The Beatle Who Got Away

Revisiting Stuart Sutcliffe’s role in the band’s breakthrough. 27, 2022

Stuart Sutcliffe and his bandmates in Hamburg, 1960.Photograph by Astrid Kirchherr / Courtesy Ginzburg Fine Arts

In August 17, 1960, five young Britons were approaching the stage of a small night club in Hamburg, about to play music in that city for the first time. To reach the stage, they had come an almost unimaginable distance. From their home, in Liverpool, they had driven in a cream-and-green minibus to the port of Harwich. The bus, teetering under the weight of amplifiers and instruments, had been lifted onto a ferry by a crane. At first, the stevedores had refused to handle such a precarious load; a photograph captured the moment just after they changed their minds, with the sixties hanging in the balance.

The Beatles beginning their takeoff, August 16, 1960; at far left, a bespectacled John Lennon.Photograph by Barry Chang

The musicians slept on benches as the ferry churned across the North Sea toward the Hook of Holland. From there, they drove to the West German border, where they told officials that they were students, bringing their guitars for “sing-songs” with friends. They were young enough to encourage the ruse—during the long ride, their manager had recited “The Wind in the Willows” to entertain them. Four of the five were teen-agers: John Lennon, nineteen; Paul McCartney and Pete Best, eighteen; George Harrison, seventeen. The fifth, Stuart Sutcliffe, was twenty, barely.

But they were growing up fast, and the road offered its own form of instruction. Entering a roundabout, they turned in the wrong direction, and found a gigantic truck bearing down on them. When the bus’s tires became caught in streetcar tracks, its passengers avoided colliding with a tram, but only at the last second. Finally, as they pulled into Hamburg, they rammed into a car.

Eventually, the minibus found its way to the Reeperbahn, the main avenue of Hamburg’s sin district, then turned into Grosse Freiheit, a small street named after the “great freedom” offered by a local count, around 1610, when he established a set of economic and religious reforms. The band set up their gear in a tiny club, at No. 64, that offered a “daily international program” with lingerie shows. Its marquee included a name, Indra, that came from a Hindu deity, a friend to weary travellers and poets. That seemed appropriate. John Lennon took out a pen and crossed out the word “Silver” from the band’s name. From now on, they were simply Beatles.

The Beatles at the Indra, August 17, 1960.Photographer unknown

On their first night in Hamburg, the band members posed for a photograph, as if to prove that they had survived the crossing. In light blazers, dark pants, and tan cowboy boots, they had not yet settled on their look, and were staring in different directions. But, on the right, the bassist was locked in, radiating an attitude of pure rock and roll. Stuart Sutcliffe’s pose might have amused the others; he had been playing bass for only seven months, and was distinctly less virtuosic than the three guitarists. Yet he had done a great deal to propel this journey across the North Sea, into the slipstream of history.

Sutcliffe remains a spectral presence in Beatles lore, obscured by our knowledge that the band was destined to become a quartet. He joined early in 1960, and his departure, in 1961, forced Paul McCartney to pick up the bass, the instrument that God clearly wanted him to play. No band needs three guitarists.

Yet Sutcliffe has come out of the shadows in recent years, thanks especially to the British writer Mark Lewisohn, who has been laboring for decades, like a medieval scribe, on what is sure to be the most detailed history of the Beatles ever written. “Tune In,” the first volume of an expected trilogy, appeared in 2013, and devoted nine hundred and forty-four pages to their beginnings, through 1962. Among other breakthroughs, Lewisohn has shown how pivotal Sutcliffe was during the Wunderjahr of 1960. At the end of 1959, the band was an iffy proposition, changing its name every few months. Like Spinal Tap, they suffered from a chronic shortage of drummers, and they collectively owned a single amp. So dim were the group’s prospects that George Harrison joined a band with steadier gigs.

But Sutcliffe’s arrival was galvanic. Lennon, energized by his friendship with a brilliant painter, began to hear his own muse. Together, they came up with the perfect band name, and Sutcliffe’s charisma kept opening doors. His search for his voice guided theirs, and even after he left—and even after he died, in 1962, of a mysterious brain injury—he continued to speak to them.

I encountered that voice three years ago, on an arctic day, in a basement on Long Island. A friend had alerted me to a cache of art, letters, journals, and photographs by Sutcliffe, which were held in the house of his sister Pauline near a street named Blue Jay Way. The Beatles’ creation story is deeply entrenched, and teleological: it is simply inevitable that Lennon will meet McCartney, that their genius will conquer the world. But Pauline’s archive suggests that, without Sutcliffe’s arrival, they might never have found their way to the ferry. To elevate his role in the story doesn’t detract from his bandmates’ achievement. On the contrary, it forces new amazement that they made it out of Liverpool at all.

Born in 1940, the eldest child of his family, Sutcliffe grew up with a father at sea, and filled the void with reading, writing, and drawing in his sketchbooks. “We young artists are like young sailors,” he wrote in a notebook. “Unless we encounter rough seas and are buffeted by the winds, we’ll not become real sailors.” It was as if the North Sea were already beckoning.

The story has been told of Liverpool’s openness to American music, but it was also a city teeming with literary ideas—in the coffee bars near the Liverpool College of Art, where beatniks gathered to shout poems at one another, and in the garrets where they chattered late into the night. Sutcliffe entered the college in 1956, and quickly established himself as a star painter, splashing his canvases with a riot of color, like the artists he loved: Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël. When he met another student, John Lennon, a spark was kindled.

Cynthia Powell, a fellow-student and the woman who would become Lennon’s first wife, wrote about these years in her memoirs, and dwelled at length on the friendship between the two nearsighted artists, who tried so hard to see what the world had to offer. Patiently, Sutcliffe taught Lennon how to think through the act of composition, planning a painting so that it would create a rich universe of its own. Less patiently, Lennon expanded Sutcliffe’s sense of sound, raving about the latest singles from across the Atlantic.

They shared a love of words, too. In his youth, Lennon had created a mock newspaper, the Daily Howl, which he wrote out at home, by hand. Sutcliffe read everything he could get his hands on, from Kant and Spinoza to Kerouac, Dostoyevsky, and Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher who counselled his readers to set aside intellectual concerns and “leap.”

