I don’t think Putin will stop at Ukraine, I don’t think we are in a rational actor paradigm, says Marci Shore

The war in Ukraine has intensified in the last few days. There have been dozens of airstrikes, resulting in thousands of deaths. Hundreds of thousands of people are under siege, with Russia blocking food and water supplies. There are estimates that at least three million people have been forced to leave Ukraine while millions have been internally displaced. Ever since the war began, Marci Shore, who teaches European intellectual history at Yale University, has barely slept. The phones are constantly ringing, and she has made appearances on television and other media to talk about what she calls Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unhinged aggression. In between, she speaks to her friends in Ukraine, for whom she says she worries constantly.

Shore’s most recent book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution (2017) is a deeply felt account of the 2013-14 Ukrainian revolution which, she says, unified Ukrainians in a manner that is getting reflected now in the resistance they are offering to the invading Russian army. Here, Shore talks about Ukrainian defence, young Russian soldiers and their motivation, the role of Western powers, and Putin’s unfinished business.

I know it’s a very busy time for you. But, for us in India, can you describe what you are feeling about the war in Ukraine?

It’s been devastating. And I feel ridiculous saying that because I’m on the other side of the world. I’m in a place that’s relatively safe, at least as safe as America ever is. It feels like the world that existed a month ago no longer exists, that there’s no continuity. Since the invasion began, I’ve been trying to shake myself out of the disbelief. And then I’ve just been following news reports in different languages and checking on my friends to make sure they’re still alive, and talking to journalists, and talking to students. And thinking this must be a nightmare, that you’re going to wake up and it’s going to be over. I think moments like this force even people like me… I’m a scholar, I’m a historian of the 20th century, I know what kind of evil is possible in the world. And even so, the moral shock is still there, like the sheer possibility of so much evil.

I studied these things, I’m familiar with them, I know what’s possible. I knew there was a possibility that Putin would invade. But I also look at how I’ve gotten so many letters and emails from readers, from students, from colleagues, from distant acquaintances, from people I’d forgotten I ever met—people asking how they can help people getting on planes and going to Poland and working with refugees…people who had nothing to do with Ukraine sending money to these humanitarian efforts. I think there are millions and millions of good people in the world. There are all these millions of people trying to help and so how is it possible that a handful of psychopaths can wreak so much evil? It’s just not right. The world shouldn’t be like that.

Give us a sense of what is happening in Ukraine right now. How are people in Ukraine suffering under the Russian siege?

The Russians have been bombing civilians. They are trying to bomb the country into submission. They are bombing maternity hospitals. They are bombing bread factories, and apartment buildings in residential neighbourhoods. They are shelling people who are on humanitarian evacuation routes. This is a thing that Svyatoslav Vakarchuk [Ukrainian social activist and a prominent musician] said to me three days into the war. He sent me this text message and said you don’t know how happy I am when I see how Ukrainians are responding like that, the spirit and the solidarity and the dignity, and the bravery and the cooperation like this was the Ukraine he had dreamt about. This was the Ukraine so many of my friends who are of my generation wanted to come into being and to develop on the ashes of the Soviet Union. And there is a sense that they are there. My friend wrote from Lviv, and he said the solidarity is indescribable; you’ve never experienced something like this.

People have been saying that the spirit of the Maidan [Uprising] that we feared was a brief moment is there, and it’s back, and civil society is doing everything. But not only is the civil society doing everything… I mean, eight years ago, only civil society was doing everything. Eight years ago, it turned out that Ukraine didn’t really have an army and it was exclusively being crowdfunded on the internet when the war in Donbas started. Now, it turns out, there’s a functioning state. I mean, in fact, a state that is functioning remarkably well, and there’s a functioning army. In addition, you have this civil society that stepped up. So, there’s tremendous resistance, there’s tremendous cooperation. You’re dealing with somebody who is unhinged, and just doesn’t care how many people he kills. And in that sense, it’s an unequal battle. It’s not just a question of somebody having more weapons, and somebody having fewer weapons, the West delivering weapons and that it will even it out. Because you’re dealing with somebody for whom other people’s lives have no meaning whatsoever, and therefore, anything is possible. Therefore, there’s no restraint.

