On Monday, October 28, 2024, Russian novelist Sergei Lebedev delivered RAAM's eighth October Lecture in the Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. This is the full text of Lebedev's lecture, titled 'After Putin: Russians' imperial complex as a cultural and political problem'. A recording of the event can be found on YouTube.
We are speaking today as we approach the end of the third year of Russia's open military aggression against Ukraine, which the Russian leadership mockingly calls a “special military operation”. Ukraine's losses – military, demographic, economic, cultural – are staggering and growing by the day. At the same time, the hopes that the Russian aggression would "run out of steam," that the economy would fail, that there would be a social explosion – unfortunately did not materialize. The Russian state proved to be stable enough to continue the war without considering any losses.
Of course, one could say that the reason is that all opposition structures have been destroyed in advance, and that coordinated, sustained public protest is impossible under the de facto military dictatorship and police state. This obvious consideration seems to me important, but incomplete. There is another factor that lies at the intersection of the social and the ethical, a factor that is difficult to measure empirically but that plays an important role in both Vladimir Putin's internally repressive and externally invasive policies.
That factor is the extremely low price of human life. I am not so much talking about the conventional economic value on which insurance companies operate, although money does play a role. I am talking about the combination of civil rights and dignity that gives rise to the idea of the self-worth and inviolability of the individual. I am talking about the symbolic, but at the same time very real value of life, which is expressed, among other things, in the institutions of law enforcement, in the institution of an independent court, and in the way the state protects the lives of certain people, for example, in extreme situations, and in the degree of responsibility for mistakes or inaction.
Metaphorically speaking, Vladimir Putin now has an unlimited supply of these cheap lives, which the Russian command can spend on "meat attacks," paying with them for kilometers of advance deep into Ukrainian territory. It is these lives, not just shells, equipment, fuel and money, that are the main currency of this war.
Yes, now money is also at stake: those who sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense can receive a sum (maximum) of about 50 thousand euros. This is a huge amount of money for a Russian province. But the very fact that the lives of citizens can be bought for a сertain price shows that these lives have no symbolic, immutable, dignity-related value. Everything is determined by demand and the structure of the war market.
Where does this scarcity of existence, this devaluation of existence, come from? Without seeking excuses, without trying to rationalize Russian aggression, to psychologize it, to give it a predetermined (fatal) character, I still want to understand the question posed, because it has a direct bearing on the political future of Russia, with which Europe is forced, for geographical reasons, to be a neighbor. I will focus on three pillars of Putin's neo-empire, the most important ones from my point of view: impunity, militarism and chauvinism.
Impunity
What is horrible about the Soviet project from the perspective we are discussing? It is the monstrous, senseless, criminal waste of human life, which reached such a scale that life was devalued. I am not just talking about Stalin's repressions and deportations of entire peoples, mass shootings, arrests, and the Gulag. The very atmosphere of unfreedom, subjugation, suppression of natural vital interests, destruction of diversity, is also murder.
And it is not by chance that even in Russia in August and December 1991 no one really came out to defend the USSR, no one went to the barricades to defend the red flag - most people, it seems to me, had the feeling that it was impossible to live like this, at least in a purely material, utilitarian sense.
But how can this notion of the value of individual life be recovered, restored, re-grown, and made effective in politics?
At the very least, it is necessary to recognize the problem in its entirety. To understand the problem, to diagnose it and propose remedies, to learn from our neighbors.
This has not been done in the case of Russia. Intellectually, anthropologically, Russian liberals were completely unprepared to understand what the totalitarian legacy is, what power it has, and why the task of restoring violated human dignity, the rule of law, and human rights is of momentous importance for Russia, the center of the empire for many centuries.
To put it crudely, the bet was on the notorious "invisible hand of the market": push the country into market relations as quickly as possible, and the market will do everything itself, the market will re-educate people, the market will give birth to a new man - an idea very much in the spirit of the early Soviet re-education projects.
The problem is that if the market itself produces values, they are material values. The market, especially in the form of wild capitalism as it existed in Russia at that time, is not a fertile ground for the growth of civil rights. There was a hope - I remember this motif very well in public discussions - that a class of owners was about to emerge (liberals were even ready to turn a blind eye to how this property was acquired), and these owners, small and large, would become a new political class, property would give rise to rights, property would give rise to dignity...
As we can now see, this hope was extremely naive. It seems to me that the main political question of the transition to a state based on the rule of law in Russia, the question without the solution of which the transition could not take place from the very beginning, was the question of legal and moral responsibility for the numerous and systematic crimes of the Soviet state.
