Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the British have been steadfast in their support for Kyiv. While others have faltered, we have stood firm, just as Churchill did in 1940 – though it is the Ukrainians who are making the ultimate sacrifice. Putin’s Russia is a gangster state led by a monstrous tyrant; Ukraine is the innocent victim of unprovoked Russian aggression; Putin dreams of a new Russian empire and is a threat to all Europe; we must therefore support Ukraine in its fight to recover its lost territories, including Crimea. Ukraine’s agony and Putin’s ruthlessness are plain for all to see.
Such is the national mood that one hesitates to raise the slightest objection to this analysis or express the slightest doubt. Nevertheless, there are legitimate Russian interests in the region – some of us documented them prior to the invasion – that Russia regarded as under threat. For example, that the 30 per cent of Ukrainians who speak Russian faced discrimination under Ukraine’s 2019 language law (the European Commission raised concerns about the law in a report in the same year); that neo-Nazi paramilitary Azov battalions were operating in Eastern Ukraine (concerns were raised in the US Congress, which banned arms supplies to them in 2018); and that the prospective expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders was in breach of an informal commitment given in 1990 by US Secretary of State James Baker prior to German reunification, namely that NATO would not be moving “one inch eastward”. The Russian fear of being encircled might verge on the paranoid, but one need only imagine the American reaction if Mexico made a military pact with Russia and threatened to station missiles on its border.
Clearly, Russia’s attack on Ukraine was an act of aggression against an independent sovereign state, a flagrant violation of international law. But unpalatable though it may be to admit it, the Russian interests in the region that existed before the invasion still exist and will have to be considered in any settlement – assuming that the total defeat of Russia is not a realistic objective. For without a negotiated settlement, and with Russia now dug in, pounding Ukraine into submission, its supplies of munitions apparently inexhaustible, and prepared to resort to any means, there is every prospect that Russia will win this war, and that the West will have been defeated by an axis of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
How have we got ourselves into this appalling situation? How is it that the predictions made at the start of the war that Russia would quickly collapse have proved so wrong? Did we seriously believe that Prigozhin would topple Putin? What happened to the sanctions that, according to Boris Johnson, speaking shortly after the invasion, were going to “cripple” Putin and “starve Russia’s war machine”? What happened to the noose that was “being tightened round Putin’s neck”? Is it still tightening? If anything, it is Russia that is going from strength to strength, and the West that is being suffocated.
It is against this depressing background that Emmanuel Todd’s La Défaite De L’Occident, (The Defeat of the West), published earlier this year in France, provides a timely counterblast to the windy rhetoric and misinformation that we have been fed. There is plenty to object to in Todd’s book: sweeping assertions, superficial analysis, a reliance on Marxian notions of exploitation, and the depiction of anyone who opposes immigration as xenophobic, all spiced up with a sprinkling of conspiracy theories – like the bizarre proposition that leading American politicians with Ukrainian Jewish ancestry, like Anthony Blinken, want war because they want to see Ukraine suffer as retribution for the pogroms inflicted on their ancestors. Nevertheless, the core argument is disturbing as it is compelling, and it is supported by a wealth of statistics in the best tradition of the French Annales school.
Todd argues that Putin delivered Russia from the nightmare years of the 1990s, when near chaos reigned, and ushered in a period of prosperity and much-needed stability. On the economic front there have been rising living standards, low unemployment, improvements in health care and investment in strategic industries and agriculture. Russia is now the world’s biggest exporter of wheat, replacing America, and it earns more from its food than it does from its gas exports; it is the world’s leading exporter of nuclear reactors, and second largest exporter of both arms and natural gas; and it has developed a viable Internet (Runet) that is independent of the Tech giants, along with its own financial messaging and payments systems, which makes it independent of Swift.
Comparative statistics that depict Russia as having a fraction of the GDP of America are, argues Todd, highly misleading because the American GDP is grossly inflated by a host of over-valued and over-priced services, like those of lawyers and financiers. The reality is that Russia is a powerful economy, largely self-sufficient, and enjoys the world’s second highest trade surplus after China. The “moral statistics” are even more startling. Since Putin took over, alcohol-related deaths, suicide rates and homicides have all fallen dramatically. Infant mortality has fallen from 19 per thousand to 4.4 in 2020, which is less than in America, and life expectancy has increased from 65 to 73 in 2019.
