Sanctions on Russia Will Create a Monster

Over the past week, friends in Russia have described to me how storefronts in vibrant shopping districts are being shuttered and there are long queues of people trying to buy goods before they become permanently unavailable. The price of modern necessities like children’s nappies increased threefold in the space of a few days. The sticker price of many other consumer products is no longer the real price when you bring them to the cash register. Police are questioning groups of young people in the subway on suspicion of being part of illegal gatherings. State employees are having their social media accounts scrutinised for evidence of sedition. People with a history of left-wing activism are fleeing the country while they still can, and those who remain behind risk long jail terms. 

They say the result will not be what the West hopes for, however. The austerities resulting from sanctions will be felt most acutely by the middle-class metropolitan intelligentsia who represent about 20 per cent of the Russian population, and have become used to Italian shoes, French cheese, and the international news media. The problem for NATO is that most Russians don’t travel abroad and they get their news from state media. As far as they’re concerned, their government is protecting them against NATO’s weapons of mass destruction. Russian Telegram channels are full of stories like the one that says the Ukrainians hurriedly shut down a Pentagon-backed biological weapons program just before the Russian army moved in. These people are not turning against their leader but are closing ranks against the West. 

In a Russian-language social media post that has been viewed millions of times across various platforms, writer Alexander Tsypkin gives a list of reasons why the West is creating a monster by trying to isolate Russia. He says it’s economically impossible to smother a country where 30 per cent of the population still uses an outside toilet. As a friend whose parents belong in this category puts it, their Urals village is not connected to public sanitation services but they go to church each Sunday where they light a candle for Putin. The idea that they can be bludgeoned into submission by pulling Louis Vuitton or Marks & Spencer out of Russia, and by cutting off the SWIFT international payment system, is risible. Tsypkin says this population has contempt for the tranquillity and risk-averseness of petty-bourgeois life and is not amenable to what Western powers might think of as rational appeals.

He points out that Europeans tend to think of Russians as being like those they meet at international tourist resorts, but such people are less related, mentally and financially, to the average Russian than they are to the average Italian. Ordinary Russians are prepared for war in a way that Europeans can’t fathom, because Russia in the 90s was effectively a warzone due to the level of banditry in everyday life. Moreover, human rights and personal sovereignty are not a priority for them when compared with national pride and national security. They believe in Russia as a citadel of traditional values and perceive the West as an arena of failed ideologies characterised by godlessness and hypocrisy. Liberalism and democracy are terms of abuse among them.

He mentions the film Brother 2 (2000) as being still the most popular Russian film. Together with its 1997 prequel, it depicts a Russian nationalist veteran of the Chechen war taking on gangsters in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Chicago. The landscape of the film is that of the immediate post-Soviet era, seen as the triumphant end of history by American neocons, but its main character’s attitudes are firmly anti-Western. The Western media is currently full of speculation that sanctions against the Russian people will unseat Putin and such speculation contains the thinly veiled hope that a new Gorbachev will emerge to restore normality. However, Tsipkin thinks it more likely that by demonising Russia they will bring a new Stalin to power. If lines of communication aren’t kept open, and a détente reached very soon, there will be no means of reversing the process that is currently underway. 

The Western establishment is trying to cancel Russia and one wonders whether their desire for an enemy commensurate with their vainglorious self-characterisation as ‘the resistance’ during the Trump years has finally borne fruit. The irony is that if Trump was still in power, this crisis would probably have been defused before it got out of hand. He knew how to talk to people like Putin, and yet he wasn’t as soft on Russia as the liberal media tried to portray him. European leaders are now doing exactly what Trump advised: looking for ways to divest from Russian energy sources and increasing their defence spending. Having made their point with regard to sanctions, they need to go one step further and concede that Ukraine will never join NATO, allowing it to be a buffer zone with Russia rather than a means of bringing decadent Western culture to Russia’s doorstep in a way that will cause conflict with their very different civilizational values.  

Of course, Russia would also have to concede something by pulling out of Ukraine and recognising its independent sovereignty. Things can change quickly at a time like this but indications, as I write, are that they will insist on keeping Crimea, on independence for the Donbas, and on Ukrainian neutrality. Whether Ukraine accepts these terms may depend on whether Western outrage remains at fever pitch, and Western solidarity in imposing sanctions against Russia endures. Even if the effect of sanctions on the Russian heartland is not what NATO hopes for in terms of fomenting opposition to Putin, it’s not unreasonable to say that their devastating effect on the economy is akin to an act of war. As such, it is one in which innocent civilians are the primary casualties, and unlike what happens in the West when somebody is cancelled, most Russian citizens can’t go elsewhere and start a different life. 

It’s also a rather passive and, some might argue, feminine form of aggression in that it involves national reputation destruction and the manipulation of the geopolitical environment against Russia while preserving a level of plausible deniability about its own belligerence. The contrast between the behaviour of Putin and that of the West might seem to cast the latter as the ‘good guys’ in their own estimation, but it also underlines the fact that this is not a conflict about the meaning and application of commonly held values. It is a conflict between value systems. Western progressive ambitions to be the world’s moral vanguard will never advance until they can recognise that their values aren’t universal and start to act accordingly. Moreover, the debates going on within Western societies about free speech and intellectual diversity, as well as the march of intransigent wokeist ideology under the ‘diversity’ banner within Western institutions, can now be seen as never before to have geopolitical implications. 

We can only hope that it won’t take a hot war with Russia for the Western intelligentsia to recognise the role that traditional masculinity still has to play in the world beyond their echo chambers. This is an arena whose diversity progressives can’t recognise, caught up as they are in a Manichean psychodrama into which even nominally conservative leaders like Boris Johnson have been sucked. Surrounded by impassioned new left takes on Putin’s behaviour, they can’t see the bigger civilizational asymmetry that is the most important context for the conflict over Ukraine. Perhaps what’s most interesting is that nobody foresaw that the clash of civilizations predicted by Fukuyama’s mentor Samuel Huntingdon would be with Russia, assuming as they did that Russia would instead become the poster child for the triumph of American ideology around the globe.