The only way to restore the value of individual life, civil rights and dignity was to act in two ways: to commemorate the victims, to bring them back from the oblivion into which they had been plunged. And – and this is an extremely important "and" – to punish the criminals who committed these crimes, to punish them by legal means, thus restoring the rule of law and stating unequivocally that a human life is indeed invaluable. If justice is not done, any remembrance remains in the air, it does not change the structure of society, it does not tangibly, visibly prove that the value of human life is an active political value.
What happened in Russia? The question of justice and responsibility was simply pushed aside and replaced by a vague concept of "repentance", which does not require legal action. Even the best liberal minds somehow avoided it, focusing more on memorialization.
Some may argue that legal punishment is not an unconditional part of the transition to freedom, pointing to Spain, for example. But the thing is that Spain's relapse into tyranny would have been primarily a danger to Spain itself. Russia falling back to tyranny and de facto questioning, reversing the dissolution of the Soviet Union, such a Russia is a threat to the whole world.
I see a clear connection between the impunity of Soviet crimes and criminals and Russia's aggression against Ukraine. A country where the crimes of the past go unpunished is an easy prey for the next dictator – precisely because the value of human life as a public good has not been restored and protected, and so the ground is prepared for the next abuse of power. At best, such a society would be guided by the individual survival strategy, where a person values his own life, but not the lives of others.
It is a great pity that the Russian opposition has never made Putin's responsibility for aggressive wars the main accusation against him, preferring to focus on corruption in order to gain popular support. The rise of militarism has not been sufficiently recognized.
Militarism
Where does today's Russian militarism come from? Where are its roots? Or, to put it another way, what fuels or drives it?
I would dare to suggest that it is not just the crazy will of Vladimir Putin and his entourage. The origin – or the source – is somehow embedded in the very political system of the Russian Federation.
What is now Russia is actually a conglomerate of nations that were conquered and subjugated in different historical periods, some quite recently, in the middle of the 19th century. Under Soviet rule, the larger ones where given quasi-political subjectivity in the form of autonomous republics.
More than thirty years ago, one of these republics claimed independence. It was Chechnya.
The Chechens were brutally conquered in the 19th century, and the history of this brutal conquest remains a blank spot in Russian public conscience. In 1944, the whole nation was deported to Kazakhstan with enormous population losses.
Quite a record, one might say, quite a pattern to prove and explain the claim of independence. First, Russia tried to overthrow the Chechen government by sending troops with no insignia, pretending to be "opposition". The attack was repulsed, and captured Russian officers said on television that they had been drafted for the mission by the military authorities – a fact that the authorities vehemently denied.
Then, in December 1994, came a full-scale army assault. The operation was planned to be short and victorious: Russian generals did not believe they would meet resistance. As we all know, the operation grew into a big war, into a punishers’ campaign against a rebellious nation. Destroyed cities and facilities, use of heavy weapons to scare the population and force it into submission, mass crimes against civilians – all that we see now in Ukraine was already a reality thirty years ago.
Simply put, the Russian government under Yeltsin had set an example for the other potential candidates: no one goes, everyone stays.
Chechen women and men pass in February 1996 by a Russian Army armoured personnel carrier in front of destroyed presidential palace in Grozny, capital of the breakaway southern republic of Chechnya. Photo: Alexander Nemenov / ANP / AFP
One can discuss the general legal framework, the international law that prevents separatism and gives central governments the power to respond. But the law cannot eliminate reality. And the reality is that the question of the right of nations to self-determination is one of the key questions for the future of Russia. It will always be on the table, even if we pretend that it is not there.
The war, waged for the sake of the integrity of the state and constitutional order, turned the very state it was supposed to save into the reincarnation of the Russian/Soviet empire with its brutal colonization policies. And it reintroduced militarism as a permanent state of alert, as a violent way of dealing with emancipatory tendencies by suppressing them with military force.
The Russian word "распад", which means collapse, dissolution, became the main political bugaboo as early as the nineties. Any attempt to discuss the design of the so-called federation, the distribution of rights within it, to raise the idea of secession even as a theoretical possibility could easily be blocked with the accusation – do you want the bloody collapse of Russia or what?
It is quite interesting psychologically that underneath the public consciousness there is a non-verbal assumption that the Russian Federation is not exactly the most attractive state to be a part of. And if given free will, nations will immediately rush out.
I have never heard anyone argue – oh, every nation will decide to stay, it is so profitable and logical to be a part of the big political entity, the big state with the nuclear arsenal... No, somehow the majority of Russians assume that Russia is actually quite a precarious, unstable political structure, and it needs stricter rule, it needs repression as a tool of maintenance, otherwise it will collapse.
This fetish of integrity and fear of collapse can be seen as the historical undoing of Russia.
