Masha Gessen is a Russia-born journalist who writes frequently for the New Yorker and other publications. The following article, written before the invasion of Ukraine, appeared in The New Yorker. Reflecting the pre-invasion fears, the article was titled “The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine.” Few believed that Ukraine would survive for more than a day or two in the face of the mighty Russian military machine. Gessen predicted a staunch Ukrainian resistance to Putin but expected that he would respond with overwhelming force, “the only way he knows.”
“Are you listening to Putin?” is not the kind of text message I expect to receive from a friend in Moscow. But that’s the question my closest friend asked me on Monday, when the Russian President was about twenty minutes into a public address in which he would announce that he was recognizing two eastern regions of Ukraine as independent countries and effectively lay out his rationale for launching a new military offensive against Ukraine. I was listening—Putin had just said that Ukraine had no history of legitimate statehood. When the speech was over, my friend posted on Facebook, “I can’t breathe.”
Fifty-four years ago, the Soviet dissident Larisa Bogoraz wrote, “It becomes impossible to live and to breathe.” When she wrote the note, in 1968, she was about to take part in a desperate protest: eight people went to Red Square with banners that denounced the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. I have always understood Bogoraz’s note to be an expression of shame—the helpless, silent shame of a citizen who can do nothing to stop her country’s aggression. But on Monday I understood those words as expressing something more, something that my friends in Russia were feeling in addition to shame: the tragedy that is the death of hope.
For some Soviet intellectuals, Czechoslovakia in 1968 represented the possibility of a different future. That spring, events appeared to prove that Czechoslovakia was part of the larger world, despite being in the Soviet bloc. The leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was instituting reforms. It seemed that, after the great terrors of both Hitler and Stalin, there could be freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a free exchange of ideas in the media, and possibly even actual elections in Eastern and Central Europe, and that all of these changes could be achieved peacefully. The Czechoslovaks called it “socialism with a human face.”
In August, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and hope everywhere in the Soviet bloc. Nothing different was going to happen here. It became impossible to live and to breathe. This was when eight Moscow acquaintances, with minimal discussion and coördination, went to Red Square and unfurled posters that read “For Your Liberty and Ours” and “Hands Off Czechoslovakia,” among others. All were arrested, and seven were given jail time, held in psychiatric detention, or sent into internal exile.
Ukraine has long represented hope for a small minority of Russians. Ukraine shares Russia’s history of tyranny and terror. It lost more than four million people to a man-made famine in 1931-34 and still uncounted others to other kinds of Stalinist terror. Between five and seven million Ukrainians died during the Second World War and the Nazi occupation in 1941-44; this included one and a half million Jews killed in what is often known as the Holocaust by Bullets. Just as in Russia, no family survived untouched by the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, both Russian and Ukrainian societies struggled to forge new identities. Both contended with poverty, corruption, and growing inequality. Both had leaders who tried to stay in office by falsifying the vote. But in 2004 Ukrainians revolted against a rigged election, camping out in Kyiv’s Independence Square for weeks. The country’s highest court ordered a revote. Nine years later, when the President sold the country out to Russia—agreeing to scrap an association agreement with the European Union in exchange for fifteen billion in Russian loans—Ukrainians of vastly different political persuasions came to Independence Square again. They stayed there, day and night, through the dead of winter. They stayed when the government opened fire on them. More than a hundred people died before the corrupt President fled to Russia. A willingness to die for freedom is now a part of not only Ukrainians’ mythology but their lived history.
Many Russians—both the majority who accept and support Putin and the minority who oppose him—watched the Ukrainian revolutions as though looking in a mirror that could predict Russia’s own future. The Kremlin became even more terrified of protests and cracked down on its opponents even harder. Some in the opposition believed that if Ukrainians won their freedom, Russians would follow. There was more than a hint of an unexamined imperialist instinct in this attitude, but there was something else in it, too: hope. It felt something like this: our history doesn’t have to be our destiny. We may yet be brave enough and determined enough to win our freedom.
On Monday, Putin took aim at this sense of hope in his rambling, near-hour-long speech. Playing amateur historian, as he has done several times in recent years, Putin said that the Russian state is indivisible, and that the principles on the basis of which former Soviet republics won independence in 1991 were illegitimate. He effectively declared that the post-Cold War world order is over, that history is destiny and Ukraine will never get away from Russia.
