Opinion: The Only Thing That Will Delay Further Russia Aggression is Total Defeat

It is a slippery slope to paint any group of people with a broad brush. As a Cold War kid who watched the Berlin wall fall, grew up singing Winds of Change, and watched the Duma on fire in 1994 to see the infant Russian Federation survive, I believed anything was possible. Red Dawn (1984, not the horrible remake) was just a piece of Cold War propaganda churned out by Hollywood, with which President Ronald Reagan had deep ties being a famous actor himself. Other Soviets bad and the West is good gems on the silver screen, including Rocky IV, Firefox, Red Scorpion, Octopussy, and The Living Daylights – I watched them all.

I believe that for my generation, the last two to five years have been a shock. We watched the Russian Federation tickle the ideas of Democracy and reform to reverse course and plunge head-first toward a Stalinist society. The new threat within Russia isn’t the Communists, the liberals, or the LGBTQ – Russia has declared they are now defeated within their country. The new enemy is the overly patriotic and zealous, who question the wisdom of the Kremlin.

Surely the people will protest against this. Surely, because we were told from the moment as children we could understand the idea of a Cold War, that at the end of the day, it was the Soviet Union leaders to blame – not their people.

When I met my wife over ten years ago, I was immersed back into my Eastern European roots – 50% Hungarian, 25% Belarusian, and 25% Italian (my wife and I did Ancestry DNA tests this month, so I get to find out if the Belarusian/Italian is just legend). I learned some things about my Cold War peers who grew up in the Soviet Union. They were just as afraid of nuclear war as we were. Watching Soviet "West wants to destroy us" propaganda movies, I can tell you that anti-Soviet Union propaganda in the mass media was far worse in the West than what the Soviets were saying about us.

It is a slippery slope to paint any group of people with a broad brush. Not all Russians! As I watched propagandists on Russian One a year ago, I reminded myself that if someone watched Tucker Carlson and then assumed everyone in the United States thinks that way, they are not getting the complete picture. I will pick on Fox News all day (and CNN, MSNBC, and any other MSM outlet) because they don't deliver the news – they deliver an opinion. I pick on Tucker Carlson because Russia Mir loves Tucker Carlson. Please put the angry letter to the CCO pens down.

There is one thing I noticed about Russian society. In almost any other national identity, if a bridge needs fixing, if the electricity is unreliable, if the people are unhappy about something, the people let the government know. If things get bad in most societies, someone eventually demands change, and others rally around that cause. Even in China, when the people had enough of Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, they rebelled and, to the surprise of many, ended the program like a line in the sand. You can’t say this has never happened in Russia, but it has been extremely rare.

In Russia, if something is broken or wrong, society largely shrugs and goes, "that's the way it has always been." Twenty-five percent of Russian homes don't have indoor plumbing. In some of the poorest nations on the planet, this is unacceptable by the people and the government. There are towns with Soviet-Era apartment blocks, just 60 to 90 minutes from the Baltics, in the shadows of St. Petersburg, with no heating system in the building. People still rely on firewood or coal. I know, for me, this was shocking to learn. Apartment blocks built in the months and years after World War II that haven't been replaced or renovated? No one has said it is ridiculous that in the 21st century, people have to haul buckets of coal up five flights of stairs to stay warm. Shouldn't building codes be amended? But this is how it has always been.

When my sixth-grade teacher told me that Russia was still living in a semi-feudal society at the start of the 20th century, my sixth-grade brain pictured knights and castles and peasants laboring in the mud. There were peasants laboring in the mud, but not gallant knights in armor or medieval castles across the landscape held by lords. When Tzar Alexander III came to power in 1881, he believed that to “save” Russia, which was mired in poverty, unrest, and famine, only a return to the rules of Nicholas I could save the country. He gutted the zmestvo, a quasi-democratically elected group of local administrators, and returned control to land owners over the peasantry. He wanted to Russify the vast country, so he instituted programs such as only teaching the Russian language in schools, embraced the Eastern Orthodox church as a defacto state-sanctioned religion, and actively destroyed religions and culture that didn’t align with his view. Who did Alexander III turn to blame for Russia’s problems – the Jews. In 1882 the May Laws started a period of repression, violence, and pogroms that would last into the 1950s and carried over into low-key institutional anti-Semitism that still exists in Russia today.

By 1890, most of Europe had rejected or was rejecting autocratic rule by monarchs brought on by industrialization and education, but not in Russia. While the monarchy was “abolished” in 1894 with the death of Tzar Alexander III, Tzar Nicholas II did nothing to reverse the work of his predecessor. On the contrary, he was determined to hold on to absolutely autocratic power, and he said so out loud and wanted more.

