We Eastern Europeans Are Not Surprised by Putin’s Brutal Plans
The Russian leader’s dreams of imperial conquest have shocked the West – but on this side of Europe, we have long memories – and know what vengeful dictators are capable of.
The day that Russia invaded Ukraine I was teaching my class: “Tales of political dystopia: storytelling after the Berlin Wall”. That’s a lesson that explores the relationship between writing and history in Southeastern and Eastern Europe.
We had just finished reading Milenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro and the Bosnian genocide, and I was about to introduce Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Primeval and Other Times.
The story takes place in a mythical rural Polish village called Primeval: a paradoxical place, simultaneously both on the fringes and at the crossroads of Europe’s feral 20th century.
What brings marginal Primeval to the centre of history are the bloody invasions and wars unleashed by the big imperial powers hovering over Eastern Europe – Russia and/or Germany.
The people of Primeval become survivors of wars, disasters, and totalitarian regimes. Therefore, like all survivors, they take nothing for granted, and that attitude shapes their perception and imagination of the past, present, and future.
Primeval can be viewed as a metaphor for the whole of Eastern Europe. Czesław Milosz, the famous Polish émigré and Nobel laureate, wrote that the most striking feature of Eastern European literature, as opposed to Western European literature, is its awareness of history. “This is because time is associated with a danger that threatens the existence of a national community to which the writer belongs,” he wrote.
Those who take nothing for granted and face the danger of personal and national extinction are willing to resist and fight against all the odds. Like Ukrainians are doing these days: Kyiv might become the next Sarajevo – or Primeval.
I have the impression that Mao was the last dictator who drew as much attention to himself as Vladimir Putin has been doing these last few weeks. Historians, academics, journalists, politicians are all trying to analyze, decodify and understand Putin’s behaviour and motives.
Dictators differ among themselves but have certain similarities. Time in power is a crucial factor. As time goes by, the dictator becomes more isolated and unchecked.
When the dictator decides to die in power, clad in imperial glory, that is the moment he enters the realm of monstrosity – which means that he has decided to strongarm reality to obey to his orders, ideas and desires.
The last stage of any such dictatorship is sealed by acts of mass destruction and self-destruction. Dictator Putin, though, constitutes a peculiar “innovation”: he is a hybrid of tsars, Stalin and post-Soviet mafia boss. That mixture renders him even more dangerous and unpredictable than his Soviet predecessors. He is much closer to the fictional Joker than the real Leonid Brezhnev.
In any case, no dictator can be “understood” without the ideas and narratives which stir them and make them feel entitled to absolute and unrestrained power.
Former German chancellor Angela Merkel once commented about Putin’s “bizarre” behaviour, when, during one of their meetings in Russia, Putin summoned his black Labrador into the room, knowing well that Merkel was afraid of dogs: “I understand why he has to do this – to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”
Merkel and Putin are both “children” of the Cold War. The main difference is that Merkel drew lessons from the Cold War and afterward lived in a country with successful politics and economy. Putin instead drew on an insatiable desire to take revenge and settle scores for Russia’s defeat and crumbling politics and economy. All he has and can leave behind as a legacy now is this: his glorious revenge.
Putin’s barbaric war caught many in the West by surprise. Some said that Putin was provoked by NATO’s extension to the East. That kind of discourse shows that even now, Eastern European countries and people are treated as passive entities which have no right to decide their own fate. Moreover, it shows little understanding of history and dictators. It seems that Western European leaders saw and still see dictators like Putin as spoiled children who may be appeased once their whims are satisfied.
As a consequence, all these years that he was provokingly deploying his dictatorial whims – killing dissidents at home, occupying territories abroad, threatening retaliation on countries such as Montenegro for joining NATO – they kept treating Putin as a gentleman, a frightening genius and an economic partner, allowing him to gain absolute power at home and become a global icon of the anti-liberal West abroad.
Eastern Europeans knew, though, that Putin’s “whims” were boundless. For them, Putin’s whims threaten directly their young and fragile democracies and their very national existence. They carry an awareness of history that in Western Europe seems to have painfully faded.
What Western European leaders refuse to understand, even now, is the fact that vengeful dictators and mafia bosses stirred by imperial dreams like Putin cannot live, survive and manipulate the masses without enemies, wars and imperial revenges and trophies.
To believe in peaceful coexistence of the democratic world with regimes like Putin’s is the most dangerous of delusions. There will be no peace in Ukraine, Europe and the world for as long as Putin and his vengeful imperial dreams rule Russia.
That’s why this war is not only about Russia, Ukraine and Europe. The fact that a variegated crowd of Soviet/Bolshevik nostalgics, resentful liberal-West-haters and all kind of white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists, supremacist nationalists, kleptocrats and authoritarians of all lands now feel distressed at the thought that Putin’s Russia might lose the war, says a lot about what is at stake in Ukraine.
Hannah Arendt wrote that the problem of evil would be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe — as death became the fundamental problem after the last war. Here we are again, unfortunately: history drawing dystopian vicious circles as in Tokarczuk’s fictional Primeval.
I hope that we will be able to face and overcome the upcoming moral, political and economic challenges and hardships with the resilience and wisdom of the people of Sarajevo and Primeval – learning how to not take anything for granted anymore. The war in Ukraine will shape large and small countries and each one of us, rich and poor, in Europe and the world for generations to come.
Author: Gazmend Kapllani
Gazmend Kapllani is the Albanian-American author of the best-selling A Short Border Handbook. Kapllani lives in Chicago and directs the Hidai “Eddie” Bregu Program in Albanian Studies at DePaul University.
Credits: This story was originally published by BIRN’s English language website Balkan Insight.
