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For most of the Christian world, Easter is over. For Orthodox Christians, however, Easter week has just begun—and Russia, the largest Orthodox country in the world, is still relentlessly pursuing the invasion and barbaric destruction of its mostly Orthodox neighbor, Ukraine. In fact, the renewed Russian offensive in the Donbas, replete with day and night bombardment of mostly Orthodox, mostly Russian-speaking areas in eastern Ukraine, began just after Russians and Ukrainians observed Palm Sunday.
I note this because I, too, am an Orthodox Christian, and I am watching one nominally Orthodox nation try to slaughter another.
In most of my comments on the Russian war against Ukraine, I’ve tried, as best I can, to provide you with dispassionate analysis. But I hope this week you’ll allow me a few personal observations as I head toward Easter. I realize that sometimes the cold equations of political analysis can seem far removed from our emotions, and so I thought I would share with you some of my own.
Although my career was mostly spent as a scholar and Russia expert, it is difficult for any area specialist to be completely objective about the countries they study, because our lives end up unavoidably connected to the subject of our profession.
Sometimes, it’s an adversarial relationship: In my youth, I was a Reaganite Cold Warrior, and I never hesitated to say so even in discussions with Soviet military officers. (One Soviet colonel told me that he appreciated that kind of honesty more than false good wishes, and we toasted—repeatedly—to our mutual candor.) In midcareer and middle age, however, I changed course, and I ardently hoped for the success of Russian democracy. I was a vocal advocate for better relations with the new Russia, including security cooperation and the reduction of nuclear arsenals. In my 40s, I became the adoptive father of a daughter born in Russia, a great joy that has produced an all-American kid who knows much about her own heritage—a birthright I would never take from her.
My education was steeped in Russian philosophy and history. Russian art fills my home. My bookshelves are lined with volumes in Russian and English, with everything from Russian translations of American science fiction to multi-volume biographies of Lenin and Stalin. I have written a few books of my own, including one on how to deepen Russian constitutionalism (a now-dead project) and how to deter a nuclear war with Russia (a project very much alive, sadly).
Nonetheless, whether friend or enemy, I have spent my life trying to understand Russia and its people. Now, like everyone, I am disgusted by Russian savagery. Fury grows in me each time I see the mutilated corpses and leveled homes—not only because of the sadistic violence, but also because I know that the Russian regime, in trying to destroy the Ukrainian nation, has destroyed a chance, at least for some years to come, for a better world.
And for what?
For the messianic dreams of a small man, a frightened and delusional thug leading a criminal enterprise masquerading as a government, who believes that he is doing God’s will.
You might be surprised at the last sentence, but Vladimir Putin really believes this. He thinks he’s on a mission. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but it’s a reality that too many in the West have either overlooked or chosen to ignore. And as much as I’d like to lay all of this mayhem on Putin’s shoulders alone, we now have to accept that his butchery of innocent people is either tacitly or openly supported by millions of Russians. Yes, there are brave Russians who have risked their lives to protest this war, but there is no way, any longer, to deny that Putin enjoys more support than any decent nation should give to such horror.
And so I grieve not only for Ukraine, but for the knowledge that no matter how this war ends, the era of hope that began in 1989 is over. Ukraine is now the scene of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. NATO and Russia are openly enemies again. Nuclear war, for a time a forgotten abstraction, is a real danger.
Some of you may think that it is naive to talk about the hope that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is because it is now fashionable to dismiss the euphoria of that era, especially among people who think the affectation of weary cynicism looks like wisdom. But it is difficult, especially for people who have no real memory of the darkness of the Cold War, to understand how much progress has been lost in a matter of weeks.
