Civilization vs. Barbarism
The duality of human society is again on display in Russia's invasion of Ukraine
It is the intrinsic nature of humans that we are equally capable of producing both exquisite beauty and barbaric savagery. As we learned to use art and science to investigate and describe the world we live in, we also found ways to use our knowledge to build more effective and terrifying tools of death and destruction. Planes, trains, and automobiles became tanks and bombers, atomic energy became atomic bombs. The yin and yang of human social behavior brought Europe both the Rennaisance and the Enlightenment, as well as centuries of war and the Holocaust.
No society manifests this dichotomy more starkly than Russia. Think of Russian culture: writers such as Dostoyevsky and Pasternak, or composers like Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky; Mother Russia gave us the Bolshoi Ballet and dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Anna Pavlova. Russian grandmasters (Kasparov, Karpov) dominated international chess for years. Russian athletes found fame and fortune in the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the ranks of professional tennis and ice hockey. It was Soviet Russia that won the space race in the 1950s, launching the first satellite into space (Sputnik, 1957). The first human to reach outer space was a Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin (1961).
But when we flip the coin over, we see the brutal side of Russian society. The seventy years of Communist rule following the overthrow of the Czar in 1917 did not bring the promised “workers’ paradise”, only a continuation of autocracy under one-party rule. Famines purges, show trials, and executions were hallmarks of the pre-World War II Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. An estimated 7 million people died in the famines of the 1930s. At least 750,000 people were executed during the Great Purge (1936-1938), and over a million other people were sent to forced labor camps (“gulags”). During World War II, Russia suffered an estimated 27 million military and civilian deaths, far more than any other country that participated in the war. Russian attitude toward the lives of its soldiers was expressed by Marshall Georgy Zhukov, Russia’s best general: “If we come to a minefield, our infantry attacks exactly as it were not there”.
Russian society does not cherish human life, Russian or other. In 1945, as it relentlessly pushed towards Berlin, the Red Army lawlessly looted, raped, and killed its way through Germany. No exact statistics are available, but the estimates are that 100,000 women were raped in Berlin alone, and 2 million in all of Germany. Looting was ubiquitous: For Soviet soldiers raised in an “economy of shortage”, the affluence of German civilians was a temptation not to be resisted. And as they looted, they burned, destroying the villages they passed through, As might be expected, the Army’s official records made little reference to the crime spree.
Given current Russian actions in Ukraine, it would not be wrong to view these behaviors as endemic to the Russian character. They are attacking civilian targets- hospitals, nursing homes, apartment buildings, and schools- with missiles, bombs, and artillery. They’ve done this before: in Chechnya in 2000 where they reduced the capital Grozny to rubble. In 2008, they repeated these tactics on a smaller scale in Russia's conflict with the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Again in Syria, when they provided military assistance to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and attacked civilian targets in the ancient city of Aleppo.
Vladimir Putin’s attempted blitzkrieg into Ukraine has been a failure, both because of the poor performance of the Russian military, and the stiff resistance of Ukrainian forces. When their advance stalled in the early days, the Russians quickly reverted to their old playbook- attacking civilian targets with missiles, airstrikes, and artillery. The eastern city of Mariupol has been mostly destroyed. Other cities, including Kyiv, the capital, were heavily damaged. In the face of a Ukrainian counter-offensive, the Russians have been pulling back from Kyiv. Though they claim to be repositioning for an offensive in the eastern part of the country, they have left behind a trail of death and destruction that parallels the depredations of their 1945 advance into Germany.
This week the world has seen photographic evidence of those horrors: The streets of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv the Russians had occupied since early March, lined with the bodies of murdered civilians, many with their hands tied behind their back; a pile of female corpses, who’d apparently been raped and murdered, burned beyond recognition. There are reports of executions and mass graves, and photos of destroyed homes, cars, bridges…
The horrific scenes from #Bucha… [show the] Russian commanders were negligent, ethically corrupt & criminal. Bucha shows the Russian Army is not ‘professional’ nor do they deserve the term ‘soldiers’… The Russian military transformation since 2008 has clearly not transformed anything at a human level. Beneath the shine of fancy equipment and clever slogans (like ‘active defence’) lies a rotten core of a sloppy and corrupt Russian military culture. But, as the saying goes, fish rot from the head. If the military serves a self-interested class of corrupt authoritarians, why would it’s military culture be any different?
Mick Ryan, AM (@WarintheFuture) on Twitter
There is a sense that Vladimir Putin’s revanchist attitudes are more connected to the mid-20th Century than the recent past. It has been reported that he once remarked that “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union”. If his goal is to realize a fastastical vision he has of a restored Russian empire, he’s already lost. The irony is that his rationale for this tragedy was a desire to “de-nazify” Ukraine. It is Russia that needs to turn away from barbarism.
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