The war in Ukraine has brought decision-makers in Washington and Moscow closer to direct conflict than perhaps at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. We have come to think that war is not possible, much less probable, between these two nuclear powers. We have also forgotten much of the past history between Russia and the United States while Russia, especially its leaders, has not. To understand Putin’s motivations and actions we need to know what it is he is remembering.
Putin’s US history starts in the 1800s when Russian explorers set up trading posts on the west coast of America. Russia sold its colony of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Few Americans remember that but Russian nationalists do and still complain they were cheated.
Initially the two countries had little direct contact and knew relatively little about each other. The American explorer George Kennan, a distant relation of the much more famous Cold War diplomat of the same name, gave his readers a romantic view of the wonders of the Caucasus and Siberia. In the other direction, the reforming tsar Alexander II sent a younger son to assess and learn from the US in 1871 (and to get him away from an unsuitable love affair).
Both nations entered the 20th century with a sense that they were two pioneer peoples pushing back their frontiers, the Russians in Siberia and to the south, the Americans across the west. Where they were also similar, and have remained so, is that both peoples see themselves as a civilisation with its own distinct values and, frequently, as a model for others. During the First World War and subsequent civil war in Russia, the American Red Cross and YMCA sent missions to Russia to train peasants to become modern farmers and mothers how to feed and bring up their children with modern methods. Given a chance, the optimistic missionaries maintained, the Russians would become just like Americans.
Not for the first time, American and western policy towards Russia and its successor the Soviet Union was inconsistent. Western powers also had troops there, initially to support Russia. They then moved to support the White Russians in the civil war which broke out in 1918. The West’s effort was never on a sufficient scale to make a difference and the aims of the intervening powers were different. The Americans had troops in Siberia as much to keep an eye on the Japanese who were also there in force. Like the Alaska purchase, however, US intervention on Russian soil is something Americans have forgotten and Russians remember.
Advertisement
Apart from the Second World War, the two countries had limited contact until the end of the Cold War. They looked at each other through the lens of their own hopes and fears. Was the new Soviet Union a socialist paradise managing much better than democracy and capitalism or was it a monstrous tyranny where human beings had been re-engineered? Was the United States a model of liberalism with the most efficient capitalist system in the world? Vladimir Lenin, who took power in Russia, certainly thought so and both he and his successor, Joseph Stalin, admired American production methods. The other Soviet view was of the deeply unequal United States, run by a handful of bloodsucking capitalists. Such stereotyping is with us again today as Russia becomes more isolated. Russians are told increasingly wild stories about Ukraine and the US by state-controlled media while Americans conflate the Putin regime and its invading armies with the Russian people. There are reports of Russian speakers being harassed on American streets.
This quick alteration in mood is not new but it adds to the difficulties of US-Russian relations. Many Americans were hopeful and enthusiastic about the revolutions in Russia in 1917. “I have seen the future and it works,” said the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens after a brief visit to meet Russia’s new communist rulers. That optimism was followed by the “red scare” of the early 1920s as the American authorities carried out a campaign against suspected subversives and the widespread Palmer raids against suspected Bolsheviks. The United States did not have an ambassador in Moscow between 1917 and 1933.
In the Second World War, American public opinion, encouraged by Washington, embraced the Soviet Union as an ally. The terrifying bear became a cuddly one and the Soviet dictator kindly Uncle Joe. After the war, when the Soviet Union built an empire in eastern Europe, there was another reversal and a second red scare, fuelled by demagogues such as Senator Joe McCarthy, gripped the United States.
Inspired by (the diplomat) Kennan’s forceful argument that the Soviet Union was an opportunistic power which would press until confronted by firm opposition, the American government embarked on a policy of containment. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the policy paper National Security Council Document 68 set the foundations by the early 1950s for a sustained and, crucially, bipartisan economic, military and political confrontation which stopped short of all-out war. Indeed at times America and the Soviet Union became something of an odd couple, bickering away, but learning to live with each other. When the Cold War came to its (mercifully) peaceful end in 1989, the Soviet Union disappeared. The United States relaxed and turned its attention elsewhere. Too soon as it turned out, for a very large Russia remained, still in possession of rich natural resources and a large military with nuclear weapons.
