Russians are about to learn ‘German lessons’

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine will have momentous consequences for many — above all for Ukrainians, those who are fleeing the country and those who have stayed to fight off the invading army or to helplessly endure the devastation. But the effect on Russians, too, will be enormous, whether or not we realise it now. It’s time for we citizens of the aggressor state to try on the shoes of post-World War II Germans.
The comparison will seem hyperbolic to many. The Nazis, after all, committed genocide on a grand scale, leveled cities in many countries, set up death camps. It is difficult for Putin to measure up to Hitler’s homicidal madness, hard as he might try. Yet it is 2022, not the 1940s. Putin’s war crimes are instantly documented on social media, and the global audience’s sensibilities have also changed: No matter how limited your bombing of civilians might be, it’s unforgivable from the moment the first missile targets a residential area. Because of the abundance of evidence, Russia doesn’t even have to lose the war for its people — and not just Putin personally — to be held responsible even in lands far removed from Russia and Ukraine.
Many Russians, especially those leaving to escape the official war hysteria and the economic and lifestyle consequences of unprecedented Western sanctions (no more IKEA! No H&M!), don’t blame themselves for the war. Like the many Russian celebrities who have posted “No to war” or “I’m for peace” on social networks without taking the next step — calling for an end to Putin’s mad aggression — they feel no personal responsibility for the leveled neighborhoods of Kharkiv or Mariupol. “I’ve never voted for Putin,” I hear from them. “What do I have to do with this? I’m against war!”
Everybody’s for peace, of course — even Putin says he is. Hitler spoke of his “love of peace” and his intention to “establish peace on the eastern border” in his speech to the Reichstag on September 1, 1939. Individual responsibility, however, hinges on what one has done to make war impossible — and collective responsibility stems, no matter how we might hate this, from a polity’s inability to avert the dictatorship that, as we see now, cannot but lead to war.
That’s the logic behind the tendency of many Ukrainians to blame the Russian people, not just Putin. A fresh poll by Ukraine’s Rating Group shows 38% of respondents say Russians as a nation share responsibility for the war; that goes up to 42% in central Ukraine and 46% in the country’s west.
In 2014, after I’d just emigrated from Russia because of my opposition to the Crimea annexation, I bristled when Ukrainians told me the move didn’t erase my responsibility. I was sure I couldn’t have done anything to change the nature of the Russian regime. “You go fight Putin,” I snarled back at my Ukrainian accusers. “See where you get with that.” It fills me with shame to remember that now, because of course they are fighting him as I write this — and we didn’t really do so even when it wasn’t as dangerous as in the current climate of cruel suppression.
When Hitler took power in 1933, he did it on the strength of a 44% national vote, meaning that a majority of Germans didn’t back him. Just one year before, he didn’t even have a third of the vote. It was not too late to stop him, and too few Germans cared enough to do it.
This is true of us, too. We swallowed blatantly stolen elections (and our protests in 2011 were, though impressively large, too vegetarian, too cute to matter). We swallowed the gradual stifling of independent media. We shrugged off massive corruption and the increasingly hysterical “patriotic education” of our kids. We adapted as the government became the only meaningful economic player and as the police state swelled, feeding on our helplessness and its own impunity. We acquiesced, by and large, to the Crimea invasion; Russian celebrities became adept at creative answers when Ukrainians asked them on camera to whom Crimea really belonged. Meanwhile, too many of us enjoyed the semblance of normality — the brands, the clubs, the skyscrapers, the tech, the money. Now, it has all collapsed like the cardboard scenery it always was.

—Bloomberg