The first leap came soon enough. At the end of 1959, Sutcliffe was selected for a prestigious art exhibition, and sold a painting. Suddenly, he had ninety pounds burning a hole in his pocket. Lennon, who had been playing skiffly rock and roll with McCartney, Harrison, and an assortment of drummers, pressed Sutcliffe to convert his capital gain into a new bass. On January 21, 1960, Sutcliffe bought a Hofner 333, and soon joined the combo.

From that moment, the story accelerates. Sutcliffe was not a natural musician, but he practiced until his fingers bled, and helped in other ways to fill out the picture. (Harrison would remember him as the band’s “Art Director” in those years.) He helped scare up a second amplifier from the college, and the band’s sound grew richer. They needed connections, too, and when a new café and venue, the Jacaranda, opened nearby, Sutcliffe was ready. The café’s owner—a plumber named Allan Williams—wanted someone to paint over graffiti in the women’s bathroom. Sutcliffe delivered a series of murals of, as Williams later put it in his memoir, “Rock n’ Roll Scenes.” Williams was delighted.

Sutcliffe had begun living in an artist’s loft, across the street from the Anglican cathedral that towered over Liverpool. Lennon immediately moved in, and Harrison and McCartney were a constant presence, eager to escape parental supervision. McCartney later remembered it as a magical place (“Very studenty!”), where they could stay up all night, playing the latest records from America, until the sun shone on the cathedral.

But, even as they cohered, the band lacked a name. (They had outgrown options like the Quarrymen, and Johnny and the Moondogs.) Sutcliffe kept long vocabulary lists—gregarious, ascetic, sublimate—and one night, in April, he and Lennon concocted a pun that nodded at once to the Beat Generation and to one of their favorite acts, the Crickets, the band led by Buddy Holly. McCartney later remembered the exact moment when his friends, walking along the cathedral, announced, “Hey, we want to call the band the Beatles.” Harrison gave the credit to “Sutcliffe/Lennon.”

In the weeks that followed, the Beatles rehearsed in Sutcliffe’s rooms. Williams, enchanted by their style, and by Sutcliffe’s artistic disposition, began to take an interest. In late May, he booked the group on a tour of a windswept stretch of the Scottish coast, backing a teen-idol type, Johnny Gentle. When the group returned, they were granted a regular spot playing gigs at the Jacaranda. But the big break came in August, when Williams got a call from a German club owner who needed five English musicians to perform in Hamburg.

Here was a second leap of faith, especially for Sutcliffe, who would need to pause his promising art career, and had more to lose than the others. But he finally agreed. The decision was made easier when a newspaper article about beatniks identified his building as a foul nest of this invasive species. On August 15th, he and Lennon were evicted. The next day, the band made it onto the ferry.

In eight months, they had come a long way, thanks in no small part to the bookish young man who kept painting new doorways for them to walk through. Sutcliffe still wrestled with his instrument, but he had earned his place in the Beatles, finding them a name, a place to grow, and a chance to soar. In a notepad, he wrote a list of aphorisms. “History is my father and tomorrow is my son,” one reads. Another: “Now I am young I have strong wings I can fly high. I will.”

From the moment the Beatles arrived in Hamburg, their immersion was total. Between August 17th and October 3rd, they played forty-eight sets at the Indra, each roughly six or eight hours long—far more than they had ever played in England. After an elderly lodger complained about the noise, they moved to the Kaiserkeller, a nearby sailor bar. On their first night at the new venue, at a tense moment in the Cold War, the U.S.S. Antares and the U.S.S. Fiske sailed into Hamburg. Suddenly, hundreds of Navy men needed entertaining.

The Beatles played fifty-eight more sets between October 4th and November 30th. Under pressure to mach schau, or “make show”—the phrase that had been yelled at them by the Indra’s manager—they became more extroverted, stomping and screaming to get attention. In mid-October, Sutcliffe wrote home to Pauline, “We have improved a thousandfold since our arrival.” His confidence was burgeoning during this trial by fire. At the Kaiserkeller and the Indra, women swooned over the intense young man, as did the gay clientele, especially when Sutcliffe came forward to sing the Elvis ballad “Love Me Tender.” In a letter home to his sister, Sutcliffe wrote, “I’ve become very popular both with girls and homosexuals, who tell me I’m the sweetest, most beautiful boy.”

As in Liverpool, Sutcliffe soon connected with a group of like-minded art students. One night in late October, a young graphic designer, Klaus Voormann, came into the Kaiserkeller after a quarrel with his girlfriend. It was his first time in a night club. When I spoke to Voormann, who lives near Munich, he recalled the moment as if it were yesterday. He had just seen a boisterous band finish its set. (It turned out to be Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, featuring Ringo Starr on drums.) When the next act came out, the first Beatle to take the stage was a slender young man with a passing resemblance to James Dean. The group launched into a blistering set, and Voormann remembers a woman in the audience who seemed to experience an orgasm “just looking at the way Stuart was standing.”

The next night, Voormann came back with his girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, and another friend, Jürgen Vollmer. They became regulars, and Voormann shyly introduced himself to Lennon, who told him to find Sutcliffe, “the arty one.” “We started talking, and it was like the world was on fire,” Voormann said.

Soon Kirchherr began taking photographs of the Beatles, who instinctively understood how to mach schau for her camera. One day, she brought the band to a local fairground—the Heiligengeistfeld, or Field of the Holy Spirit—where she captured them among the abandoned trucks and carnival rides of the off-season. Twice, she framed Sutcliffe in the distance, looking past Lennon and McCartney, through sunglasses, toward her.

Kirchherr spoke hardly a word of English; Sutcliffe spoke almost no German. But they fell in love, and their relationship sparked a series of formative ideas, especially regarding how a band could look. Sutcliffe was small enough to wear Kirchherr’s clothes, and he often did, without hesitation. For rockers on both sides of the Atlantic, hair grease was a crucial mortar; but Voormann and Vollmer were beginning to let their bangs tumble forward, with no grease at all. The look, which they called a pilzenkopf, or mushroom head, was daringly new, but it was also old, and Voormann traced it back to Classical statuary. Sutcliffe was the first Beatle to go Greco-Roman; the others soon came around. Later, Sutcliffe showed up in a collarless Pierre Cardin jacket, the garment that would eventually come to define the band.