Nicholas II's contributions to the world included the 1903 propaganda disinformation works, The Protocols of Zion, which a subset of Germans embraced, along with the United States' ideas on eugenics, causing one of the worst genocides in modern history 30 years later. Pogroms from 1903 to 1906 killed thousands as Jewish people fled to Western Europe and the United States. Nicholas II led Russian expansionism eastward, creating tension with its neighbors – especially in Japan. In 1904, Japan launched a preemptive strike on the Russian eastern fleet, obliterating it. Undeterred, Nicholas II sent the Baltic Fleet, which had to take a nine-month journey. The Baltic fleet was also obliterated. Facing total defeat in Manchuria, Nicholas II's family appealed to him to press for peace, which he refused. In 1905, completely defeated, he accepted the military defeat with the United States leading negotiations. Months later, railroad strikes devolved into a general strike, and Russia was on the brink of revolution. Nicholas II was forced to make concessions, but just months later, The updated 1906 Russian Constitution expanded his autocratic powers over the state and church. His pledge to improve the people's basic rights was just an empty promise.

In 1914 Nicholas II thought he had an opportunity. With the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he used the shared-Slavic identity with Serbians to build a case to enter World War I. Against his advisors' and cabinet members' advice, he ordered a general mobilization and, on August 1, 1914, despite being woefully unprepared, declared war on Germany and Austro-Hungary.

Nicholas II had three motivations. First, he wanted to restore Russia’s image as a great power after the defeat in 1904-05. Second, shortly after the war started, he added that he wanted peace, peace, piece! Just a little piece of territory along the borders of the Austria-Hungarian Empire and Germany because expanding east wasn’t enough. When Turkey entered World War I, Nicholas II privately told the Romanovs and his military commanders he wanted control of the Black Sea and the Bosporus Straight. It was all a dream. Less than a year later, Nicholas II’s rule, the Russian military, and the Russian people were in collapse.

That’s when Germany got an idea. Getting Russia out of World War I would free up significant military resources to focus on the Western front. Enter one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who became radicalized in 1887 after his brother was executed for being part of a plot to assassinate Tzar Alexander III. In 1895, Lenin was arrested for attempting to organize Marxist unions and protests, sentenced to a year in prison, and spent three more years in Siberia. In 1900 he fled to Western Europe, where he was living in exile, and talked a lot about Marx and revolution. Lenin returned to Russia in 1905 during the civil unrest but was forced to flee again when Nicholas II unraveled his promised reforms. In 1912, he created the Bolshevik Party, which believed that revolution into a Marxist-socialist society could only be achieved through military might.

In 1917, financial backers were trying to convince Lenin he needed to return to Russia and lead his revolution. In March, with his country in collapse, Nicholas II abdicated, ending the Russian monarchy. In April, Lenin returned to Petrograd. His European backers assumed one of two things would happen. Lenin would get killed, his radical ideas would die with him, or he would throw Russia into complete chaos, destroying the continued goals of expansionism forever. Either way, it meant Russia would leave World War I, and the die was already cast. They didn’t count on option three – Lenin and the Red Army would lead Russia to a corrupt form of Communist rule through years of violence, and Stalin would continue the policies of Nicholas I and Alexander III until he died in 1953. Five months before Stalin died, a child was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The third son of Maria Ivanova Putina, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, came into the world.

Why are there all these words to reach this point?

If we think of post-industrial revolution history, Russia has always aspired to empire building. Russia has always aspired to Russification and to destroy all other cultural and religious institutions beyond a short glimmering period of hope from the mid-1980s to the start of the 21st century. Full stop. So did Great Britain into the 1940s and the United States through the 1970s. At the end of World War II, the idea of expansionism through military action was largely a dead concept in Europe.

Despite the desires of Russian leaders as far back as Catherine the Great, Russian life for the common person has never been great. Russia’s greatest military achievement in the last 150 years was to defend its 1940 Soviet-era borders and a land grab in Manchuria during the last week of World War II. Isn’t that interesting? When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Russia didn’t break its Non-Aggression Pact with Japan, despite the United States providing direct military aid starting in November of the same year. It wasn’t until Japan was hopelessly defeated that Stalin took the opportunity to fix history and Tzar Nicholas II’s failures exactly 40 years earlier. What does the Kremlin teach its people? Japan didn’t surrender due to atomic bombs or because it faced a one-million-person invasion force. It was Russia’s invasion of Manchuria. We won World War II on both sides, comrades!

When you dive into Russian history, something emerges. Every Russian leader since Catherine the Great, except during Lenin’s chaotic rule from 1918 to 1923 and the post-Soviet collapse from 1991 to 1994, has embraced expansionism through military means. Every Russian leader has viewed the average citizen as a resource, even during Glasnost and the post-Soviet collapse.

