Putin’s deliberate brutality in Ukraine has a backstory

Image that could not be reproduced properly: Russian service members walk in a Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 5. (Anastasia Barashkova/Reuters) 

 Opinion

The past holds Russia prisoner. This cruelty in war shows how.

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By Antony Beevor

Antony Beevor is the author, most recently, of “Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs.”

The deliberate brutality of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has raised a debate about its origins. Were killings such as the 2022 Bucha massacre “casual savagery,” as one commentator put it? Or did they derive from an ancient, underlying assumption in Russia that conspicuous cruelty is a necessary weapon of war?

One can never generalize about a whole nation, especially not Russia, with all its different component nationalities and its split between Slavophiles and Westerners. Nor can there be such a thing as a DNA-based national character. At the same time, most countries are influenced, at least subconsciously, by a certain self-image or national narrative. Perhaps ever since the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, the Russian attitude has been conditioned to the idea that overwhelming violence — fire and sword, terror, mass rape, looting, pointless torture — is natural if not essential in combat.

Europe during the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century was equally horrific. The difference came later as the western half of the continent experienced the Enlightenment. Rules limiting the suffering of warfare, such as the Lieber Code in the United States, began to take hold. The Red Cross was founded in Europe after the Battle of Solferino in 1859, and by the turn of the century, the first Hague Convention had been held. All this passed Russia by as it continued to expand its empire with the same old slaughter into the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East.

While Europe had been humanizing itself, the Russian empire was suffering occasional explosions of violence. The insurrection of 1773 led by the Cossack peasant Yemelyan Pugachev prompted Alexander Pushkin to write of “Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.” Such events were often considered to be outbursts of Russia’s mixed heritage. The great writer Maxim Gorky, who knew the impoverished reality of peasant and proletarian circles better than any Bolshevik leader, had no doubts. During the revolution in February 1917, which overthrew the czarist regime, he visited the ruins of the Okhrana headquarters in Petrograd. There, he predicted to the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov that the uprising was bound to lead to “Asiatic savagery.”

During the Russian Civil War that followed, the captain of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Montrose wrote home from the Crimean coast in 1919. “War has made fiends of the illiterate, simple-minded superstitious Russian peasants, and devils of the reckless, drunken pleasure-loving aristocracy they wish to exterminate,” he recounted. “Both sides are equally barbarous, and the torture applied to prisoners is so inhuman that I cannot write it here. Every man carries a grenade fastened to his tunic button, with which to blow off his own head if captured.”

An official Cheka ceremony in Moscow on Feb. 2, 1921. (AP)

The Cheka, Vladimir Lenin’s secret police, found the romanticization of violence to be intoxicating. It described itself in public statements as “the sword and flame of the revolution.” This summed up the Bolsheviks’ idealized ruthlessness, elevating their cause above any humane concern, such as justice or respect for life. In an anthology of poetry published by the Cheka, one of its executioners began his contribution:

“There is no greater joy, nor better music/ Than the crunch of broken lives and bones.”

In World War II — or the Great Patriotic War, as Joseph Stalin termed it — pitilessness was confirmed as a prime Communist virtue. At Stalingrad, Soviet snipers were ordered to shoot down starving Russian orphans who had been bribed by German soldiers with crusts of bread to fill their water bottles in the Volga. Even their own troops who had surrendered when badly wounded were treated as traitors to the Motherland.

Such cruelty was one matter. The mass rapes carried out by the Red Army in Hungary and Germany in 1945 were quite another. The same phenomenon has recurred today.

A Soviet tank faces the badly damaged Reichstag building in Berlin in May 1945, where the last pocket of German resistance was crushed. (Mark Redkin/Slava Katamidze Collection/Getty Images)

That is perhaps in part because Russians all too often treat their own soldiers almost as badly as they do their enemies. I’ll never forget: While researching in the Moscow archives in the mid-1990s, I read that there had once been 5,000 suicides a year among teenage conscripts because of bullying. This provoked amusement among generals.

The British political attaché told me how he had accompanied his ambassador to Siberia to meet Gen. Alexander Lebed, the hero of the war in Transnistria, who tried to challenge Boris Yeltsin for the presidency in 1996. Lebed greeted them with his favorite dining-out story.

When the general took up this post as governor of Siberia, he invited the local army commander to dinner and asked him what his problems were.

“Well, Alexander Ivanovich, it’s the weather.”

“Well, of course it’s the weather. We’re in Siberia.”

“What I mean is the frozen earth. We had so many suicides last year that we could not bury them. So, when the thaw came, I had all the conscripts out digging graves for last year and more ready for the next winter, and do you know, half of them deserted!”

The general then laughed uproariously at his own joke.

The brutality in 1945 and 2026 owe to what could be known as the knock-on theory of oppression. Russian soldiers were so badly treated and humiliated by their officers and NCOs that they took their rage out on the women of Central Europe with gang rapes. The depraved handling of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war today has been equally appalling for much the same reason.

For the war against Ukraine, tens of thousands of conscripts, in defiance of Russian law, have been tricked or forced into frontline service. Blackmail, threats and outright violence, including summary execution, have been used against citizens of the Russian Federation.