The intimacy between Sutcliffe and Kirchherr also caused tension. According to Pauline, McCartney later confessed that it “peeved the rest of us like mad, that she hadn’t fallen in love with any of us,” and he seemed to feel that the plonk of Sutcliffe’s bass playing was holding the band back. Voormann, for his part, maintains that “the Beatles were best when Stuart was still in the band,” and that Sutcliffe had “great feeling.” Pete Best, who had a front-row seat, agreed that Sutcliffe got the hang of his instrument.

By early December, most of the group was ordered back to England after disputes with the Kaiserkeller’s owner and the local police. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Best limped back to Liverpool, but Sutcliffe lingered in Hamburg, hesitant to return to a city that he likened in his letters to a “brass coffin.” When he finally returned for a set of gigs in late January, he received a savage beating after being cornered by a group of Teddy Boys. Lennon and Best broke up the fight, but not before Sutcliffe was kicked in the head. Two weeks later, the Beatles began playing at the Cavern Club. (A grainy photograph shows Lennon playing guitar with a splint on his finger. Behind him, Sutcliffe’s bass can be seen, but not his face, as though he were easing out of the picture.)

The Beatles journeyed back to Hamburg, and played ninety-two shows between April 1st and July 1st. In photographs, Sutcliffe appears fully engaged, but he was spending more and more time with Kirchherr, and was increasingly drawn to his passion for art. (As Cynthia Lennon wrote, “He was not the type of person to fool himself.”) In late June, the Beatles recorded their first professional tracks; Sutcliffe, though there to cheer on his friends, didn’t play. The band backed another singer, Tony Sheridan, for five songs, then worked out two on their own. One was an instrumental titled “Cry for a Shadow.” The only song credited to John Lennon and George Harrison, it seemed to describe the Beatle who was both present and not.

Sutcliffe in his studio, around 1961.Courtesy Stuart Sutcliffe Estate

Aweek later, the break was complete. The Beatles returned to Liverpool for the next phase of their launch, and Sutcliffe began painting with a fury, selling his Hofner to Voormann and using the cash for paints and canvases. He had also found the perfect instructor: Eduardo Paolozzi, a fellow-Brit, who happened to be teaching at a Hamburg art school. Like Sutcliffe, Paolozzi was entranced by American pop culture. In 1947, he created a collage titled “I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything,” which featured an airplane, a bottle of Coca-Cola, and a gun with the word “pop” near the barrel. Many believe that Pop Art was born in that moment.

With a sculptor’s eye, Paolozzi roamed the scrap lots and ship-salvage yards of Hamburg, looking for bits of metal. Sutcliffe followed him, eager to experiment with new media. Paolozzi began work on a thirteen-minute movie; Sutcliffe, according to his letters, started making short films. The art was flowing out of him: life studies, collages, canvases as tall as he was. “If he’d lived, he could easily have been the Beatle,” Paolozzi later said. “He was imaginative, ultra-intelligent, and he was open to everything.” In at least one edition of “Tune In,” Lewisohn includes a photograph from February 3, 1962, full of that sense of possibility. Voormann wears a Baroque ruff, as if impersonating a Rembrandt portrait; Kirchherr and Sutcliffe wear matching leather pants.

Voormann, Kirchherr, and Sutcliffe in Hamburg, in 1962. Courtesy Kai-Uwe Franz

To judge from the swagger, Sutcliffe was the picture of good health. In fact, he had been suffering from a range of medical complaints. The issues began early in 1961, when he was still with the band, and when he started experiencing mysterious pains. In July, he wrote his mother that he had “a shadow” on his lungs, gastritis, and an appendix that needed removal. Near the end of January, he suffered a convulsive fit, and couldn’t attend classes. Still, he kept painting at a frantic pace.

When Sutcliffe returned to Liverpool, in the third week of February, he began to worry friends. He confessed to Lennon that he sometimes thought about jumping out of a window, and his mother later described his pain as “a bomb going off in his head.” In March, the Beatles played on the radio for the first time, and Sutcliffe soon returned to Hamburg, where the headaches got worse. They stopped on April 10, 1962, when he slipped into a coma and died in Kirchherr’s arms, on the way to the hospital.

The Beatles learned the news not long after, from Kirchherr, at the Hamburg airport, where they had landed to begin a new residency. “John went into hysterics,” she later recalled. “We couldn’t make out . . . whether he was laughing or crying because he did everything at once. I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.” Losing his best friend was an inexpressible loss, but there was little time to grieve. Once again, the Beatles needed to mach schau.

Three days later, on April 13th, the Beatles played an extraordinary show at the Star Club, a huge theatre with a mural of the New York skyline. Voormann witnessed a tragicomic scene as John, dressed as a cleaning woman and knocking over mike stands, worked through his grief. “It gave me shivers to watch it, but this is what clowns do, bring humor to tragedy,” he told Lewisohn decades later. “It was hilarious.”

At first, the official cause of Sutcliffe’s death was “cerebral paralysis due to bleeding into the right ventricle of the brain.” One doctor told Kirchherr that Sutcliffe’s brain had been pressing against his cranium as it grew. Later, pathologists discovered a tumor caused by a small depression in Sutcliffe’s skull, suggesting that his suffering stemmed from an act of violence.

Whatever the reason, Lennon was plunged into grief. He began picking fights and drinking too much, and for a time even lost his voice. He told Kirchherr that he wished he could have died in Sutcliffe’s place. One day, he showed Kirchherr the room where he was staying, and she described it, in her rudimentary English, in a letter to Sutcliffe’s mother: “Every piece of paper from Stuart he have stick on the wall and big photographs by his bed.” At times, Lennon swallowed his anguish and expressed a hard-bitten perspective. Trying to comfort Kirchherr, he told her, “Make up your mind, you either live or you die.”

The Beatles continued their ascent, but Sutcliffe cast a long shadow. He would appear, ghostlike, on their album covers: on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Sutcliffe is among the scores of pictured faces, and, when Lennon released “Rock ’n’ Roll,” in 1975, he used an old photograph from Hamburg, in which his friend appears as a blur from the spirit world. Yoko Ono later told the journalist Larry Kane that “there was not a period in our lives” during which Lennon didn’t mention Sutcliffe, and that he considered them to be “soul mates.”