Does Putin look like a man in control to you?

To me, no. And I know this is a debate, whether or not Putin can be understood as a rational actor. And, of course, I have no especially privileged, epistemological access to what is going on inside his head. But I can tell you this that I listened very carefully, eight years ago, to Putin’s Crimea speech, after the illegal annexation of Crimea. It was a very grandiose speech, it was very carefully choreographed. It was all false, but it was done with a certain rationality of cleverness. He was the grand strategist, he was very shrewd. He was manipulative in a very, almost kind of, scientific way.

When I listened to him three weeks ago, now, when he gave that hour-long speech before the invasion started, my intuition—and you can take this with a grain of salt, because I’m not a native Russian speaker—was that he was no longer the same person, that he was unwell, that he was much more unhinged, that his contact with reality, it had gotten much vaguer. My intuition was that we’re no longer in the paradigm of a high-stakes chess game. We’re now in the paradigm of Shakespearean drama. And an ageing man facing his own mortality has decided to create immortality by destroying the world. That was my intuition, again, based on no privileged information, but that was my intuition.

I wanted to ask you about the symbolism of some terms that Putin has used in his justification of the war, especially when he said he was invading Ukraine for the de-Nazification of Ukraine. You and Tim [Marci’s husband and Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder] try to warn about the perils of not learning lessons from the Holocaust. What do you feel when Putin puts such words to use?

This was actually a conversation between me and Tim. My first impulse when he [Putin] started with this rhetoric—maybe, six months ago or nine months ago, he had written this kind of crazy article about Ukraine and Russia and one people and setting out his own kind of view of history—was that this is just not worth engaging with. It’s not worth dignifying with a response. And Tim’s impulse was that, no, it’s actually important that we respond. It’s important that we respond as historians, that it’s important that we set the narrative right. So, of course, de-Nazification… I mean, Nazi became like this word with immediate visceral resonance. It hits people at the level of effect that we must save people, let’s de-Nazify…the embodiment of evil. It obviously makes no sense in present-day Ukraine. Putin was using this story during the Maidan, that the uprising was a kind of Western-sponsored Nazi conspiracy, and Ukrainian fascists were going to kill all the native Russian speakers in Ukraine. That story got him some traction with the West during the Maidan, the fear that maybe, it’s a revolution by extreme nationalists and we should not support them. It got him traction at the beginning of the war in Donbas; there were many people in Donbas, maybe, say, a third of them, who thought, oh, maybe there are Nazis coming to kill us. Maybe, they do want to kill the Russian speakers, maybe, we do need to be protected.

Maybe, I should just add as a footnote for your readers, and you should be in a much better position to understand this than Americans because you’re a multilingual country: Ukraine is a bilingual country. I mean, you could say it’s also a multilingual country and a lot of people also speak Polish and now English and German, but it’s a bilingual country—Russian and Ukrainian. In general, as you go east, Russian is more dominant and as you go west, Ukrainian is more dominant. But that obscures the fact that basically everybody can switch back and forth.

Now that story seems even more insane, because, at this point there is a democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who is openly Jewish and it’s not a secret that his family died in the Holocaust. And he’s a native Russian speaker. He does speak Ukrainian. And he, you know, has been speaking Ukrainian. Now all the time, especially, when he gave an address to Russians in Russian right before the invasion started, his Russian is better than his Ukrainian. And he was elected with 73 per cent of the votes. So, the idea that he is running a Nazi dictatorship is so absurd that it’s not even clear how it makes any sense to engage with.

I should also add, for the record, I don’t think that story has got the traction at all that it got eight years ago. Eight years ago, a lot of us who work on Ukraine, were very frustrated. We felt like we needed to intervene with the English and German-language media. People were like, well, there has been a history of Ukrainian nationalism, and maybe, there are extremist elements. That story now I think has zero traction, basically, anywhere except Russia. Then the big question is the Russians who support the war, what do they actually believe they’re supporting. They’re supporting, for the most part, something they believe is a so-called special operation just designed to liberate and rescue their poor, oppressed, Russian-speaking Ukrainian brothers and sisters, who have been victimised and persecuted by this “Nazi dictatorship”.