In 1917, the empire collapsed and literally hundreds of proto-states emerged. Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia escaped. Others were taken back by force during the Civil War. Then in 1939, almost simultaneously, Poland and Finland were attacked, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia were forced into negotiations, which resulted in their loss of independence in 1940.
After the Second World War, the new layer of satellite states in Eastern Europe was taken under Soviet control.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-1991, again new states emerged, gaining international recognition, and some of the Russian republics had shown sovereign ambitions.
In August 1990, future president Boris Yeltsin made a famous statement to the public in Kazan, the capital of the Tatar Autonomous Republic: "You can take as much sovereignty as you can swallow". And he added: "But you are in the center of Russia – do not forget that”.
Four years later, he would approve the military attack on Chechnya. In 1999, his successor, Vladimir Putin, opens the gates to the second Chechen war, and shortly thereafter begins to curtail the rights of the subjects of the Federation, including the right to elect governors.
Former president Boris Yeltsin with his successor Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2000. Photo: ANP / AFP
In 2008, Russia attacked Georgia, the former Soviet republic in the Caucasus. Six years later, it annexed Crimea and invaded (pretending not to) eastern Ukraine.
It is a third expansionist wave in a period of a century, as if this structure really cannot stand still, it can either disintegrate and collapse or reassemble and expand.
In a way, it cannot. The logic of internal centralization of power to avoid (imaginary) dissolution creates a traction, a kind of overproduction of power to be channeled outward. And the historical and cultural neighborhood of the former empire creates a perfect playground for the "historically justified" claims, provides a set of myths that can be politically instrumentalized and used to exercise dominance.
There is another side, or rather, a long-term effect of these waves of expansion and militarization, which are engraved in Russian culture as symbols of power and glory. Public peace movement(s) and pacifism are characteristic features of the Western political landscape. In Russia, pacifism (which tends to emphasize the value of a human life) is somehow a foreign concept, known but not widely practiced.
I can share with you my personal experience, which I am certainly not proud of. In 1999 I was drafted into the Russian army. Just a detail – the draft notice was printed on a blank of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR, 8 years after it ceased to exist, so officially I was called to join the ranks of the Soviet Army.
I avoided the draft for fear of ending up in Chechnya. There was a whole generation of draft dodgers in the big cities, very rarely did a young boy in our circles want to go. We were good at fooling the military commissars, but... We were young, and it was still Yeltsin's time, when huge demos were possible, mass strikes were possible... But no one – literally no one – thought of protesting, of making a student movement against the war, against the draft, a movement for peace.
It was not just a lack of courage or experience. It was a contradiction to something not codified, but rather tangible – the built-in aggressive masculinity of everyday Russian culture, with its hidden obsession with hierarchy, power, and dominance, with the omnipresence of the heroic cult of World War II in which we had grown up.
To admit to being a pacifist, a peace-seeker, was something embarrassing, almost indecent, like coming out in a traditionally conservative society.
And we, to be honest, were not exactly pacifists. We were just draft dodgers, hoping that someone else would be picked up instead of us to fill the quota, someone not as smart or as lucky as we were.
Now that part of my biography is a source of sadness and shame, a specter of lost opportunity. But that was not the case then. I (I am sure I can also say "we") did not feel within myself this militarized state of mind, my loyalty to it.
One more argument to be added here. In the nineties, nuclear disarmament was on the way, since the Cold War was presumably over. But there was no political party or movement, no substantial public group, that consistently demanded such disarmament.
The last public figure who approached the problem of weapons of mass destruction from a fundamental, ethical point of view was the academician Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb who became a human rights activist and liberal thinker, and who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 "for his struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament, and cooperation between all nations".
With his death at the end of 1989, the whole discourse about the danger of nuclear weapons was swept away from public discussion in Russia as it had never been before. The only visible public concern was that the nuclear weapons were aging and rusting.
A mother and her son sit next to a monument to Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov in central Moscow. Photo: Yuri Kadobnov / ANP / AFP
But what is a nuclear arsenal? It is a multiplier of civic responsibility for the citizens of the country that owns it. We have never put it that clearly. Why?
Again – because the very idea of "disarmament" sounds suspicious to the Russian ear, close to treason. It takes a lot of courage to disarm, to build trust and respect, and we have always lacked such trust, because (as a writer I can say things political scientists cannot)... since Russia is built on the fear of losing itself, of falling apart, because none of us can explain 100% convincingly, what holds us (different nations) together, except inertia, the violence of the past and the rigid, inflexible political architecture inherited from the Soviet Union?