Even the other Beatles felt Sutcliffe’s presence. McCartney remembered that the band had a pact. “If one of us were to die, he’d come back and let the others know if there was another side,” he said. “So as Stuart was the first one to go, we did half expect him to show up. Any pans that rattled in the night could be him.”

If pans did rattle, it would go some distance toward explaining just how good the Beatles became. Their songs embraced life, but they also dared to contemplate death, and what lies beyond. “It is not dying,” Lennon insists in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” In just a few years, Sutcliffe had given a great deal to his friends—but in death he reminded them of life’s transience, and of the urgency of being true to oneself. “He would walk down the street, anywhere, and see something beautiful—the sky, a bird, anything,” Voormann said. “He was the most inspiring person I have met in all my life.”

Sutcliffe’s aura was palpable on the day that I met his sister on Long Island. The sunshine was streaming through generous skylights, and Pauline sat in a room that brimmed with her brother’s art. There seemed to be hundreds of pieces: some large, stretching from floor to ceiling, while others were small collages, with bits of Hamburg newspapers pasted throughout. In a corner, one canvas commanded special attention. At the bottom, there was a single word, “Stuart,” and below it two shapes resembling question marks. Pauline told me they were added at the last minute, as the paint was drying, by John Lennon.

Pauline invited me to visit several times, and encouraged me to go through the archive of writings in her basement. (Some of them have been reproduced by biographers, including Pauline herself, in her 2001 book “The Beatles’ Shadow.”) It was impossible not to feel Sutcliffe’s life force; it was radiating from the canvases, and the letters, and from Pauline’s face, which lit up every time she said his name. In the fall of 2019, she died, and my visits stopped. Still, she had given a great gift, by granting a backstage pass into the story. Throughout the desolation of the pandemic, it helped to play the Beatles, especially with a deeper understanding of just how close we came to never hearing them at all. If Harrison had immigrated to Australia, as he wished; if McCartney had kept his job as a coil-winder, as he nearly did; or, if Lennon and Sutcliffe had not recognized something profound in one another, this would have been a different story.

One of Sutcliffe’s mixed-media collages. Courtesy Stuart Sutcliffe Estate

A self-portrait by Sutcliffe, circa 1960.Courtesy Stuart Sutcliffe Estate

Fortunately, history unfolded as it did, thanks in part to a young artist who took a leap of faith and never looked back. “There is no mercy for us,” Sutcliffe wrote in his journal. “Everyone has to go through a period of worry and struggle if he wants to go into deep water.” By crossing the North Sea, the Beatles found a water so deep that we can swim in it forever.

Such sadness, he was such a talent and he enabled John Lennon to bloom. His death was such a loss. Imagine what he would have done. DAF

Putin Made a Profound Miscalculation on Ukraine

 Putin Made a Profound Miscalculation on Ukraine

By Yaroslav Hrytsak The New York Times

Dr. Hrytsak is a Ukrainian historian and a professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University.

LVIV, Ukraine — Ukraine is once again at the center of a potentially global conflict. World War I, as the historian Dominic Lieven put it, “turned on the fate of Ukraine.” World War II, according to the legendary journalist Edgar Snow, was “first of all a Ukrainian war.” Now the threat of a third world war hinges on what could happen in Ukraine.

It’s a striking repetition. Why has Ukraine, a midsize country of 40 million people on the eastern edge of Europe, been at the epicenter of warfare not once, not twice, but three times?

Part of the answer, at least, is geographical. Set between Russia and Germany, Ukraine has long been viewed as the site of struggle for the domination of the continent. But the deeper reasons are historical in nature. Ukraine, which has a common origin point with Russia, has developed differently over the course of centuries, diverging in crucial ways from its neighbor to the east.

President Vladimir Putin likes to invoke history as part of the reason for his bloody invasion. Ukraine and Russia, he asserts, are in fact one country: Ukraine, in effect, doesn’t exist. This, of course, is entirely wrong. But he is right to think history holds a key to understanding the present. He just doesn’t realize that far from enabling his success, it’s what will thwart him.

In 1904 an English geographer named Halford John Mackinder made a bold prediction. In an article titled “The Geographical Pivot of History,” he suggested that whoever controlled Eastern Europe would control the world. On either side of this vast region were Russia and Germany, poised to do battle. And in between was Ukraine, with its rich resources of grain, coal and oil.

There’s no need to go into the finer details of Mackinder’s theory; it had its flaws. Yet it proved extremely influential after World War I and became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thanks to the Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, the concept migrated into Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Lenin and Stalin had not read Mackinder but acted as if they had. For them, Ukraine was the bridge that would carry the Russian Revolution westward into Germany, making it a world revolution. The path to conflict again ran through Ukraine.

The war, when it came, was catastrophic: In Ukraine, around seven million perished. In the aftermath, Ukraine was sealed up in the Soviet Union, and the question for a time seemed settled. With the collapse of Communism, many believed that Mackinder’s thesis was outdated and the future belonged to independent and sovereign states, free from the ambitions of bigger neighbors. They were wrong.

Mackinder’s argument — that Eastern Europe and Ukraine held the key for a contest between Russia and Germany — never went away. In fact, it took pride of place in Mr. Putin’s mind. With one change, however: He substituted Germany with the West in its entirety. Ukraine, to Mr. Putin, became the battleground for a civilizational contest between Russia and the West.

He didn’t act on it at first. In the early years of his tenure, he seemed to expect — in line with those in Boris Yeltsin’s circle who oversaw the end of the Soviet Union — that Ukrainian independence wouldn’t last long. In time, Ukraine would be begging to be taken back. It didn’t happen. Though some Ukrainians remained under the sway of Russian culture, politically they leaned to the West, as shown by the Orange Revolution of 2004, when millions of Ukrainians protested against electoral fraud. 

So Mr. Putin changed course. Soon after the war in Georgia in 2008, in which the Kremlin seized control of two Georgian regions, he designed a new strategic policy for Ukraine. According to the plan, any steps Kyiv might take in the direction of the West would be punished with military aggression. The objective was to cleave off Ukraine’s Russophone east and turn the rest of the country into a vassal state headed by a Kremlin puppet.