A Russian soldier speaks to foreign journalists during a press tour organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense, in front of the ruined Metallurgical Combine Azovstal, in Mariupol, on June 13, 2022. (AP)

So desperate is the military for manpower that amputees are forced back into battle, some on crutches. Even in World War II, the Red Army didn’t copy the Nazi practice of deploying so-called stomach battalions with severe intestinal illnesses or ear battalions of deaf men rounded up from field hospitals. But today, Russian military authorities are preventing their medical services from providing soldiers with disability exemptions.

Soviet attitudes toward amputees after World War II were also unbelievable. Stalin didn’t want Moscow and other great cities clogged with limbless beggars, despite the propaganda of the heroic sacrifices of the Red Army. These victims, nicknamed “samovars” — Russian for tea urns, to signify their remaining torsos — were dumped in the frozen cities of the north, where the political prisoners were sent to camps. They were condemned out of sight, out of mind. [...]

A street sign marked with a "Z" — a Russian pro-war symbol — in Kherson, Ukraine, on Nov. 24, 2022. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Recent estimates run to 27,000 foreigners from more than 130 countries. They come from Cuba, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and India, where poverty is a chief recruiter. A number have been tricked, having been promised a training course as bodyguards but then press-ganged at the point of a gun. With unbelievable callousness, some of these foreigners are sent forward with explosives strapped to their bodies to act as human bombs. In World War II, the Red Army strapped explosives to dogs specially trained with Pavlovian techniques to run under enemy tanks. Now they use human beings. Russian soldiers call them “disposables.”

Altogether, Ukraine is estimated to have more than 15,000 foreigners serving in its ranks. Unlike those on the other side, we can be sure that few were tricked. Some 40 percent are apparently from South America — the majority of them Colombians serving the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade. Many of Ukraine’s allies, meanwhile, fear that Mexican and Colombian drug cartels are sending men to fight purely to learn the latest drone technology.

The large numbers of foreigners on both sides have led to comparisons with the Spanish Civil War. Ukraine until quite recently operated an International Legion that was inspired, paradoxically, by the International Brigades formed by the Communists to fight Francisco Franco. It will, in any case, be important to know if Ukraine’s attempts to recruit foreigners will make up for the young Ukrainians escaping the country to avoid service. One of Putin’s advantages in playing out negotiations is that in doing so he offers hope to those facing conscription. If they keep their heads down a bit longer, perhaps they’ll avoid the horrors.

Yet Putin has sworn that he is prepared to go on fighting “until the last Ukrainian is dead,” another paradox. One of the reasons for his war against Ukraine is to return it to Russia, which is losing population disastrously. World leaders, especially autocrats, are desperate. They need immigration to make up for the collapse in the birth rate but don’t want “foreigners.” Putin evidently can’t decide whether Ukrainians are Nazi aliens or misled Russians.

The logic of his thinking isn’t helped by listening to his chief ideologues Vladimir Medinsky and Alexander Dugin, both of whom contributed to his so-called endless essay published the summer before his invasion. Medinsky, the minister of culture, and Dugin, a philosopher who looks like an Old Testament prophet, believe that Holy Slav Rus has the right and the duty to occupy the Eurasian landmass from “Dublin to Vladivostok.” That effort apparently is to save the land from transsexuals, homosexuals and all other forms of corruption and perversion. Putin’s support for the sanctity of the Orthodox Church and respect for family life isn’t entirely convincing when one begins to study his own extramarital relationships.

 

Bodies are exhumed from a mass grave containing corpses of civilians killed during the Russian occupation in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 8, 2022. (Heidi Levine/For The Washington Post)

Putin and the Kremlin’s disregard of any criticism from outside is rooted in the old Russian saying: “Nobody judges a victor.” And as long as they think they are winning, nobody has the right to bring up the wars they have started and the atrocities they have committed. Interestingly, when in 1947 the United Nations was debating the new definition of genocide, the Soviet Union fought tooth and nail to prevent it from being applied to anything like the massacre of aristocrats, the bourgeoisie and the kulaks, which included Stalin’s 3.5 million famine victims in Ukraine.

But is the victor never judged? Of course, when things turn against Russia, their patriots feel outraged and embittered that the world is against them. It is back to the old encirclement paranoia that has haunted them since those Mongol invasions. The truth is that no country is as much a prisoner of its past and its complexes as Russia. 

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Conversation Summary

The conversation explores the historical context and cultural factors contributing to Russia's military actions and perceived brutality, as discussed in the opinion piece. Participants highlight Russia's long history of authoritarianism and cruelty, drawing parallels between past and present leadership, including figures like Stalin and Putin. Many comments emphasize the need for Western support for Ukraine, while others criticize the perceived admiration of Russian leadership by certain Western figures. The discussion also touches on the cultural and historical influences that have shaped Russian society, with some commenters noting the resilience of the Russian people despite their hardships. Additionally, there are reflections on the broader implications of Russia's actions for Europe and the world, with some expressing skepticism about the potential for change in Russian governance and society.