If you came of age in the late 1980s—if you were, say, a college student in 1988 or 1990—the “Soviet Union” and the “Cold War” had no real meaning outside of Mikhail Gorbachev and the era of mutual cooperation that began when Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan jointly declared in late 1985 that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Even the Soviet coup of 1991 only lasted three days. Blink and you missed it. (I was trapped in my apartment without electricity because of Hurricane Bob during the coup; the last thing I saw before my phone and television went off—remember, this was before cell phones—was that Gorbachev had been removed from power. For a young Soviet expert, being cut off from the world while one of the most important events in Soviet history was underway was agony.)
That first decade after the Soviet collapse was a time of great optimism, even if some of the more churlish observers of international politics might now sniff that they were not caught up in it. We created multiple paths to more cooperation—including inviting Russia into the G7 and making it, for a time, the G8. We slashed our nuclear inventories. We had our differences, but as Henry Kissinger later wrote, for the first time in history all of the major powers of the world were dependent on the same political and economic system of global cooperation.
There are some, like Francis Fukuyama, who believe it is possible that Russia’s defeat in this war at the hands of the Ukrainians—and “defeat” here means “Ukraine survives as a state”—could create an opening for another Kremlin collapse and another renewal of freedom, a kind of second chance at 1989. (Garry Kasparov, too, believes Putin is in danger of an internal coup.) I want to believe they’re right. But even the best outcome will be built on the graves of thousands of dead Ukrainians, a ghastly price for ending a war that is—no matter what the foreign policy “realists” tell you—not about power, but about the sickness of one dictator and the dysfunction of a national political culture that tolerates, and even supports, his rule.
What, exactly, spurs the dysfunction at the heart of Russian society is a long argument for another day. Whether you blame the Mongols, or the Tsars, or the Communists is, at this point, irrelevant. (Although I will say that the charge that NATO expansion goaded Putin into his wars of aggression is noxious poppycock.) My own approach is to put a lot of the blame on Stalinism; I think the Soviet destruction of civil society hollowed out Russia for generations, making it hard—as the Communists intended—for Russians to create the kind of normal social and political associations that make democracy possible.
In fact, if you ask me what really went wrong after 1991, it’s not that the West flooded Russia with hamburgers, or that there were too many casinos in Moscow, or even that Putin and the opportunists around him raided the Russian treasury while many of Russia’s citizens lived in poverty and declining health. It’s that there was no recognition among the Soviet elites that they had lost the Cold War and that they had deserved to lose it. Instead, people like Putin and others nursed resentments about betrayal and humiliation—as if the Soviet Union had just been another country and hadn’t been part of a mad project that killed millions of its own people and enslaved its neighbors.
I encountered some of this personally in the first years of the new Russia. I would visit Moscow and talk with colleagues and friends, some of whom would begin to go on about Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin’s betrayals. They would decry the looting of the country by foreign capitalists, while ignoring that the oligarchs pocketing the money were Russians. It was often a litany of victimization that sounded like the Russian terrorist played by Gary Oldman in Air Force One: “This infection you call freedom…you have given my country to gangsters and prostitutes.” (Russia’s Putinist elites still sound like this today.)
In my usual tactful and understated way, I would tell my interlocutors point-blank that the Soviet Union was an evil regime, that it had deserved to fail, and that the people who ran it had escaped the judgment and punishment they deserved.
And yet, even then, I was hopeful. Russia was, in a tremendously screwed-up way, a democracy. There were elections, and people actually expected them to continue. There was a free press and open expression of competing political ideas. Corrupt plutocrats were making billions, but younger Russians were getting the idea that they had choices about where they could live, work, and even travel.
It wasn’t pretty, but to know why anyone would view it as progress, you’d need to have seen the gray, rotting mess that was the old Soviet Union.
I did. And so I’ll conclude here with a personal story about my first trip to the Soviet Union and how it is connected to this abomination of a war.
In the summer of 1983, I went to the U.S.S.R. to study Russian after graduating from college. I didn’t expect to learn much from the actual classes; Soviet pedagogy was based on rote and repetition, and I learned more from exploring Leningrad by night with my friends. (This sometimes made the morning classes a bit hazy.) The summer program then moved to Moscow, and included a trip to Zagorsk, which the Soviet Union allowed to continue functioning as an Orthodox monastery.