At the time, it seemed fantastical, ludicrous. Nobody believed it could be genuine. But by the final weeks of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014, in which Ukrainians demanded an end to corruption and an embrace of the West, it became horribly clear that Russia was intent on aggression. And so it proved: In a rapid-fire operation, Mr. Putin seized Crimea and parts of the Donbas. But crucially, the full extent of his ambition was thwarted, in large part through the heroic resistance mounted by volunteers in the country’s east.

Mr. Putin miscalculated in two ways. First, he was hoping that, as had been the case with his war against Georgia, the West would tacitly swallow his aggression against Ukraine. A unified response from the West was not something he expected. Second, since in his mind Russians and Ukrainians were one nation, Mr. Putin believed Russian troops needed barely to enter Ukraine to be welcomed with flowers. This never materialized.

What happened in Ukraine in 2014 confirmed what liberal Ukrainian historians have been saying for a long time: The chief distinction between Ukrainians and Russians lies not in language, religion or culture — here they are relatively close — but in political traditions. Simply put, a victorious democratic revolution is almost impossible in Russia, whereas a viable authoritarian government is almost impossible in Ukraine.

The reason for this divergence is historical. Up until the end of World War I (and in the case of western Ukraine, the end of World War II), Ukrainian lands were under the strong political and cultural influence of Poland. This influence was not Polish per se; it was, rather, a Western influence. As the Harvard Byzantinist Ihor Sevcenko put it, in Ukraine the West was clad in Polish dress. Central to this influence were the ideas of constraining centralized power, an organized civil society and some freedom of assembly.

Mr. Putin seems to have learned nothing from his failures in 2014. He has launched a full-scale invasion, seemingly intended to remove the Ukrainian government from power and pacify the country. But again, Russian aggression has been met with heroic Ukrainian resistance and united the West. Though Mr. Putin may escalate further, he is far from the military victory he sought. A master tactician but inept strategist, he has made his most profound miscalculation.

Yet it’s one based on the belief that he is at war not with Ukraine but with the West in Ukrainian lands. It’s essential to grasp this point. The only way to defeat him is to turn his belief — that Ukraine is fighting not alone but with the help of the West and as part of the West — into a waking nightmare.

How this could be done, whether through humanitarian and military help, incorporating Ukraine into the European Union or even supplying it with its own Marshall Plan, are open questions. What matters is the political will to answer them. After all, the struggle for Ukraine, as history tells us, is about much more than just Ukraine or Europe. It is the struggle for the shape of the world to come.

Yaroslav Hrytsak is a professor of history at the Ukrainian Catholic University and the author, most recently, of a global history of Ukraine.

 

Putin The Terrible: The Cowardice Of A Shunned Tyrant

Putin The Terrible: The Cowardice Of A Shunned Tyrant

by Mark Harvey 3 Quarks Daily

When I am dead, then bury me

In my beloved Ukraine,

My tomb upon a grave mound high

Amid the spreading plain

—Taras Shevchenko

Vladimir Putin

If you didn’t know who Vladimir Putin was and you ran into him in, say, Dayton, Ohio, you might take him to be the owner of a small family-run mortuary. With his pallid complexion, dour bearing, and ordinary features, he has all the makings of a good mortician who could feign enough concern and show enough solemnity to upsell you on a walnut coffin for a distant aunt.

An impressive figure, the man does not cut. He is short, pale, balding, and lacking in a good Soviet chin. It’s been said that great leaders need to have enough charisma to rattle the furniture when they walk into a room. But Putin has a reptilian aura, only missing the scales and a tail that can grow back when the original is torn off while desperately escaping a raptor.

It makes you wonder what sort of knots Mother Russia has tied herself in to choose such a demonic milquetoast figure to rule such a glorious land. What we know about the Russian people is that they are gifted beyond measure in literature, music, poetry, drama, dance, sports, the hard sciences, and of course, chess. But with their otherworldly gifts they seem to have a self-destructive element manifested in a revolving door of imprisoning their heroes in their gulags, choosing despotic leaders, high rates of alcoholism, and a skepticism only immune to world class agitprop.

So to see such a great land ruled by such a small, diminished but cruel man is painful. And with his last gasp at greatness at age 69, amassing 200,000 troops on the border of Ukraine, sending warships into the Black Sea off the Crimean Peninsula, and then attacking Ukraine beneath an embarrassing interpretation of its national history, has us all hoping the man meets an unhappy end. (Even those of us who keep trying unsuccessfully to practice universal compassion).

Commenting on the Ukraine crisis, a wag on TikTok said, “Congratulations, in just two weeks we’ve all gone from being expert virologists to expert geopolitical analysts.” Some truth to that. The geopolitics of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia have those who have dedicated their entire careers to the subject arguing over the current war. Nevertheless, as expertly diagnosing the spread of the COVID virus is getting dull to those of us who have never even touched an electron microscope, let’s wade into Eurasian politics.

Statue of Ivan the Terrible

In the reading I’ve done about Russian history, there always emerges a mysterious figure from the 16th century called Ivan the Terrible. He was really Ivan IV and the czar of Russia from 1547 to 1584. Ivan the Terrible may be a poor translation as in Russian he is called Ivan Grozny, and the word grozny in Russian is closer to formidable, redoubtable, and menacing. And to many Russians, Ivan’s terrible or grozny qualities were something to be admired, not abhorred. It gave him the power needed to rule such a vast land. The true history of Ivan the Terrible has given scholars lots to write about, mostly because there is so little written about him by those with a first-hand account. Thus some of his reputation comes from folklore.

Ivan managed to fit a lot of bloody wars into his life and it’s hard to imagine he had much family time with his string of six wives. His wars included the Polish-Lithuania War, the sacking of Novgorod, the Conquest of Kazan, the Russo-Turkish War, the Livonian War, and the Conquest of Siberia. That is a partial list. And his style of warfare was brutal. During the sacking of Novgorod, in addition to killing and torturing thousands of inhabitants, he tied men, women and children accused of treason to sleighs and ran the sleighs into the icy waters of the Volkhov River to drown them.

