As Vladimir Putin’s tanks are preparing to invade Ukraine, expanding on the first armed annexation of territory in Europe since World War II in Crimea. For decades, the free world wishfully ignored Russian revanchism, making itself believe that Russia was somewhere between a “benign” autocracy and a flawed democracy. This liberal dream conceived of Putin’s autocratic menace as Russians’ problem, and possibly a problem for Russia’s neighbors, but not the world’s.
But an autocrat’s excesses are never just one people’s problem. This is especially true of the Russian tyrant. Cloaked in centuries of insecurity, with vast porous borders, the Russians’ strategic culture has always been—before, during, and after the Soviet era—one of “the best defense is offense,” which is to say, terrorizing neighbors to not be terrorized. A Putin confidante recently articulated this mentality by saying that Russia has only two options: expand or die.
Why did the free world, and especially the Americans across numerous political administrations, get Russia wrong? Let’s look at the many times Putin revealed his true nature and was essentially ignored. Begin with his biography.
Vladimir Putin entered the declining Soviet intelligence apparatus and rose to the rank of a KGB colonel. He may no longer be a colonel, but he still radiates the cynicism, paranoia, and psychosis of the KGB. Putin grew up poor in the slums of St. Petersburg. He had no prospects beyond what the Soviet Union had to offer him. So he joined the Soviet security service and experienced a degree of mobility that would have been unlikely during the Tsarist regime. As Russianist scholar Leon Aron has suggested, Putin believes that he owes his everything to the Soviet empire. As a case officer in Dresden, he watched in horror when the Soviet Union dissolved.
It was thought in the free world that the end of the Cold War was V-Day. The view from Moscow, and certainly in St. Petersburg where Putin was deputy mayor, was somewhat different. It was Dunkirk. The Soviet security apparatus had remained intact. It was now the Russian security apparatus. Disillusioned by Marxism-Leninism, the anti-West, imperialist ideology still ran in its DNA. Years later, Putin would say that “whoever doesn’t miss the Soviet Union has no heart; whoever wants it back has no brain.” What he meant was that the glorious days of imperialism and glory were missed, but the godless, centralized economy was not.