American policy towards Russia in the 1990s was a mix of condescension and lack of interest. Asia was increasingly the new frontier for American business and, later, President Barack Obama’s administration announced a strategic pivot there, especially towards a rising China. Russia fell into the hands of corrupt oligarchs and a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin. He didn’t seem to be a problem for the West. “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” said President George W Bush after a summit in Slovenia in 2001.
Advertisement
While much of Washington was looking elsewhere, Putin quietly restored salient features of the old regime with a highly centralised, top-down rule centred on one person, the infallible, all-powerful, all-wise leader.
The press and social media are severely constrained. Where the Putin regime is different from the old Stalinist one is that it has no ideology which points to a better society and no faith that history will eventually move in the right direction. Putin is a man in a hurry who wants to restore Russian power and that means extending control over what he thinks belongs to Russia, Ukraine above all.
He hasn’t made much secret of it in the past decade: just read his speeches. His history is often absurd and wrong but he believes it as he believes that Russians are superior spiritually to the hopelessly decadent West.
He maintains that the West betrayed Russia in the 1990s when it expanded Nato eastwards to Russia’s borders. No matter that the famous promise of “not one inch eastward” was never officially made by the Americans nor accepted by the Russians. Yes, it is now possible with hindsight to see that the West could have handled Russia better. Indeed at the time, Kennan called Nato expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era”. Putin also resented and feared American unilateralism in changing regimes in Iraq and Libya. To test American and western resolve he moved tentatively and then more boldly into the border states around Russia, waging war on Georgia and then brutally subduing Grozny in Chechnya. The West did nothing. And did nothing when Putin’s army, in the flimsy disguise of “volunteers”, seized Crimea in 2014.
Putin must be shocked and surprised at the forceful response of America and other leading powers today, not to mention the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine. It wasn’t supposed to play out like this. While many in Washington and Moscow wrote off President Joe Biden as a tired old man, he has shown effective leadership. Russia is already feeling the cost of sanctions and humiliation at the failures of its forces in Ukraine.
Advertisement
Can the past offer any useful advice now to those in Washington in making the next key decisions? First the United States cannot afford to disengage from the world. Putin has threatened it with nuclear war. And however this war ends, dictators will still be able to initiate conflicts that threaten US allies and America’s own prosperity and security. Biden appears to be learning that and needs to bring the American people with him. America was able to sustain the long and heavy burden of containment because it had bipartisan support in Congress and among the public.
The international scene may continue to be like the one before the Second World War, with democratic nations opposed to fascist and militaristic ones, and a large number of uncommitted powers. Washington, as Britain and the US did then, will need to build on and strengthen its friendships, try to win over — or where necessary oppose — actual or potentially hostile powers, and keep on as good terms as possible with the uncommitted. And let’s hope that Washington and other western capitals do not forget once this crisis is past how important it is to know your potential foes and friends before the event.
With Russia in particular, as long as it continues to be a rogue state, Washington will have to update the notion of containment. And it could update another policy and take the lead in creating a 21st century Marshall Plan to rebuild Ukraine. At the same time Washington needs to think about how it treats Russia after this is all over. Let it be clear that Russians are not the regime and treat them with generosity. The mistakes of the 1990s should not be repeated. Russia must eventually be brought back into the community of nations. The Biden administration may recoil from the prospect but that may mean, at least in the short term, dealing with Putin as the United States dealt with Stalin in the Second World War. And Putin will not be there for ever.
The United States has the capacity to hope and plan for a better future with a different Russia. Optimistic, yes, but think of the grim alternatives.
Margaret MacMillan is a historian and the Engelsberg chair of history and international affairs at LSE Ideas. She is the author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us