Ivan also organized what was considered Russia’s first version of a political police force in what was called the Oprichniki. The Oprichniki was a group of carefully selected men to serve as Ivan’s personal police regiment. They numbered around 6,000 men at its peak, dressed entirely in black, rode black horses, and used the broom and dog’s head as their symbols. The broom symbolized sweeping away of traitors and the dog’s head symbolized nipping at the heels of enemies. If only the Oprichniki were as gentle as rabid dogs. They were known for relentless days of torturing enemies, rapes, whippings, and mutilations. Some suggest the Oprichniki were the ancestors of the KGB.

Ivan the Terrible’s style of ruling seems to have set the pattern for Russia over the last 400 years including today’s wannabe czar, Vladimir Putin. You can hopscotch through Russian history and almost anywhere you land you’ll meet strange, cruel, crazy, and capricious rulers.

Painting of Anna Ionnovna’s Ice House

Take the niece of Peter the Great, Anna Ionnovna, who ruled Russia from 1730 to 1740. Known as Anna of Russia, she was disappointed in love when her hard-drinking husband died shortly after their wedding. She was desperate to marry again but never managed to land a suitor. For reasons beyond my reading, she took a terrible disliking to one Prince Mikhail and forced him to marry an unattractive woman named Avdotya Ivanovna. She then built them an elaborate palace 30 feet high made entirely of ice. It included an ice bed, ice pillows, and an ice clock. Anna forced the newly betrothed to spend their wedding night in the ice castle entirely naked in the middle of the brutal Russian winter. The couple somehow survived. It’s rumored the bride traded a pearl necklace for a coat with one of the guards.

Despite the Russian Revolution and the many Soviet slogans about brotherhood and equality, the cruel tendencies of Ivan the Terrible survived well into the 20th century. In a conversation with Sergei Eisenstein, the film director who made a biopic about Ivan the Terrible, Joseph Stalin said, “When Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more decisive.”

Joseph Stalin

None of the “He could not tell a lie” mythology surrounding George Washington or folksy quotes like President Gerald Ford’s “Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time” for Joseph Stalin. No, his problem with Ivan the Terrible was that he just wasn’t quite terrible enough. And if Stalin’s cruelty didn’t have all the baroque torturing of his predecessors, he certainly killed more of his own countrymen than probably any Russian leader. Impossible to know the exact number of Russians killed by Stalin (through direct executions, starvation, or gulags), but scholars agree it was in the millions.

Stalin was particularly hard on Ukraine. Between 1932 and 1933, close to 4 million Ukrainians died from a terrible famine called the Holdomor, meaning death by famine in Russian. With its rich black earth, seasons of summer wheat and winter wheat, Ukraine never should have seen mass starvation.

There is still debate among scholars as to whether the famine was caused by Stalin’s sheer ineptitude managing the agricultural economy or intentionally done out of his hatred of Ukrainians. Regardless, Stalin, like Putin, couldn’t stand the idea of an independent Ukraine and did his utmost to kill any movement toward independence from the Soviet Union. Whether through summary executions, imprisonment, or torture, he brutalized hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian writers, politicians, priests, and intellectuals if they ever strayed whatsoever from the Soviet agitprop.

Putin has quietly revived Stalin in Russia and compared him to Oliver Cromwell, the English general who lead the charge in not one but two civil wars. That he chose Cromwell, one of the most brutal generals in England’s history, for a favorable comparison is telling. Writing in the Washington Post, Peter Rutland calls Putin a Stalin-lite.

There is great irony (and perhaps hope) in the massive protests against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that were held in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Tbilisi is only about 40 miles from the town of Gori, where Stalin was born. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands gathered near the parliament buildings in Tbilisi to denounce Putin and his war. Of course it hasn’t been long since Georgia and Russia had their own little war when fighting between the two nations broke out in August of 2008. That war, though explained by Russia with painfully contorted justification, sure looked like revanchism.

Ukraine has such a long, complex history, that to get some basic understanding of its internal politics and its role on the international scale would take a few Ph.Ds. worth of study. Today we simplify its role as the gateway between east and west, the interface between the old Soviet Union and the modern European Union. To the west, it is characterized as a nation clamoring for freedom and independence and a modern way of life.

But if you dip into Ukraine’s history, you find it has a long, complicated past that does indeed involve the intersection of east and west, the old and the new. Over the more than thousand years of its existence, what we now call Ukraine has seen pre-Roman Greek colonies on the Crimea, hundreds of years of Viking domination beginning in the 9th century, Mongol hoards in the 13th century, the Cossacks in the 15th century, and many more groups all trading goods, fighting wars, pushing their religion, interbreeding, and molding the language. I suppose you don’t need to know of long Viking campaigns through Ukraine territory down to Turkey, of trading Crimean slaves on the Ottoman market, or the Slavic connections to its neighbors to form opinions about the war today, but it sure does make the area more intriguing and lifts up the conversation beyond our usual American simplification of far-off conflicts. Simplifications that often center around the question, How will this affect my American lifestyle? To wit, what will the war do to gas prices?

As Anne Applebaum points out in Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, the geography of the country offers few natural defenses. To the east is a wide-open steppe and to the northwest are gentle woods and pastures and fields. There are no rivers to separate it from bordering nations. Besides the Carpathian mountains to the southwest, the country is not defined by clear topography. The very word Ukraine means borderland in both Polish and Russian. Applebaum suggests that despite having distinct customs, culture, language, music, food, etc., its open geography has made it difficult to form an independent nation—well into the 20th century.

Given Putin’s justification for the invasion—to de-Nazify Ukraine—it’s safe to say his propaganda has nothing to do with his real motive which is crushing its independence. After all, the heroic leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish himself and a few days ago the Russians bombed Babi Yar, the site which is now a memorial of where German Nazis killed 33,000 Jews over two days in September of 1941.

As he approaches 70, Putin must be considering his place in history and compared to some of his predecessors, his legacy appears to be that of a small, frustrated man– Vladimir the Petit, itching to be a Peter the Great. And if Peter the Great wasn’t a good man, he was nevertheless a Great man if you consider his accomplishments in the 17th and 18th centuries. He industrialized Russia, making it the greatest iron producer in the world, built the modern Russian navy, founded St. Petersburg, completely redesigned Russian education, created the Russian Academy of Sciences, and won two major wars, greatly adding to Russia’s territories and influence.