We are obsessed with the fetishes of power because it is compensatory – in fact, we are powerless in our own country, not knowing what vision of the future we have. The Soviet project was at least formally oriented toward the future, it offered at least some (false, but at least given) explanations for the common goals of the multiethnic community. This project was designed to be modern, to be a vehicle from the dark past to the rich future.
And it is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin has, in a way, reversed an arrow of time. His project uses some Soviet spare parts, but in its core, it is aimed at the past, at the Golden Age, it is conservative and archaic, it thrives on a variety of fears that social progress triggers.
And one of the characteristics of this project is a growing chauvinism. You cannot oppose modernity without a return to imperial paternalism, the flip side of which is chauvinism.
Chauvinism
When I tell people in the West that Russia is a chauvinist and racist country, most of them do not believe me or say that I am exaggerating. Russian Russians, even liberal ones, do not support this thesis. Or would accept it partially: yes, there are certain attitudes towards people from the Caucasus, towards workers from Asia...
But I want to talk about government policy, not public opinion. About the ongoing covert process that the famous Ukrainian dissident, the philosopher Ivan Dziuba, who was severely persecuted by the Soviet KGB for his views, called "denationalization," which means the deliberate erasure of national identity by means of Russification, education and memory policies, employment models, and so on.
Approximately every 5th person in the Russian Federation is not Russian. It is a lot of people, actually, more than 20 million, more than you have here in the Netherlands in total.
But – as I have already said – they de facto don’t have political subjectivity. Their different historical narratives are not represented on the federal level. We all have learnt Russia’s history from the Moscow point of view, within the logic of the colonizer. It is a very comfortable model for the ethnic Russians: nothing disturbs your conscience, nothing reminds you of bloody history.
Their languages are going extinct: experts told me, there are approximately 8 to 10 non-Russian languages in Russia capable of producing modern prose and poetry, but soon the count will be 7, then 6…
Since 2018, according to the federal law signed by Putin, the teaching of native languages in schools has lost its obligatory status. This means that the next generation will know much less and will be cut off from their ancestors. To protest this decision, Udmurt scholar and language activist Albert Razin committed self-immolation. In vain.
All this can be seen as a problem of globalization, a sad but somehow natural process in a modern world. But it is not.
This is a chosen path. This is an active and poisonous political paradigm, which, coupled with the long imperial and colonial history, gives the Russian public reasons to believe that there are subordinate nations, nations that are not entitled to statehood, because if given one, they will go off the rails and become a threat to Russia.
This is exactly the concept (one of them) widely used by Russian propaganda to justify Russian aggression against Ukraine. Independent Ukrainian statehood is described as a permanently failed state, a puppet of the West manipulated to harm Russian interests.
Put another way, Russia's imperial and colonial history, which is not reflected upon, criticized, and discarded, creates a potential security alert for all states that were once part of the empire. This history offers tropes of former unity, powerful images of predestined togetherness, stealthily stealing sovereignty, turning independent states and nations into satellites designed to follow Russia's lead.
It can be used for internal purposes, eliminating attempts at emancipation, and it can be directed outward, as in the case of Ukraine, explaining why this particular territory is not considered for self-government.
Unfortunately, even within the liberal part of Russian society, Russia's colonial past is largely terra incognita, neither properly studied nor at least problematized. In fact, we know very little about who our neighbors are and what we have done to them. For example, according to continuous and reliable social surveys, no more than 5% of the Russian population considers the Soviet occupation of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to be an occupation.
If you think about it, that is a very dangerous number. It means a denial of responsibility and opens the doors to a variety of political speculations, and it prescribes to the citizens of these countries ingratitude for "our" efforts to develop them.
When the Ukrainian authorities demolish Soviet-era monuments erected almost automatically in every city, such as the statues of Lenin and Pushkin, the latter case sometimes provokes grim comments from the Russian intellectual community – what does Pushkin have to do with the war? Why should the monuments of a great poet be destroyed? People do not feel that they are, in a way, interfering and trespassing. But trespassing is not the main point.
A statue of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin painted with the words "Go away", on Pushkin Street in Odesa in November 2022. Photo: Oleksandr Gimanov / ANP / AFP
The Pushkin statues were erected as a sign of ownership and dominance, as a symbol of the undisputed superiority of Russian culture, as a "fraternal" reminder of who is who. I, who now live in Potsdam, cross Pushkinallee every day – a vivid testimony to Soviet systematicity and the German (probably East German) half-hearted break with the red past.
So it is up to Russian intellectuals to work through this difficult subject, to reveal the true nature of Russian expansion, and to understand how high Russian culture itself was (and still is) instrumentalized as a tool of Russian state chauvinism, of forcible Russification.
Conclusions
What kind of perspective do we have in view of the above?