Hannah Arendt observed that totalitarian regimes function by declaring imagined laws of history and then acting to enforce them. On Tuesday, Putin asked his puppet parliament for authorization to use force abroad. His aim is clear: in his speech, he branded the Ukrainian government as a group of “radicals” who carry out the will of their American puppet masters. As the self-appointed enforcer of the laws of history, Putin was laying down the groundwork for removing the Ukrainian government and installing one that he imagines will do the Kremlin’s bidding.
Putin expects to succeed because he can overwhelm Ukraine with military force, and because he has known the threat of force to be effective against unarmed opposition. Putin’s main opponent, Alexey Navalny, is in prison; the leaders of his movement are all either behind bars or in exile. The number of independent journalists in Russia has dwindled to a handful, and many of them, too, are working from exile, addressing tiny audiences, because the state blocks access to many of their Web sites and has branded others “foreign agents.” Putin’s sabre-rattling against Ukraine has drawn little protest—less even than the annexation of Crimea did eight years ago. On Sunday, six people were detained for staging a protest in Pushkin Square, in central Moscow. One of them held a poster that said “Hands Off Ukraine.” Another was an eighty-year-old former Soviet dissident.
What Putin does not imagine is the kind and scale of resistance that he would actually encounter in Ukraine. These are the people who stood to the death in Independence Square. In 2014, they took up arms to defend Ukraine against a Russian incursion. Underequipped and underprepared, these volunteers joined the war effort from all walks of life. Others organized in monumental numbers to collect equipment and supplies to support the fighters and those suffering from the occupation of the east, in an effort that lasted for several years. When Putin encounters Ukrainian resistance, he will respond the only way he knows: with devastating force. The loss of life will be staggering. Watching it will make it impossible to live and to breathe.
Ukraine is calling for volunteers to come help them fight. I’d be willing to pay for a couple one-way tickets.
Won’t you be too busy packing up your family to support Putin’s war against the children and babies of Ukraine?
Rarely am I rendered speechless, Dienne, but good Lord! Bush et al. in Iraq; Putin in Ukraine. Psychopaths.
Murderers. War criminals. International scofflaws.
The thing I simply cannot understand about all this is how Putin could have been so colossally stupid as to think his invasion of Ukraine a good idea. It was entirely predictable that it would achieve precisely the opposite of the goals he has said that he wants to achieve and that this would lead to a long and bloody insurgency that he cannot, in the end, win.
Apparently, Putin told the Russian people that he was “liberating” Ukraine from fascists and his troops would be met with Ukrainians carrying flowers. He is delusional or so isolated that he has no idea what is happening in the real world.
Exactly.
“would be met with flowers.” Yes, delusional.
And exactly what Donald Rumsfeld said about Iraq
“Apparently, Putin told the Russian people that he was “liberating” Ukraine from fascists…”
That’s what dienne77 posted a few days back. Maybe she is a Russian, which explains why she doesn’t have to get busy packing up her family to move to Russia to support Putin’s war if she is one of the Russian people and already lives there.
Dienne,
Please remind me why it’s not OK for Ukraine to be independent and why you support dropping cluster munitions in the middle of Kharkiv.
Good questions, Ponderosa!!!
This, Dienne, is what you are supporting. The blood of this little girl, and of all the Ukrainian defenders and the hapless Russian conscripts, is on the hands of your hero:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/28/europe/gallery/ukraine-girl-killed/index.html
Sorry, Dienne, but no one is accepting payment in rubles anymore.
My question is not if but — WHEN Putin uses tactical nukes designed for battlefield to crush Ukraine’s defenders, instead of city busters, what will the US and EU do then.
Unless Putin losses power (that doesn’t mean removal but pressure from other powerful Russians that have been his allies for decades), I do not think he’ll back down. I think he’ll escalate the war in the Ukraine by using tactical nukes to win. If that doesn’t work, then he’ll use city busters and turn Kiev into a smoking crater.
Some way has to be found for Putin to pull out of Ukraine and save face. He’s a cornered animal, and will probably fight to the death if he can’t get out and still “look good” somehow. I don’t know how it will happen but I think that’s how it’s got to be. Unless the Russian people overthrow him somehow. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re looking at WW3.
I am already seeing some of the regular pro-Putin hacks tweeting that it is worth sacrificing all the people of the Ukraine (let thenm all die) to make Putin happy and prevent nuclear Armageddon.