And Putin? A botched war in Chechnya and Georgia, the grotesque accumulation of wealth for himself and his oligarchical friends, all those cringe-worthy macho stunts riding horses without a shirt, staged hockey games, and stiff judo rolls. As one commenter in the Washington Post wrote recently, “…he thinks of himself as a latter-day Ivan the Terrible, but the Russians have realized he is Czar Nicholas with a Breitling watch….”

There is a YouTube video of Putin singing his own version of Blueberry Hill (the song made famous by Fats Domino) at a charity dinner held in St. Petersburg in 2010. As he walks out to the microphone to sing, he looks painfully uncomfortable like some overworked accountant at a karaoke bar, prodded to sing without enough vodka in his system. He pronounces the words hill and thrill and still with the Russian sound of scraping a word across the top of the mouth. Various luminaries such Goldie Hawn, Kevin Costner, and Gerard Depardieu attending the event clap along with delight. As the song progresses, Putin appears to relax a tenth of a notch and enjoy himself. With his diminutive size, light-background singing voice, and slightly effeminate manner, it’s easy to imagine him in another lifetime starring in his own televised children’s show—a St. Petersburg version of Mr. Rogers.

Anton Chekov

In Anton Chekov’s play The Seagull, the young playwright Treplieff falls madly in love with the aspiring actress Nina, who stars in one of his plays. But Nina is infatuated with the novelist Trigorin and has no use for Treplieff.

Treplieff is also suffering as a playwright for what he considers the lack of respect given him by his mother’s famous and accomplished friends. He says, “What could be more intolerable and foolish than my position, Uncle, when I find myself the only nonentity among a crowd of her guests, all celebrated authors and artists?”

In act II, Treplieff kills a gull with a shotgun and lays it at Nina’s feet. She is horrified, picks up the gull and says to Treplieff, “What is happening to you?”

After threatening suicide for being spurned, he responds, “You have failed me; your look is cold; you do not like to have me near you.”

He continues, “I have burnt the manuscript to the last page. Oh, if you could only fathom my unhappiness! Your estrangement is to me terrible, incredible; it is as if I had suddenly waked to find this lake dried up and sunk into the earth.”

As act II continues, Nina is still infatuated with Trigorin and his celebrity as a writer. When Trigorin sees the dead gull at Nina’s feet, he says, “…an idea that occurred to me. An idea for a short story. A young girl grows up on the shores of a lake, as you have. She loves the lake as the gulls do, and is as happy and free as they. But a man sees her who chances to come that way, and he destroys her out of idleness, as this gull here has been destroyed.”

At the end of the play, Treplieff does kill himself. If you can believe it, Chekov wrote the play as a comedy.

Chekov’s plays and stories leave room for endless symbolism and allegory in his characters, the dialogue and the landscapes. And reading The Seagull, it’s hard to avoid the allegory and parallels with the paths of Putin, Russia and the Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin

Tossing aside all the fancy geopolitics, Putin resembles the spurned lover stuck in the past, convinced that Ukraine should still be part of his gauzy vision of an intact Soviet Union. In this Russian version of unrequited love, rather than getting on with his life—the life of an oligarch with billions of dollars, shirtless days riding horseback in Siberian summers, and staged hockey games—Putin just can’t let go. He stalks Ukraine, first with forays into the Crimea, then with forays into its eastern provinces, and finally breaking down the door with tens of thousands of soldiers trying to vanquish Kiev.

Like Treplieff, for years Putin has been frustrated for what he considers the disrespect shown Russia by the west, likely personalized to be interpreted as disrespect for himself. Like Treplieff, he attempts to kill the gull when he can’t get the gal. We don’t know what will happen in Putin’s third act. But we can be certain it will be dark. And very Russian.

The Weakness of the Despot

The Weakness of the Despot

A serious sober and frank conversation about Putin and Russia. DAF

An expert on Stalin discusses Putin, Russia, and the West.

By David Remnick The New Yorker

“The shock is that so much has changed, and yet we’re still seeing this pattern that they can’t escape from,” the Russia expert Stephen Kotkin says.

Stephen Kotkin is one of our most profound and prodigious scholars of Russian history. His masterwork is a biography of Josef Stalin. So far he has published two volumes––“Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.” A third volume will take the story through the Second World War; Stalin’s death, in 1953; and the totalitarian legacy that shaped the remainder of the Soviet experience. Taking advantage of long-forbidden archives in Moscow and beyond, Kotkin has written a biography of Stalin that surpasses those by Isaac Deutscher, Robert Conquest, Robert C. Tucker, and countless others.

Kotkin has a distinguished reputation in academic circles. He is a professor of history at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. He has myriad sources in various realms of contemporary Russia: government, business, culture. Both principled and pragmatic, he is also more plugged in than any reporter or analyst I know. Ever since we met in Moscow, many years ago––Kotkin was doing research on the Stalinist industrial city of Magnitogorsk––I’ve found his guidance on everything from the structure of the Putin regime to its roots in Russian history to be invaluable.

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Earlier this week, I spoke with Kotkin about Putin, the invasion of Ukraine, the American and European response, and what comes next, including the possibility of a palace coup in Moscow. Our conversation, which appears in the video above, has been edited for length and clarity.

We’ve been hearing voices both past and present saying that the reason for what has happened is, as George Kennan put it, the strategic blunder of the eastward expansion of NATO. The great-power realist-school historian John Mearsheimer insists that a great deal of the blame for what we’re witnessing must go to the United States. I thought we’d begin with your analysis of that argument.

I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar. But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

I would even go further. I would say that NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in NATO? They would be in the same limbo, in the same world that Ukraine is in. In fact, Poland’s membership in NATO stiffened NATO’s spine. Unlike some of the other NATO countries, Poland has contested Russia many times over. In fact, you can argue that Russia broke its teeth twice on Poland: first in the nineteenth century, leading up to the twentieth century, and again at the end of the Soviet Union, with Solidarity. So George Kennan was an unbelievably important scholar and practitioner—the greatest Russia expert who ever lived—but I just don’t think blaming the West is the right analysis for where we are.