None of this detracts from the ruthless nature of Putin’s rule. But in a country that has never known democracy, Putin is by no means the worst of its dictators. As Todd notes, Putin is no Stalin. Todd’s characterisation of Putin’s Russia as “an authoritarian democracy” will raise eyebrows, but the continued widespread support for Putin among ordinary Russians reflects the care Putin has taken to cater to their interests and look after their welfare. There is a thriving market economy, the freedom to travel abroad, even now, and “an almost complete absence of anti-Semitism” – all things that mark a clear break from Russia’s Stalinist past.
Another important factor in the stability of Putin’s Russia, argues Todd, is that social life is rooted in communitarian values of authority and egality, as exemplified by the patrilinear family. These values and social structures have their origins in peasant life, made a fertile ground for communism, and have not been extinguished. The Western nuclear family and the principle of the sovereign individual are foreign to Russia, as they are to most of the rest of the world. Which helps explain why the rest of the world has failed to rally to the cause of Ukraine.
It is, argues Todd, sheer hubris for the West to assume that its secular liberal ideology has universal appeal and is morally superior to any alternative. For in traditional socially conservative societies, it is not at all clear that the rights of the sovereign individual trump all other values, beliefs, and traditions. Where the West sees progress toward a liberal democratic nirvana, others see American imperialism and mass consumerism. America may once have been a beacon of freedom, democracy, and prosperity, but what many now see is a system loaded in favour of an oligarchic elite, social decomposition, a hollowing out of American industry, a chronic trade deficit, and a dysfunctional political system. Nor is it obvious to the rest of the world that a perverse obsession with LGBT rights, that crowning expression of hyper-liberalism, symbolises the West’s moral superiority.
But what of Russia’s unprovoked aggression? Boris Johnson spoke for many when he argued that the West’s faltering support for Ukraine represents “a failure to grasp the essential lesson of the 20th century – that you cannot ignore the actions of faraway dictators”, a clear allusion to Britain and France’s appeasement of Hitler in the Munich agreement of 1938, which heralded the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Yet the parallel here is double-edged. Yes, Hitler was emboldened by Britain and France acquiescing to his demand that the Sudetenland be ceded by Czechoslovakia to Germany. But the Sudetenland contained 3 million Germans whose demand for self-determination in 1938 merely mirrored that of the Czechs in 1918, who had up till then been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Moreover, in 1993, Czechoslovakia itself broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a development which suggests that Czechoslovakia was never a viable state to begin with.
Like Czechoslovakia, Ukraine is also a divided state. It is not merely that 30 per cent of Ukrainians are Russian speakers, but that the entire East and South of the country leans towards Russia – linguistically, culturally, socially, and economically. In successive Ukrainian presidential elections, these regions have overwhelmingly supported the pro-Russian candidate (Yanukovych in 2004 and 2010) while the central and Western regions have supported the pro-Western candidate who favoured integration into the EU and NATO (Yushchenko in 2004, Tymoshenko in 2010). The fault line dividing the country is dramatic, as Todd shows in a series of maps with provinces shaded according to how they voted.
Would a negotiated settlement that involved Russia making territorial gains, that even ceded the Donbas to Russia, represent a pragmatic settlement, a recognition of the right to self-determination of the Russian population of Ukraine? Or would it merely reward Putin for his aggression and embolden him, like Hitler, to go further? No doubt Putin harbours dreams of recreating the imperial Russia of the Tsars, but the Russian campaign in Ukraine does not augur well for further territorial expansion. Moreover, as Todd argues, if Putin intended to invade and occupy the whole of Ukraine, why would he have committed only 180,000 men to the task? It took 500,000 men to occupy the much smaller Czechoslovakia in 1968. It took Hitler over a million men to invade Poland in 1939.
Whatever one’s view on these questions, it cannot be denied that Putin has widespread support among Russians. And though wall-to-wall propaganda has no doubt played its part, there is more to it than that. The unpalatable truth for us in the West is that Putin has brought a large measure of prosperity and social stability to Russia. As a nation state rooted in traditional values and cultural nationalism, economically and militarily powerful, and determined to defend its interests, Russia is easily a match for its Western counterparts, who are self-immolating in a witches’ brew of hyper-liberalism, cultural Marxism, and uncontrolled immigration.