I was sort of curious why my American professor was reluctant to let me go visit the monastery’s church; after all, she knew I was Orthodox and that I’d be eager to attend a service in the U.S.S.R. But she relented and covered for me as I slipped away from the group and headed over to the small church.
For the first time in my young life, I understood repression.
This was not about tough guys beating people up at the door. I’d spent some of my boyhood in Greece with my grandmother during the time of the Greek junta, and I knew what it was like to see people afraid to speak. I understood the raw force exercised by the military and police. I was unprepared, however, for the way the Soviets dealt with religious believers at a nominally functional church: with humiliation.
The church was used as a museum, and so services took place while people were encouraged to talk and laugh and point. Tourists took pictures. The priest, following Soviet guidelines not to interact with the congregants or show too much emotion, plodded through prayers while the usual security goons loitered about.
I could feel my face getting hot and helpless rage welling up in me. I waited for a bit and left. When I got back to my group, my professor only said: “Are you okay?” She knew.
I shook my head. Tears were welling in my eyes.
“Just go,” she said. Again, she covered for me as I found a quiet bench away from the group.
If there was ever a time you could have convinced me to destroy a nation, those next five minutes were it. Yes, it was self-centered to think of myself and my personal faith while sitting in a country where millions of people had been tortured, shot, and worked to death. But I was young, and I’d never felt like the direct victim of state power. It was a new experience for me.
I calmed down and rejoined the tour. But I would never be the same. (This moment later carried over into my political life as an American; it was part of how I became an obstinate and even extreme civil libertarian.)
After 1991, the Russian church could finally shake off the shackles of the atheist state. I was eager to see what would happen next. Some years earlier, while working for a Greek-American newspaper, I had interviewed Methodios, then the Greek Orthodox bishop of Boston, and he told me that the Orthodox world would need its own Vatican II, a new convention of the faithful, once the Russian church was free. And now such things seemed possible.
Instead, the Russian church under Patriarch Kirill I (who climbed the greasy pole of ecclesiastical politics to become the leader of Russian Orthodoxy in 2009) has willingly entered into a nauseating symbiosis with Putin, picking up the chains of the old KGB and slapping them right back on the church’s wrists.
Well, not on Kirill’s wrists. He was already pretty comfortable with the old KGB, and today his preferred jewelry is a $30,000 Breguet watch. Kirill has not only supported Putin’s war; he has called Putin’s continued rule “a miracle of God.” This is a subjugation worse than the church’s imprisonment under Communism. This is a voluntary relationship based on greed and power, and it’s sickening.
Fortunately, at least 300 of Russia’s priests, along with the rest of the Orthodox world, have broken with Moscow, and Kirill and Putin have now created the greatest rift in Orthodoxy since the Bolshevik coup. Indeed, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church broke away from the Moscow patriarchate back in 2019—five years after the last time Kirill supported a Russian invasion of Ukraine—in a move that was formally recognized by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (the global leader of the Orthodox Church based in Istanbul).
The Western media, in my view, have not paid enough attention to the religious aspect of this war, and in particular Putin’s insistence that he is acting to unite something like an Orthodox Christian empire. (This week, The Washington Post ran an excellent piece on this.) The religious aspect of this war is difficult for Americans to understand, not only because Orthodoxy is a relatively small denomination in the United States, but because it is an explanation that runs counter to the various narratives of great power conflict, or civilizational clash, or academic realism, all of which to some extent have filled in as explanations for why Putin has launched a fratricidal war with the full approval of the Russian Patriarch.
I have not felt this way since that day in 1983. And so this week I will go to church, and pray for peace, and in penitence, I will pray for mercy—for me, for the victims of this slaughter, and for my brothers and sisters in my faith who are conducting, and cheering on, this obscene war.