Russia has suffered several attacks on its own territory this week, coups carried out by Russian military personnel fighting with Ukraine. They have been limited but significant, the embryo, according to historian Orlando Figes, of what could be a civil war. “I see a risk of civil war”, he admitted yesterday during a lunch before the conference that he gave in the afternoon at the Catalunya Europa Foundation – Llegat Pasqual Maragall.
The British historian, who has written extensively on Russian society, culture and history, believes this new civil war could resemble the one that ravaged Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. There was no defined front and sabotage, attacks and killings were committed in a wide area of ​​Russian territory.
The small offensives on Monday and Tuesday in the Belgorod region involved dozens of Russian fighters attached to two groups fighting within the International Legion, a foreign military unit under Ukrainian command. It remains to be seen whether these expeditionary forces will continue with this strategy of hitting Russia in the rear.
In any case, Figes recognizes that “the Russian state is too strong and civil society too weak for an internal revolution to break out”. Hence the best card to bend the Kremlin are military incursions from the outside.
The British historian believes that time plays more in favor of Putin than of Ukraine: “Putin is confident that the West will eventually tire of war because its cost is too high. Trump will exploit this fatigue in the next campaign for the presidency in the United States and if he regains the White House in November 2024, Ukraine will be lost.”
He confronted the Bolsheviks with the White Army, which defended the old tsarist order. It was almost six years of horror and barbarism. Horrific crimes were committed by each side, but the inhumanity of the Bolsheviks was unrelenting. More than ten million Russians died, almost all of them civilians.
Figes remembers that Putin is recruiting young Russians in a similar way as the Bolsheviks did; that is to say, putting them between a rock and a hard place, not giving them an alternative. In this way he has incorporated tens of thousands of soldiers into the ranks. To succeed in Ukraine, however, he needs even more men and if he wants them to fight, he must change his argument. “To say that war is a special military operation is no longer enough. Now he must elevate the invasion to a patriotic war, as was the Second World War. In a way, it already is. The speech he delivered on May 9 in Moscow’s Red Square on the occasion of Victory Day went in this direction.”
“They have no choice but to submit to the will of the Kremlin”, says Figes. The repression is too strong.
Submission to power, low material expectations, capacity for suffering, collectivism and acceptance of violence at the hands of the State are characteristics that the author of La historia de Rusia (Taurus) links to the Russian character. Putin reinforces them with the argument that “NATO started”. Figes sees some truth in the idea that NATO is responsible for the climate that led to the invasion of Ukraine. He believes that “it should have been dismantled after the cold war, as happened with the Warsaw Pact. The satellites of the USSR, however, found protection in an alliance that went from being anti-Soviet to being anti-Russian”.
Figes believes that Putin is a brutal dictator and that the invasion of Ukraine is unjustifiable, but adds the nuance that “throughout history, the West has used Poland and Ukraine to attack Russia, and now is no different “.
President Putin blames Mikhail Gorbachev for the dismantling of the Soviet Union – “the worst geostrategic mistake of the 20th century” – but Figes defends the pacifism of the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR: “Russia was also ready then of entering into a civil war and the conciliatory attitude of Mikhail Gorbachev avoided it”.
Figes considers that the fall of the USSR was a very dangerous moment, of defeat and disorientation: “There was no longer a utopia to achieve or a leader to follow”. Any scenario was possible, including civil confrontation over the possession of natural resources and state industries.
Coercion and propaganda and the mythologizing of the past to face the future have made him the savior of Russia. He recovered the tsarist flag of the White Army and the music of the Soviet anthem, and on these pillars he promises to recover the lost greatness.
Putin, likewise, invaded Ukraine to survive the passage of history and this mistake, according to Figes, highlights the envy felt by a large part of the Russian people of “a Ukraine that has chosen its path towards the West” , a path that Putin himself tried to follow at first, but which he later renounced, convinced that the principles of liberal democracies are anti-Russian.
As long as there is no regime change in Russia, Figes believes there will be no solution for Ukraine. As long as Putin remains in power, he does not believe that peace is possible, and the Ukrainians do not seem to be willing to give up their territory either.
Figes believes that, until Putin falls, the best future for Ukraine would be that of Korea; that is to say, a country divided into two parts by an armistice that prolongs the war situation but, at the same time, avoids more deaths.