Alistair Miller is a teacher and regular contributor
6 responses
I was surprised and irritated to find ‘Russia’s Strength’ in the print edition. It’s the second article you’ve published suggesting capitulation to Russian bestiality and neither contained anything of substance. What has the latest to do with “small-c” conservative thought? The supposed facts are rubbish – “not one inch eastwards”, NATO missiles on the border – the opinions unsubstantiated and the philosophy second-hand drivel from a French neo-Marxist. But worse was to follow. Who on earth put it on the website as an example of the best the Review has to offer?!! Russia’s Strength. Did anyone actually read it? What do the subs do all day?
I have drafted a detailed repost to this article but submitted it for publication before the latest Ukrainian offensive. It may be that this journal endorses the philosophy of Emmanuel Todd and is irrevocably committed to a Putin triumph, in which case it will not appear. Ah well, if I’m “no-platformed” for criticising a “thinker of the new left”, at least I’ll be in distinguished company.
The purpose of the present cross-border raid is presently unclear but it has raised an interesting question. Given his enthusiasm for surrendering occupied territory in return for a ceasefire, does Alistair Miller believe Russia should be prepared to give up Kursk?
The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, dear doctor, wait until she does, please, then talk.
The bestiality, dear doctor, began on the Feb 2014 violent putsch in Kiev, a change of government by force rather than the ballot box, have you forgotten it, google for it then yap, or are you in favour of changing governments by means other than voting.
As I recall, the 450 member Verkhovna Rada did vote on the 22nd of February – 328 to zero – to remove President Yanukovych from office. He had caved-in to Russian bribes and pressure to reject a trade agreement they had approved overwhelmingly and this had sparked widespread protests. His Internal Affairs Minister, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, had authorised the use of live ammunition against protesters and, on the 20th, the Berkut fired indiscriminately at them from ground level while snipers fired from above. 48 protesters were shot dead on Instytutska Street. I guess this is the “bestiality” to which you allude?
I’m afraid I can find no reference to ladies, fat of otherwise, and googling “yap” seems to turn up nothing relevant?
UKRAINE’S RESOLVE
Founding editor Roger Scruton worked tirelessly to contest the seemingly invincible Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe while, with equal vigor, demolishing the philosophies of the various competing idealogues of the Left. I dread to think, therefore, what he would have made of an article in the estival edition which features the maunderings of a French neo-Marxist to suggest that the free world should cave-in like a wet paper-bag to the latest Russian atrocities.
In “Russia’s Strength”, Alistaire Miller expresses some regret for the suffering but reiterates most of the Kremlin’s pretexts for the assault on Ukraine. He then describes a supposedly hopeless military situation faced by Ukraine and adds a rambling account of the failings of liberal democracy by left-wing guru Emmanuel Todd. Refuting the last is entertainment for another day. My intention here is to present a few facts to counter some of the article’s more flagrant canards.
The Kremlin’s claims to fear “encirclement” by NATO are reiterated. We read of US Secretary of State James Baker’s “informal commitment” to the Russians that the alliance would advance “not one inch eastward” following German unification. This myth seems to have originated with a list of possible negotiation topics in a cable he sent to the White House in February 1990. The idea was rejected by President George H W Bush and never mentioned in any discussion with the Russians. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbechev confirmed this in an interview in 2014 [1]: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up either.” The matter was settled in the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, which declares explicitly that all former Warsaw Pact countries have “freedom of self-determination in choosing alliances and international agreements”. Indeed, the very expression “NATO expansion” is misleading. Since its founding in 1949, the alliance has been open to, but has never sought, new members.
At twice the size of the US and China, Russia is by far the largest country in the world. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, NATO “encirclement” amounted to just five percent of its land border. With the accession of Sweden and Finland, this has more than doubled to around eleven percent. Reconnecence has confirmed that, far from being reinforced, the Russian garrison on the Finnish border is now at around a tenth of its pre-accession level, with much heavy equipment removed to Ukraine. Whatever the propaganda, it would appear that Putin is actually losing little sleep at the prospect of NATO launching a blitzkrieg towards the Urals.