The future is certainly not bright today. But when and if the day of reckoning comes for Russia, it would be very important to learn the lessons of the nineties, when the most urgent and valuable opportunities were not even considered.
The most urgent thing would be to restore justice and punish war criminals. Unfortunately, we should not be too optimistic in this regard. The ongoing war of aggression is creating a completely different political and moral landscape from that of the perestroika period. Millions of people are directly involved in the war effort – military personnel, defense and transportation workers, etc., and the entire law enforcement system is being used to round up and suppress dissent. This creates a vouchsafing bond that will be very difficult to break.
I do not believe that even in the best-case scenario, Russian liberals will have enough political leverage to enforce justice, restore the rule of law, and punish even the most heinous criminals. I suspect that they will tactically opt for silence, avoiding or postponing the question of responsibility. And all the more important would be the role of Ukraine's Western allies, who would have such leverage, at least economically, in the form of sanctions currently imposed on Russia and its frozen assets. Any deal, any agreement on lifting sanctions should be inextricably linked to the implementation of a transitional justice package, the content of which should be formulated and discussed with Ukraine. If the Russian opposition really needs anything from the Western democracies, it is a firm stand and moral clarity: you will not get a free pass a second time. Our support would and should be conditional: justice, restoration of borders and compensation for Ukraine. In my view, this is the only sticking point that can really make a difference. And the more leverage the Ukrainian allies would have, the greater the difference could potentially be.
I am not an expert, and it is a bit early to discuss Russia's possible demilitarization. But the same logic applies here: economic ties in exchange for disarmament and stopping the supply of arms and military technology to tyrants around the globe. Russia is not just attacking Ukraine – it is increasing the risks for many other countries, providing the enemies of the free world with unknown offensive capabilities, just as the USSR did in earlier times. And it should be said loud and clear: no deals with Russia until it abandons the policy of global destabilization and cuts its ties with proxies. The semi-comical СPSU trial in the early nineties exposed some of the Soviet foreign connections of this kind, but these were not considered really dangerous by the democrats. As a result, we now live in a world where Stalin's foreign policy still contributes to Russia's war: with China's unilateral neutrality and North Korea's direct involvement.
This is a very concrete Stalinist legacy in action, and it cannot be defeated by some cultural strategies. Secret agreements should be exposed and broken, foreign policies should be reversed, leaving no room for ambiguities and double games.
There is another example that Europe can set, since the Russian opposition seems incapable of setting it itself. There should be no discussion about Russia's political future without the voices and positions of non-Russian Russians, who are obviously underrepresented and marginalized. Even the best and most knowledgeable experts are used to looking at Russia through the lens of Russian language, Russian culture, Russian history.
But I dream of the day when this monopoly will be actively challenged. And here you will have a Tatar intellectual or an Udmurt intellectual talking about his or her views on the Russian imperial complex as a cultural and political problem. I can assure you that this would be a hard experience, because Russia's nations are being diminished by Putin's regime and at the same time used in a traditional colonial way as a source of manpower for aggression against Ukraine, thus creating complicity and hampering future attempts at emancipation.
Small postscript
In May 1938, two men met at the Hotel "Atlanta" in Rotterdam. One was Evhen Konovalets, military leader of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The second was, in fact, an infiltrated Soviet agent, high-ranking operative Pavel Sudoplatov, born in Melitopol. He gave his counterpart a box of chocolates – as if it were a gift from Ukraine. The box was a time bomb made in a secret police laboratory. Moscow wanted Konovalets, the staunch supporter of Ukrainian independence, dead.
A few minutes later, as Konovalets was leaving the hotel and passing a movie theater, the bomb went off. Konovalets was killed instantly.
Pavel Sudoplatov later murdered several other prominent figures of the Ukrainian national movement, including Bishop Theodore Romzha, who received a lethal injection while in the hospital.
Why remember Sudoplatov's story today? When Melitopol was occupied by Russian troops in 2022, the occupiers immediately erected a monument to him and renamed a street after him.
More recently, a week ago, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, proposed to rename Tallinskaya Street in Moscow, which was named after the capital of Estonia during Soviet rule, in honor of Sudoplatov.
Thus, Moscow praises Stalin's trusted hitman, whose "specialty" was to eliminate national resistance movements. It is a bravado of the criminal who enjoys his impunity.
But there is another place, another city in the Netherlands, the name of which is a symbol of justice.
I wish that one day Vladimir Putin will find himself in The Hague.
On the bench, where he definitely belongs.
A recording of Sergei Lebedev's October Lecture can be found on YouTube. The lecture was made possible with the support of the Wilhelmina E. Jansen Fund.
