Ghosts

Like all of you, I’m sure, I have been watching the events unfolding in Ukraine all week with the greatest attention. And, also like all of you, I’ve been surprised over and over in the course of these last days. Who would have thought countries like Sweden, Finland, and especially (time a million) Switzerland would abandon their former inability to join the West in anything that could even slightly irritate Russia to take serious, meaningful steps to help the beleaguered Ukrainians? Who would have expected our own government to shake off its doldrums and spearhead what so far feels like a remarkably successful effort to inflict maximal economic and commercial damage on the Russians and thereby, at least theoretically, eventually to dissuade them from pushing forward with the conquest of Ukraine? Watching China and even Israel—both of whom are so traditionally eager not to step on Russian toes—speaking out, respectively, vaguely and less vaguely on the side of Ukraine—that also came as a huge surprise to me. So it’s been a week of surprises that I’ve watched parade past me when I’ve been ensconced in Joan’s shiva room at her father’s assisted-living facility for long enough to peruse the news on my phone. (For non-Shelter Rockers, my wonderful mother-in-law died last Shabbat and we’ve been here in Toronto since Sunday for her funeral and shiva week. May her memory be a blessing for us all.)

As always, I try to respond to current events by setting them in their historical context. Is Putin a latter-day Hitler trying to swallow up as many of the neighbors as he can without caring if anyone does or doesn’t believe whatever fig-leaf justification he offers up to justify his actions and only having begun with Ukraine, just as Hitler only began with the Sudetenland? Or does he see himself more as a latter-day Lincoln, looking south and attempting to bring back into the union a seditiously self-proclaimed rogue state led by the political heirs of the rebels who wrongly and illegally chose to jump ship when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991? I admit that comparing Putin to Lincoln seems beyond exaggerated. But is that only because I—we—consider the nation that declared its independence in the summer of 1776 to have been a true union, a “real” nation, that the South was treacherously betraying by attempting to go its own way—and thus nothing like the USSR, which was—at best—an archipelago of serf-states held in place by the brute force brought to bear by the only “real” country in the union, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (or, as it was earlier and later called, “just” Russia)?

It’s a more complicated question than it sounds like at first. Putin himself is clearly a complex mixture of things: part schoolyard bully, part oligarch, part Caesar, part self-labelled patriot, and part gangster. I’m sure people with far more extensive grounding than myself in Russian history will find all sorts of themes from Russian history echoing through his rhetoric and his actions (and particularly his actions of this last week). But to me there are three central ghosts hovering over Putin as he pursues this policy of naked aggression towards Ukraine and each, a bit like the angels in Angels in America (and especially the one played by Emma Thompson in the HBO miniseries), guides the action forward without actually playing a role personally in the way the drama unfolds.

The first ghost is that of Ivan the Terrible. (The word “terrible” is not at all right, by the way. The Russian word grozniy means “formidable” or “fearsome,” not terrible in the way the word is used in modern English.) Ivan was the first of the czars, the grand prince of Moscow who, in 1547 proclaimed himself “Czar of All Russia.” It was a carefully chosen title: the Russian word tsar (usually written “czar” in English, or “tsar”) is merely the Russian equivalent of the Latin word Caesar, just in the same way that Kaiser is the German version of that word. And it was a latter-day Caesar that Ivan set out to accomplish the twin foreign-policy initiatives of his years in power: the effort to make Russia safe from the so-called Golden Horde (as the huge Mongol empire to the east was called) and the parallel effort to gain access for Russia to the Baltic Sea regardless of what countries lay in the way. He accomplished the first of these two initiatives, extending Russian control as far east as the Urals and as far south as the Caspian Sea (and thus creating a huge buffer zone between Russia and the Mongol Empire). But he was unsuccessful in his attempt to colonize and annex Lithuania, in those days the sole gateway to the Baltic for Russia. Still, by rejecting the Russian words for “king” or “emperor” and choosing instead to be known as czar, he was signaling—and not especially subtly—that he viewed Russia’s place in his world as something akin to Rome’s place in its, which is to say as the central state of a giant empire and as anything but a nation among nations.

The second ghost hovering over Putin’s head is Peter the Great, czar from 1685 to his death in 1725 whose self-appointed mission was once and for all to make Russia into a great nation worthy of the role in world leadership he envisaged for it. He invented the Russian navy, completely overhauled the Russian army, created a secular school system devoted to teaching children to think of themselves as citizens of a great world power, and he exerted enough influence on the Orthodox Church to keep it from getting in his way. And, indeed, he made himself into one of the most powerful of world leaders. And he managed to expand Russia decisively, taking over (because he could) large swaths of Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, thus gaining access to the Baltic. And he went to war with Turkey, as a result of which he gained access to the Black Sea. And he founded St. Peterburg (named after himself), Russia’s so-called “window to Europe,” which made him truly a towering figure in Russian history. (He was, by the way, also a towering figure in the literal sense of being six-foot-six.)

And the third ghost is the specter of Catherine II, called Catherine the Great, who became empress of all Russia upon the death of her peculiar husband, Peter III, and who remained on the throne until her own death in 1796. Catharine saw herself as the “real” successor to Peter the Great. And Russia dramatically expanded under her reign—conquering Poland and then giving away parts of it to Austria and Prussia. She went to war with Turkey and won, securing the entire northern shore of the Black Sea for Russia. (This is basically where Ukraine is today.) And she also seized the Crimea in 1783, making it part of Russia. To learn more, I recommend Robert K. Massie’s book, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, which I enjoyed immensely, as did I also his biography of Peter the Great, called Peter the Great: His Life and World. Both volumes are still in print and available as e-books. The best biography of Ivan the Terrible is probably the one by Isabel de Madariaga, published by Yale University Press in 2006.

In lifetimes of none of the above did Ukraine exist as an independent state. In other words, Putin’s ghosts did not conquer Ukraine because there was no such place: once the Russian Empire existed with its czars and czarinas at the helm, it simply went without saying that the territory that is today independent Ukraine was part of the empire. And that, I think, is the world the ghosts hovering over Putin’s head are urging him to recreate, one in which Russia, the largest nation in Europe (and by far—although Ukraine is second-largest), takes its rightful place as leader of the lesser and smaller nations of Europe, which position of natural power and influence it is being prevented from assuming by the efforts of NATO and the European Union, and by the efforts of our own nation as well, to draw Ukraine away from Russia and to make of it an independent nation in the Western style with ties to the other nations of the world, and Russia among them, that are suggestive not of Ukrainian subservience or servility but of Ukrainian sovereignty, autonomy, and independence.

Where all this will end, who knows? The Russians, it has already become clear, can only lose by winning: having to occupy a gigantic vassal state that will remain openly hostile is not what the Russians can want, but neither—and even more horrifying—would be the specter of actually losing the war they’ve begun and having to retreat. The Ukrainians have played their hand well so far, doing precisely what it took to win the support and admiration of the world. President Zelenskyy has shown himself to be brave, clever, and—crucially—photogenic and appealing. (The man is a trained performer, after all!) The Russian government will not collapse under the weight of criticism levelled against it by the entire rest of the world. But becoming a pariah state can’t have been Putin’s plan either. Perhaps the man needs to look up one last time and see the specters hiding just behind Ivan, Peter, and Catherine—the specters of the emperors of Rome (the real Caesars, after all) who chose to conquer and rule the world only for their empire to collapse in on itself when the weight of the world’s loathing simply became too heavy for it to bear.