Alastair Miller invites us to “imagine the American reaction if Mexico made a military nuclear pact with Russia and threatened to station missiles on its border”. Not very positive, I would think. NATO has had no nuclear-capable missiles anywhere in Europe since signing the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987. It has neither positioned, nor threatened to position, nuclear weapons anywhere near the Russian border and none has ever been stationed in erstwhile Warsaw Pact countries. The hair-trigger risk of “use ‘em or lose ‘em” forward deployment in the event of an attack was recognised decades ago. Today, up to a hundred B61 gravity bombs (to be dropped from aircraft) are distributed between six bases in five European countries – Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the far west of Germany – all well away from the front line.
But we don’t need to “imagine the American reaction” to a “military nuclear pact” in which Russian missiles are stationed on NATO borders. Putin and Lukashenko have both boasted of redeploying nuclear missiles to Belarus, close to the borders of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. At the recent NATO summit, the US announced that Tomahawk cruise, SM-6, and Dark Eagle hypersonic missiles are to be stationed in Germany from 2026.
Clearly, Putin’s fear is not of western military might on his border but the proximity of western ideas and lifestyle – the very things that Emmanuel Todd despises. Todd is a well known Putin groupie, having described him as an “intelligent” reader of world affairs who gives “highly structured” speeches and easily outsmarts dilettantes like Emanuel Macron with his “excellent timing”. This will come as news to anyone who watched his rambling outpourings of fabulous historical drivel on the Tucker Carlson programme. And the humiliating failure of his attempt to install a Quisling government in Kyiv hardly indicates a firm grasp of realpolitik. I have only Alastaire Miller’s account of ‘The Defeat of the West’, but I gather we are invited to marvel at achievements such as Runet, a version of the internet “independent of the tech giants”. It’s only about four decades after the original and is needed, of course, to protect what Todd calls an “authoritarian democracy” from democracy. The Russian people are said to be solidly behind Putin because they’re fundamentally different from the rest of us (there seems to be plenty of Novichok for any who feel they might not be). Todd cheers to the echo the “thriving market economy” in Russia while sneering at “mass consumerism” in the US. There’s much more but I won’t labour the point.
Todd is far from the first to justify an atrocious regime by admiring its charismatic leader, domestic achievements, and compliant population. The Nazis enjoyed much the same imprimatur during the 1930s. Never mind the territorial aggrandisement, persecution, and slaughter, Hitler delivered Germany from “nightmare years” of financial chaos. The people are obviously united behind “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” And just look at all the beautiful autobahns!
Things become even more bizarre when we get to the pretext for the actual invasion. As in Britain, there is a geographical division in Ukraine when it comes to support for the European Union, with little enthusiasm in the east. Following the Holodomor, mass deportations, and forced resettlements of the Soviet era, quite a number of the people there are of Russian ancestry and tend to vote for anti-EU candidates. But it’s a bit of a stretch to suppose that this means they wanted airliners shot down, their neighbours’ homes looted and expropriated or destroyed, the women raped, the children abducted, and the menfolk conscripted as cannon-fodder. The warmth of the reception enjoyed by the Russians may be judged from the procedures they found it necessary to impose. All the de-occupied territories reveal a similar pattern of extensive mass graves, torture chambers, filtration camps, and mass deportations. This is a conquering tsar’s dream of glory. Does anyone really imagine it has anything to do with improving the quality of life for eurosceptics in the Donbas? There can be no moral justification for abandoning any part of Ukraine behind Russian lines.
On the war itself, Alistaire Miller advises us that “Russia [is] now dug in, pounding Ukraine into submission, its supplies of munitions apparently inexhaustible” and has “every prospect of winning”. Digging-in and cowering behind kilometers of minefields is not a tactic generally associated with an army that believes it has “every prospect of winning” in the foreseeable future. Putin has been reduced to kowtowing to a dictator in Korea to replenish his “apparently inexhaustible” munitions with mouldering stocks left over from the cold war. Estimates presented at the NATO summit in July found that Russia will have to look beyond Korea and Iran for munitions to sustain its effort at the present level. At 30,000 a month, its current rate of army recruitment is barely sufficient to replenish its losses. The British Ministry of Defense has calculated that the failed offensive in Kharkiv had pushed Russian casualties to a daily conflict high of 1,262 in May and 1,163 in June [2]. However unpopular, wider mobilisation will be needed soon. And, while Ukraine is certainly being “pounded”, no evidence of “submission” is presented in the article.