Russia’s frail attempts at Democratic reform didn’t get enough time to take hold. When Vladimir Putin became President, he was already on a course to reverse the “stab in the back” that Mikhail Gorbachev had inflicted by ceding control of Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

A major challenge that the Russian peoples face (Russian national identity, not ethnic Russians) is they have been unintentionally and intentionally self-selected through centuries of violence and repression to be subservient to the state. There is a communal learned helplessness among the Russian people.

Whether it was religious persecution, ethnic persecution, cultural persecution, or the millions of people sent to die in the name of expansionism for four centuries, people who “speak out too much” have consistently faced repercussions. That includes pogroms, forced relocation to Siberia, gulags, mass executions, purges, forced conscription, slave labor camps, and the millions who fled these programs – or were actively told to go because “you aren’t a real Russian,” which is what my wife was told.

In 1937 the Soviet Union conducted a census, with officials expecting the population to be 172 million, and Stalin expected it to be 180 million. In 1930, the population was 160 million; in 1933, it had grown to 168 million. When the totals were counted after the January 6, 1937 census, the population was 162 million. Not only was it 18 million lower than what Stalin expected and 10 million lower than what his advisors expected, but it had fallen by 6 million people in four years. Where did 6 to 18 million people go? They were starved to death in Ukraine in the Holomodor, executed, and dying in gulags. Stalin’s reaction? First, the census leaders, the regional chiefs, and finally, a small army of statisticians were all arrested. The census leaders were eventually declared enemies of the state and executed, and in September, the census was declared invalid, and the results were never made public. They didn’t speak up or speak out; they did their job.

In the West, we read how students are turning their teachers in for violating “don’t say war laws.” How family members are turning on each other and how people who ask too many questions about, “when will my Ivan come marching home again? Hurrah! Hurrah!” find themselves facing criminal charges for disparaging the Russian Federation Armed Services.

Almost a year after Russia started its wide-scale invasion of Ukraine, Western leaders need to accept some fundamental facts. Expansionism, isolationism, and intolerance have been documented as historical cornerstones of the Russian leadership and life for four centuries. The Russian government collapsed twice in the last century, but Russia continues.

President Putin’s documented ambitions are no different than those of Tzars Alexander III and Nicholas II. Almost one-million people fled Russia last year, the largest number of departures since 1994. If you’re waiting for a populist uprising or the Russian people to say, “enough,” as they did in 1987 as the Soviets were mired in Afghanistan, you’ll wait a lifetime.

Russia’s comfort zone is frozen conflicts. From the start of the Cold War in 1947 to Transnistria in Moldova in 1991, South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and the Central African Republic. In Russia, negotiation is a show of weakness, even if the negotiation is ultimately disadvantageous for the Russian people. The creation of frozen conflicts helps serves to maintain the unrealistic message. Enemies surround Russia, Russia is under attack, and the world wants to destroy you and your culture. You keep repeating that for two centuries, the message starts to stick, and it will take at least a full generation to change the mentality. That’s why Glasnost and the Post-Soviet era in the 1990s didn’t work – it just wasn’t long enough.

Adding to the challenges, for the average Russian, life was better in the Soviet era. You had a job, a roof, and food; if you saved enough, you could vacation along the Black Sea every few years. Once you leave St. Petersburg and Moscow - there is a very different Russia, and in that part of Russia, life got a lot worse in 1991 and never really got better.

As long as Russia controls one square meter of Ukraine, the Kremlin will insist it is a victory for Russia. If Russia holds even one square meter of Ukraine in peace negotiations, the Kremlin will tell themselves they beat the entire West and the weak Ukrainians, and they will come back. As Stalin taught the world in Manchuria, it might take 40 years, but they will return.

Almost a year ago, I repeatedly wrote that we can do this in Kyiv today or Berlin in five years from a position of weakness. We can’t possibly report every shift in geopolitics and all Western nations' military readiness. I can tell you that very quietly, a growing list of nations are moving to a peacetime war production footing, both large and small. Not just for munitions but heavy weapons and aircraft. The parallels to the world's approach toward Germany’s expansionist goals from 1933 to 1937, and actions from 1937 to 1941, are remarkably similar.

Ukraine’s allies need to do much more than equip, support, and train the Ukrainian people with just enough. There needs to be only one goal – total victory in Ukraine, followed by NATO membership.

The alternative is Russia will continue to mobilize wave after wave, and the people will continue to follow as they have done for four centuries until Ukraine capitulates or is defeated. Then, the West will have to do it all over again. Maybe in the Baltics, Romania, or Poland, but the Russian Federation won’t stop unless they are resoundingly defeated, as in 1905 Japan and the 1914-1916 western Russian frontier. Otherwise, the war will be endless.

We can do this in Kyiv today or Berlin in four years from a position of weakness.