What other ethnic groups or races can be thrown under the bus as “expendable” and approved for Putin to annihilate in the name of “preventing nuclear Armageddon”?
Funny how Putin supporters would rather suggest that Putin be allowed to annihilate the people of Ukraine “to prevent Armageddon” but never consider that maybe the person who needs to be gone is Putin.
They are off their rockers. How many people will they sacrifice to prevent nuclear war? Millions as long as none of them are Putin.
The Ides of March is a bit long to wait for this but would be fitting.
It’s amazing that Putin gets away with all the old Communist propaganda, while he is a kleptocrat, not a Communist. Even more amazing that there are people in this country who defend him. Oh, he feels encircled; oh, he needs lebesraum.
John Oliver had another great show (well, he always does) last night, with a segment where a Ukrainian woman confronts a Russian soldier & she tells him to f@#ing (literally) get out, with a fascinating diatribe.
Will someone (Bob?) do us the honors of posting it?
Thanks 👍!
Putin: May all the grandmothers of Ukraine come for you.
Bob,
I’ve often wondered what would happen if millions of WOMEN, old and young, pregnant and with their babies stood in front of the tanks.
That is the most brilliant thing I have yet read about this crisis, Mamie!!!
Yes, yes, yes!!!!!!
According to CNN, there is a 40 mile long convoy of Russian tanks and other equipment headed now towards Kiev.
So if there was a time for women to block the tanks, it’s now.
If I put myself in the shoes of a woman in Ukraine, I get very depressed. Their men are fighting a powerful foe. Their homes are being destroyed. Everything they knew is under bombardment and will likely be obliterated.
It’s terrifying and very sad.
You would have to be made of stone not to feel their anguish.
Have you seen Nadine Labaki’s 2011 film Where Do We Go Now? (Et maintenant on va ou? is the French title. It’s an interesting film.
Thank you, Bob!
Diane,
The men of this world have been the aggressors. I can’t think of a time in history when women have perpetrated the acts that men have. I often think how spoiled we are in this country. People complain that they have to wear a mask while people around the world are suffering atrocities of the most heinous kind. We cry for “normalcy” and bemoan our plight of having to sit with ourselves in our houses for a little while. We cry over our “suffering” but don’t seem to be able to put our suffering in a greater context. We are a nation of children. I often tell myself students that they should feel lucky that they only have to wear a mask and not go off to war like our grandparents did or watch their houses be blown out from under them.
Mamie, I have the same thoughts. Also a feeling of how lucky we are —so far—to be remote from the scenes on TV.
Diane,
I know how you feel. I cried when I saw those people in parking garages with their children and pets. These past few days have been hard to cope with. I have such a feeling of powerlessness, anger and the sense that the world is spinning out of control. It is taking me a good deal of awareness to hold my center. It’s difficult to live in the world nowadays.
Agree, Mamie. When I think of all the places we have troops when the locals didn’t want us, and then see a nation desperate for our help and about to be slaughtered, it is depressing.
Vladimir Putin says that he would use nuclear weapons. Believe him.
–Fiona Hill
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340
While I was only 8 years old in the 3rd grade during the fall of 1962, practicing “duck and cover” drills during the Cuban Missle Crisis, I now know how close the world came to a US-Russia (USSR) nuclear war. We only avoided it because by less than 24 hours (my cousin was part of the invastion force and we now know the Russians had 50,000 troops in Cuba with tactical nuclear weapons and authorization to use them on the American invasion force) we had John F Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev who decided to face down the war mongers and de-escalate. A year later, JFK was dead and Kruschev removed.
This certainly has that feel. We are going to need to be lucky again, because this time, there is a leader (Putin) who is not concerned about a nuclear war, who is megalomaniacal and looking for the ulitmate validation, and there are not current conversations underway between him and the nuclear powers to talk him off the ledge.
No, only brave Ukranians prepared to die perhaps in the hundreds of thousands and perhaps similarly brave Russians in the street or more importantly within the Kremlin can stop him unless NATO is prepared to engage conventionally, believing he will not use nukes when cornered. The only strategy I see stopping this is Putin’s demise and do not see how this is going to come about.
Wow. This post took me back! Though I was only in the 2nd or 3rd grade, I remember those drills vividly. I can only imagine the memories that the children of Ukraine will have!
If the children survive.