In this context, it’s instructive to compare the suffering of Britain during WWII with that of Ukraine today. The UK population was roughly 48 million in the 1940s while that of Ukraine was about 44 million in 2020 (the exodus of women and children has reduced it to around 38 million). During five years of fighting, 384,000 British soldiers were killed, which is over 70,000 per year. In February this year, Kyiv confirmed a total of 31,000 of its soldiers had been killed during the first two years, a claim that has been met with some skepticism. Even if the true number is much higher, the rate of attrition scarcely matches that sustained by Britain. Moreover, most British fighting was overseas while Ukrainian forces are defending their homeland. Approximately 70,000 UK civilians were killed during WWII. In London alone, one and a half million people were rendered homeless. There were severe food shortages throughout Britain but starvation is one threat that does not stalk Ukraine. The figures speak of appalling tragedy in both countries but not of “submission”. If Britain could “take it” during a protracted war, there’s no reason to suppose Ukraine will prove less resolute.
The military situation in Ukraine is evolving. The defenders have achieved almost total victory at sea and reopened their maritime trade routes. With the sinking of the Moskva, its only capital ship, the Black Sea Fleet became, technically, no more than a “flotilla”. And Russia has been forced to remove what’s left of it from bases in Crimea it has occupied since 1783. Ukrainian airspace is largely closed to piloted Russian aircraft but a proportion of drone and missile strikes reach their targets. Improved air defenses were pledged at the NATO summit but the electricity grid has been badly damaged. More will be imported but vital facilities now require a decentralised power option. Ukraine is able to hit targets across the border at increasing range and Russia’s “apparently inexhaustible” supplies are being depleted usefully. The F-16s have yet to be deployed in significant numbers. On land, Ukraine has captured more Russian territory this year than vice-versa. It would be interesting to know whether Alistair Miller believes that the surrender of occupied land in return for a truce should also apply to Kursk. Little of the army that invaded Ukraine remains. Most of the professionals and reservists have been expended and historic Russian regiments are now filled with recruits who have barely any training. It takes at least a year to create an effective tank crew but those captured recently report as little as three weeks of instruction. Certainly they have proved ineffectual in combat. All that’s left to the Russians is what has become known as the “meat assault”, in which thousands are sacrificed to use up Ukrainian ammunition and eventually, perhaps, gain a few kilometers of devastated landscape. In March 2022, Russia occupied 27 percent of Ukraine, down to about 20 percent today. They’re going to find it a long, hard slog from the border to Kyiv and they’ve already failed to take it once.
Alistaire Miller asks how the western democracies got into their present disarray. The answer is simple. After winning the cold war and taking a lavish “peace dividend” at the “end of history”, they didn’t notice history restarting on August 8th, 2008. With its bestial and unprovoked attack on Georgia, Russia invaded a sovereign state for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union. The workaholic technocrat in the Kremlin was exposed as the KGB thug he had always been. The now familiar pretext of coming to the aid of persecuted ethnic Russians was, then as now, a transparent lie. His intention has always been to rebuild the Russian empire. As he put it in his State of the Union address in 2005: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. NATO’s response was pathetic in the extreme. It is not the snarling military menace on its borders that has provoked Russia to further aggression but timidity and vacillating brittleness. Supposed “red lines” have been ignored and President Obama couldn’t wait to “reset relations” after the annexation of Crimea. To this day, the Ukranians are forced to fight with one hand tied so that NATO weapons don’t upset Putin too much. Thousands of lives have thus been lost unnecessarily.
Historically, thanks to NATO, nearly a billion people in the Atlantic community have been able to live in peace, freedom, and security, even though in close proximity to one of the most evil empires the world has ever seen. My parents’ generation created the alliance and halted Russian expansion. Mine faced its greatest test when Eastern Europe was filled with highly mobile SS20 nuclear missile launchers. A fifth-column of very well-funded CND unilateralists strove to terrify us into rendering ourselves defenseless in the teeth of Soviet sabre-rattling. They even seized control of the Labour Party, with Neil Kinnock coming perilously close to winning the 1992 election. This would have given the Russians every incentive to continue to heat-up the cold war. Now it’s time for the next generation. We can only hope they don’t pay too much attention to peevish Gallic leftists.