We see some of the young Russian soldiers who get caught and then they speak to the local media, and then someone who’s present there with a mobile phone camera. And this young man who’s barely out of his teens says that he had absolutely no idea about the fact that he was being sent to Ukraine for this war. It’s sad, isn’t it?

It’s wrenching. Ukrainians and Russians did not hate each other but now they will. I mean, now Putin has provoked the very situation that he claimed he was rectifying. There had never been resistance against Russia in Ukraine—at least nothing that I had ever encountered before Putin provoked a war there. Now, these young soldiers are coming in. I mean, okay, we say there 200,000 people there, there are some select group of sadists who exist in every culture. But that’s not most people. I don’t believe that Russia is a country of 144 million people who, just for reasons of pure sadism, want nothing more than to go out and massacre Ukrainians. I mean, that’s what is so horrific about these 18-19-year-old kids. I don’t think they even know what they’re doing and how have they ended up there. You can ask what has happened to Ukrainian society, that they’re doing such an extraordinary job resisting. This is a society that has matured tremendously; this, for me, is very much the legacy of the revolution. But really understanding what’s happening and how it happened is not about understanding Ukraine. It’s about understanding Russia. The fact that people don’t want to be invaded, raped, pillaged, bombed, they don’t want their cities decimated, they don’t want their people mass murdered, that doesn’t actually require explanation. You don’t actually have to think, oh, wow, how do we understand their reaction?

What requires explanation is what has happened in Russia, or what has not happened in Russia since 1991, that Putin has been allowed to get this hold over the population. He has been allowed to send these 18-19-year-old kids to kill people having no idea what they’re doing, or why, or thinking they’re in some other story.

It has also dented this powerful image of Russia as a military power because, at least speaking from an Indian perspective, there are many people in India who believed when the war broke out that, in front of a superpower like Russia, Ukraine would not last long. But now, it’s already been three weeks. And the kind of resistance which the Ukrainians have put up is phenomenal. I was looking at the images of Zelensky roaming around in the streets and making these videos. It’s quite fascinating, isn’t it?

There is a kind of unanimity which is perhaps unprecedented in Ukrainian history. Eight years ago, there was really a sense that the East could be divided. You know, that there were going to be a lot of people in Donbas who would believe the story about the Ukrainian Nazis coming to kill them, who would welcome the separatists. It was unclear which way Kharkiv would go, Odessa would go. Now, there’s an incredible amount of unity, nobody wants to be invaded by Russia. I think it’s not about whether your Russian is better or your Ukrainian is better. It’s not about whether your parents, ethnically, belong to this group or that group or are of Jewish origin. Nobody wants to be invaded by Russia. It’s a different society, it’s a different political culture. They have worked a lot on this democracy, it’s not perfect. There have been all sorts of bumps, they’re struggling with corruption, but they have developed an extraordinary civil society, which was the miracle of the Maidan. They are coming together to say, no, this isn’t what we want.

I don’t understand how militaries work well enough. But I know that even my Ukrainian friends and colleagues who are the least violent and the last people in the world to ever pick up a gun, will resist to the very end.

And it’s not clear to me that the Russian troops are that motivated. If they’re motivated, they’re motivated by a reason that is false and it seems to me sooner or later, people must start to take in that reality that this is not the story we’re told. If they were told that you’re going to be graded as a liberator, and now they’re hearing these people who are the age of their grandmother, who grew up in the Soviet Union, who are speaking their own language saying, “go away, we don’t want you here” — that has to, at some point, penetrate.

