![]() Putin then suggested that international sanctions are “blackmail”-a word used almost daily in the old Soviet press about the West-and are aimed at weakening Russia and undermining its existence as a nation. Among the Russian president’s various other quirks, the man knows how to hold a grudge. He even accused Bill Clinton of denigrating him personally when Putin asked, more than 20 years ago, about the possibility of including Russia in NATO. He accused Ukraine, for example, of developing nuclear weapons, a play right out of the old Soviet handbook, when Kremlin leaders would accuse the former West Germany of developing nuclear arms to serve their “revanchist” plans for war. Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map.įor most of the speech, Putin was drinking one shot after another straight from a bottle of pure Soviet-era moonshine. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow-and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader-has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”īy that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. ![]() That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is its author and architect.” Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse- except for Russia -were real countries. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here.īut Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. Read our ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion in UkraineĮven discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014 now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. Among men of the 'war generation' particularly, disillusionment was not only a post-war construction, an artefact of cultural memory, but a powerful legacy of the emotional experience of the war itself.Sign up for Tom’s newsletter, Peacefield, here. This analysis suggests a different and more varied account of the genesis of the 'disillusionment story' of the war than is put forward in some recent studies. Among married men, the desire to return to wives and children could provide a powerful motivation for survival. ![]() Nostalgia, being rooted in early memories of care, could be a potent vehicle for arousing the anxieties of loved ones, especially mothers. The young soldier's reminiscences of home conveyed, not just the comforting past, but the hateful present. Its emotional tones varied according to the soldier's age and the nature of his attachments to home. Although animated by solitude, nostalgia provided a means of communication with loved ones. The functions of nostalgia could range from reassurance or momentary relief from boredom and impersonal army routines, through flight from intolerable anxiety, to survival through the power of love. Evidence for both these perceptions can be found in the letters written by British soldiers to their families. Some argue that a 'cultural chasm' developed between the fronts, producing anger and disillusionment among soldiers which would surface fully fledged after the war, while others assert the continuing vitality of the links with home. What, it asks, can such longings reveal about the psychological impact of trench warfare? Historians have differed in the significance that they ascribe to domestic attachments. This article is concerned with the longing for home of British soldiers during the First World War. ![]()
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