Soviet Nostalgia Is a Geopolitical Dead End

Across the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, almost everyone knows The Irony of Fate, a 1976 romantic comedy in which a Moscow surgeon gets drunk at a bathhouse on New Year’s Eve and ends up on a plane to Leningrad. He gives a taxi driver his Moscow address, “Third Builder’s Street,” and arrives at an identical block of flats, where his key opens the door. The world that the movie describes was once much larger than Russia itself. You could arrive in Kyiv, Tbilisi, or Riga and speak Russian; quote the same Soviet films; laugh at the same jokes; and assume that underneath all the flags, languages, and newly drawn borders there was still some common social and cultural space holding the place together. Across the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, almost everyone knows The Irony of Fate, a 1976 romantic comedy in which a Moscow surgeon gets drunk at a bathhouse on New Year’s Eve and ends up on a plane to Leningrad. He gives a taxi driver his Moscow address, “Third Builder’s Street,” and arrives at an identical block of flats, where his key opens the door. The world that the movie describes was once much larger than Russia itself. You could arrive in Kyiv, Tbilisi, or Riga and speak Russian; quote the same Soviet films; laugh at the same jokes; and assume that underneath all the flags, languages, and newly drawn borders there was still some common social and cultural space holding the place together. When Russia set out to restore that world by force, some of its nostalgic talking points, once confined to state television, found a wide company in the West. Tucker Carlson, who has turned it into a routine, tells his audience that Ukraine is weak, corrupt, and finished. Candace Owens flew to Russia and came back saying, “they are lying to us about Russia.” Others, such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, refuse to support aid for a country defending itself from invasion. John Mearsheimer and Noam Chomsky have built long careers explaining that whatever Russia does is somebody else’s fault. Francesca Albanese, a U.N. special rapporteur, has called for an end to arms deliveries to a country fighting against an invader. The left and the right rarely agree on anything, yet here, some of their thinkers converge: Sooner or later, Kyiv must learn to live with Moscow’s demands. Whether it’s Owen Matthews writing in the Spectator that Ukraine is losing the war or Jeffrey Sachs insisting that Kyiv will never join NATO, the underlying belief is the same. For some people shaped by that world, its disappearance is sad. There is a little of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in them: They are so attached to the estate that they can scarcely imagine a world beyond it. Leaving Russia for the West did not always mean leaving its imperial assumptions behind. Joseph Brodsky, persecuted and exiled by the Soviet state, greeted Ukrainian independence with a poem full of insults, imagining Ukrainians returning to Russian poet Alexander Pushkin on their deathbeds rather than their own Taras Shevchenko. Pushkin himself, in “To the Slanderers of Russia,” told Europe to stay out of what he presented as a family quarrel among Slavs during Russia’s suppression of the Polish uprising in 1831. What is striking is how many people who never lived in that world have arrived at the same conclusion. These pundits identify Ukraine’s problems well. Kyiv is short of men, money, and Patriot interceptors; corruption persists; and its allies’ declarations have far outrun their policies. They are right about the diagnosis and wrong about the cure. They also exaggerate the threat. Russia has advanced at enormous cost to Ukraine, yet a snail set off from its starting positions might have reached parts of today’s front line first. Ukraine won the decisive battle for Kyiv, when Moscow’s aim was a disarmed Ukraine under a government of its choosing. It need not recover all its territory to win. If it remains sovereign, secure, and in the West, then Russia’s larger project will have failed. The only real Russian victory is the one that these arguments point toward—a Ukraine that is left vulnerable and subject to Moscow’s will. The worst part of this so-called realist take is the claim that it is for Ukraine’s own good. By the forecasts of these observers, Ukraine was supposed to lose in 2022, then every year since. Instead of revising the premise, they move the date forward and wait for history to rescue the thinking. Even the more serious skeptics concede that Russian President Vladimir Putin has not changed his war aims and that U.S. special envoy Jared Kushner is naive to think that business deals will seduce the Kremlin into peace. If Putin cannot be persuaded, what is Ukraine supposed to negotiate? A concession to a man who demands the maximum will only be a down payment. Georgia learned this the hard way. Its 2008 cease-fire with Russia was followed by the latter’s invasion of Crimea; the Minsk agreements were followed by the full-scale invasion. Another argument that keeps resurfacing is that the West provoked the war. Mearsheimer and Chomsky describe Russian aggression as a response to a menacing NATO, the supposed existential threat that Putin cites and his Western interpreters obligingly repeat. Yet Moscow was already using force in Moldova and Georgia in the early 1990s, when NATO enlargement was hardly an available excuse. You can call those ethnic conflicts, as some do, but after so many Russian acts of aggression, ignoring the reality takes real determination. The only power that has invaded anyone in the neighborhood is Russia. NATO only prevents it from doing so. What runs through all this is an old fatalism, very familiar in Russia, in which Russian power is a constant, Western resolve is fickle, and Ukrainian resistance is doomed. It calls itself realism, but it is really pessimism, in which history can change everything except Russia’s behavior. It treats Moscow’s desires as objective reality and Ukraine’s goals as childish aspirations, in the spirit of the Brezhnev Doctrine, where small countries choose freely, provided that Moscow approves. Soviet power once looked equally permanent; in Alexei Yurchak’s words, “everything was forever, until it was no more.” The Baltic states were told that Russia would never tolerate their joining NATO. They did not move on the map. The policy and debate did, because Western governments decided it should. Yes, they joined while Russia was weak. That is exactly the point. If Western policy has failed, then the policy should change. If Ukraine lacks air defense, the answer is more air defense. Pressure on Russia should grow until Moscow understands that the West will hold its ground and that the war will end as a strategic loss even if Russia takes the rest of the Donbas, which it does not really need. That means guaranteeing Ukraine’s future security and denying Moscow that lever. Is there a Western consensus on this yet? No. Let’s hope one arrives, because otherwise the problems will end up far closer to home. Why, then, does the argument keep returning? For some, it is a hatred of the West so complete that every war turns into a story about American wrongdoing. For others, it is audience. Outrage and fringe arguments sell, and Moscow makes a good backdrop for a story about Western decline. And for more than a few, it is simply clear sympathy for Russia, for its strongman, its bigotry framed as tradition, its fantasy of itself as the third Rome against a decadent West. Then for others, it is fear. In my village in the mountains of Georgia, my neighbor, a man called Valeri, says much the same thing as these commentators, though one should be more forgiving of Valeri. Russian troops already occupy part of his country, and one morning, he may discover that his barn is on the Russian side of the line. When he says that Russia is too big and too dangerous, one can understand. His is a foreign policy of the village bench. But the same worldview, minus the cows, turns up in American studios and newspapers, among people who know that they have more choices. Whether they echo that view from Moscow or in the West, they will find the Ukraine that comes out of this war even harder to recognize. Young Ukrainians speak more Ukrainian, consume less Russian culture, and understand fewer of the Soviet references that once traveled from Moscow to Mykolaiv. After generations of Russification, the recovery of a national consciousness is not an easy task. It may come with mistakes. But a country bombed in the name of a supposedly common history, that took tyranny and bloodshed to hold together, cannot be expected to preserve that history for the comfort of people who remember it fondly. Putin can drop more bombs and probably will, but after nearly five years of war, it is hard to imagine Ukrainians deciding that capitulation is the answer. Like other empires, the Russian one will sooner or later collapse, including in people’s heads. Along with it will go the longing to walk into Kyiv or Tbilisi and expect the keys to fit.