And in this case, I do think the language is important. I have a friend who is going through cancer treatment, and she was in the hospital having chemotherapy the day the invasion started, and she was listening to Zelensky’s address. Her Russian is very good. She was listening to Zelensky address the Russian people in Russian hours before this invasion started, in which he said, “Please don’t do this, we don’t want to fight with you…this isn’t what we want, these aren’t the relations we want to have…we’re not your enemies, please don’t do this…if you come attack us, we will defend ourselves, you won’t see our backs, you will see our faces, we will look you in the eye.” It was one of the best addresses I’d ever seen. And my friend actually came right from the hospital, having just listened to this speech, into my kitchen and said you have to listen to this. And that was a speech that only a native Russian speaker could give to Russia. There was an intimacy about it and in some ways these are soldiers who are getting to a place where they’re talking to people who are speaking their own language. And I have to think that has to somehow play some role in giving us a better chance for some kind of that understanding to penetrate.

Are the Western powers doing enough? Is the US, at the other end of the spectrum in the Cold War, doing enough?

I’m probably also very unqualified to say because I’m also emotionally involved. So for me, I feel, of course not. We have to stop it, somebody has to stop this. I understand that the major consideration is you don’t want to provoke a nuclear war. And then the question becomes, if you intervene sooner, is that more likely to provoke than if you intervene later? And what we know from history is that we’re in the world of radical contingency, it could be that whatever we do. Putin is determined to push that button, and write history with himself as the great ender of history. In either case, he would push the button. We don’t know, we’re kind of guessing at this point. My sense is that the Ukrainians are fighting for all of us. I don’t think Putin will stop at Ukraine, I don’t think we’re in a rational actor paradigm.
I was on a panel with a very smart colleague of mine, we were talking to students. And I was talking from my, I’m sure, overly emotional perspective. I’m an intellectual historian, I deal with many things that are fuzzy. And he was a game theorist dealing with his world as a chess match. I just felt all the things he’s saying are very smart. But they seemed irrelevant to me, because I thought that the game theory works, if you’re playing chess and everyone’s agreed on the rules. But what if somebody decides to take the board and throw it up and slash all the pieces? Then it doesn’t help. What if we’re outside the realm of rationality? And so, my feeling is that in some way somebody has to put a stop to Putin. I think he could easily blow up the world. I don’t see any reason that he would stop at the borders of NATO. I’m also influenced because I’m a historian of World War II. So in my mind, I’m like, oh, my God! We’re in 1939! But with the internet, we can see it all in real time. Imagine if in 1939 there were internet, you could watch everything live streamed.

Do you think in Putin’s mind there is some sort of unfinished business in Ukraine?

Putin has unfinished business in the world. I mean, he has issues, he has resentments. He has constant need to prove his masculinity in this, like, “oh, I’m not a woman, I don’t have bad days”. I mean, all of this vulgarity, that he and [Alexander] Lukashenko and [Donald] Trump share, like you have to humiliate women, you have to show that you’re dominant, this obsession with being respected, with not being given enough respect. The analysis that my Russian friends tend to give about what really upsets Putin about Ukraine—nobody has access to his soul, so this is all speculation—is the fear that Maidan could happen in Russia. In some sense, what Masha Gessen [writer-activist critical of Putin] really wanted to know while she was in Russia during the protests in 2011-12 was why they failed and the Maidan succeeded. As a generalisation, nothing ever succeeds perfectly. What Masha wanted to know is how they were able to do it in Ukraine, and why were we not able to do it in Russia.

I remember after the Maidan, I was at a conference in Russia—the last time I was in Russia when it was already kind of sketchy. And I saw there a colleague from Petersburg I hadn’t seen in years. And he was talking about the Maidan, and he said all of us, we watched the Maidan ecstatically. And I had to laugh: “Yes, all of you, that’s you and your 24 friends.” But for the Russian intelligentsia, the Maidan was the possibility.

And I think it might have been the same thing for Putin. But in the opposite way—it might have been a source of terror, that they’ve created this president, it was something done by people who may be just entirely too similar to his people and, therefore, a particular threat.

interviewMarci ShoreOpen ConversationRussia invades UkraineUkraine crisisVladimir Putin