Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War
“The bigger danger is what Putin might do if he feels his grip on power might be weakening.”
The title of this book could not be more accurate. Not only has Vladimir Putin rekindled the Cold War, but it has also become significantly hotter and more dangerous since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This account how Vladimir Putin has tried to reshape Russian history and memory to serve his own purposes is at times intriguing, infuriating, but always enlightening for anyone trying to understand his worldview for Russia.
The narrative covers several aspects behind recent developments in Russian politics and foreign policy since Putin abruptly came to power at the end of the last millennium, and the author does not spare the European community, and especially the United States in making a number of critical foreign policy decisions that likely fed into the unique Russian psyche when relating to the West. The term the author uses is Zlost, a Russian word that describes a deep-seated resentment of how Russia was treated after the fall of communism, particularly during the 1990s when Russian international prestige and society crumbled, and the Russian elite felt disrespected by the larger European community.
According to the author, this resentment, combined with the almost pathological Russian fear of encirclement or attack from other European countries, led to many missed opportunities to draw Russia into the Western security and economic structure due to the dismissal of what Putin and his inner circle felt were Russia’s legitimate security concerns.
This is particularly true of the expansion of NATO to include many of the former Warsaw Pact countries, which the author outlines clearly became a major issue both politically and psychological for Putin, who felt the West was not only intruding into what he considered a historically Russian sphere of influence, but a direct threat to Russia’s safety. This was brought to a critical point in the mid-2000s when NATO considered the potential to add both Ukraine and Georgia to the alliance, actions that Putin considered “red-line” activities that presented a major threat.
Ukraine ultimately became the focal point of Putin’s European policy and his greatest fear, as the uprising that caused the ouster of a pro-Russian Ukrainian President in 2014 not only fed fears that the West would try to instigate a similar “color revolution” in Russia, but that Ukraine would now become the eastern frontier of NATO.
The Russian action to seize Crimea using the “little green men” in 2014, a deliberate provocation that drew only a milquetoast response from the West, and particularly the United States, led directly to Putin’s agitation of the Ukraine regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which quickly became breakaway provinces, igniting a virtual Ukrainian civil war between the Ukrainian government and the majority Russian speaking inhabitants of those regions, a war that would eventually include the covert involvement of significant numbers of Russian troops fighting as “volunteers.”
The author shows a fairly straight path from this intervention in 2014 to the outright invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By this time, Putin relied on an increasingly smaller group of advisors that have become virtual sycophants, and he subsequently launches an ill-fated invasion based on outdated assumptions and wishful thinking. The Russian military attacks toward the critical cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv were ill-planned and had poor logistics, expecting little resistance from the Ukrainian military or population, and subsequently suffered humiliating reverses as the tactical and logistical shortcomings of the Russian military were put on world display.
Of course, Putin’s psyche will not accept that his design for a quick invasion and regime change to a more Russophile government have failed and the war now continues into its third year with very little movement on the battlefront since the opening days of what Putin called the “Special Military Operation.”
The author concludes with a question of where the Western democracies go from here when dealing with the most malevolent strongman Russia has seen since Josef Stalin. While there are small cracks being seen in Russia society due to the high casualties and seemingly endless nature of the war, Putin is firmly in power for now. The bigger danger is what Putin might do if he feels his grip on power might be weakening. As the author notes, Putin has been indicted for war crimes so has nowhere to go, his only path forward is something he can call victory in Ukraine. The question left unanswered for now is how far Putin will go to force an acceptable peace deal that he can call victory. Based on the author’s analysis in this insightful but sometimes frightening look at the most powerful man in Russia, there might be no limits.