When you talk about the internal dynamics of Russia, it brings to mind a piece that you wrote for Foreign Affairs, six years ago, which began, “For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of fifty square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.” You go on to describe three “fleeting moments” of Russian ascendancy: first during the reign of Peter the Great, then Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon, and then, of course, Stalin’s victory over Hitler. And then you say that, “these high-water marks aside, however, Russia has almost always been a relatively weak great power.” I wonder if you could expand on that and talk about how the internal dynamics of Russia have led to the present moment under Putin.

We had this debate about Iraq. Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam, or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq? In other words, there’s the personality, which can’t be denied, but there are also structural factors that shape the personality. One of the arguments I made in my Stalin book was that being the dictator, being in charge of Russian power in the world in those circumstances and in that time period, made Stalin who he was and not the other way around.

Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place––a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful.

Russia is a great power, but not the great power, except for those few moments in history that you just enumerated. In trying to match the West or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion. They use a very heavy state-centric approach to try to beat the country forward and upwards in order, militarily and economically, to either match or compete with the West. And that works for a time, but very superficially. Russia has a spurt of economic growth, and it builds up its military, and then, of course, it hits a wall. It then has a long period of stagnation where the problem gets worse. The very attempt to solve the problem worsens the problem, and the gulf with the West widens. The West has the technology, the economic growth, and the stronger military.

The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, to manage the gulf with the West and push and force Russia up to the highest level, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism. They’ve been in this bind for a while because they cannot relinquish that sense of exceptionalism, that aspiration to be the greatest power, but they cannot match that in reality. Eurasia is just much weaker than the Anglo-American model of power. Iran, Russia, and China, with very similar models, are all trying to catch the West, trying to manage the West and this differential in power.

What is Putinism? It’s not the same as Stalinism. It’s certainly not the same as Xi Jinping’s China or the regime in Iran. What are its special characteristics, and why would those special characteristics lead it to want to invade Ukraine, which seems a singularly stupid, let alone brutal, act?

Yes, well, war usually is a miscalculation. It’s based upon assumptions that don’t pan out, things that you believe to be true or want to be true. Of course, this isn’t the same regime as Stalin’s or the tsar’s, either. There’s been tremendous change: urbanization, higher levels of education. The world outside has been transformed. And that’s the shock. The shock is that so much has changed, and yet we’re still seeing this pattern that they can’t escape from.

You have an autocrat in power—or even now a despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps. We don’t know what the inside looks like. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. These are surmises. Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners.

And so we think, but we don’t know, that he is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.

Putin believed, it seems, that Ukraine is not a real country, and that the Ukrainian people are not a real people, that they are one people with the Russians. He believed that the Ukrainian government was a pushover. He believed what he was told or wanted to believe about his own military, that it had been modernized to the point where it could organize not a military invasion but a lightning coup, to take Kyiv in a few days and either install a puppet government or force the current government and President to sign some paperwork.

But think about the Prague Spring, in August, 1968. Leonid Brezhnev sent in the tanks of the Warsaw Pact to halt “socialism with a human face,” the communist reform movement of Alexander Dubcek. Brezhnev kept telling Dubcek, Stop it. Don’t do that. You’re ruining communism. And, if you don’t stop, we will come in. Brezhnev comes in, and they take Dubcek and the other leaders of Czechoslovakia back to Moscow. They don’t have a puppet regime to install. In the Kremlin, Brezhnev is asking Dubcek, after having sent the tanks in and capturing him, what should they do now? It looks ridiculous, and it was ridiculous. But, of course, it was based upon miscalculations and misunderstandings. And so they sent Dubcek back to Czechoslovakia, and he stayed in power [until April, 1969], after the tanks had come in to crush the Prague Spring.

One other example is what happened in Afghanistan, in 1979. The Soviet Union did not invade Afghanistan. It did a coup in Afghanistan, sending special forces into the capital of Kabul. It murdered the Afghan leadership and installed a puppet, Babrak Karmal, who had been hiding in exile in Czechoslovakia. It was a total success because Soviet special forces were really good. But, of course, they decided they might need some security in Afghanistan for the new regime. So they sent in all sorts of Army regiments to provide security and ended up with an insurgency and with a ten-year war that they lost.

With Ukraine, we have the assumption that it could be a successful version of Afghanistan, and it wasn’t. It turned out that the Ukrainian people are brave; they are willing to resist and die for their country. Evidently, Putin didn’t believe that. But it turned out that “the television President,” Zelensky, who had a twenty-five-per-cent approval rating before the war—which was fully deserved, because he couldn’t govern—now it turns out that he has a ninety-one-per-cent approval rating. It turned out that he’s got cojones. He’s unbelievably brave. Moreover, having a TV-production company run a country is not a good idea in peacetime, but in wartime, when information war is one of your goals, it’s a fabulous thing to have in place.

The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation.

How do you define “the West”?

The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.

If you assumed that the West was just going to fold, because it was in decline and ran from Afghanistan; if you assumed that the Ukrainian people were not for real, were not a nation; if you assumed that Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian, a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine—if you assumed all of that, then maybe you thought you could take Kyiv in two days or four days. But those assumptions were wrong.

Let’s discuss the nature of the Russian regime. Putin came in twenty-three years ago, and there were figures called the oligarchs from the Yeltsin years, eight or nine of them. Putin read them the riot act, saying, You can keep your riches, but stay out of politics. Those who kept their nose in politics, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were punished, sent to prison. Others left the country with as much of their fortune as possible. But we still talk about oligarchs. What is the nature of the regime and the people who are loyal to it? Who is important?

It’s a military-police dictatorship. Those are the people who are in power. In addition, it has a brilliant coterie of people who run macroeconomics. The central bank, the finance ministry, are all run on the highest professional level. That’s why Russia has this macroeconomic fortress, these foreign-currency reserves, the “rainy day” fund. It has reasonable inflation, a very balanced budget, very low state debt—twenty per cent of G.D.P., the lowest of any major economy. It had the best macroeconomic management.

So you have a military-police dictatorship in charge, with a macroeconomic team running your fiscal, military state. Those people are jockeying over who gets the upper hand. For macroeconomic stability, for economic growth, you need decent relations with the West. But, for the military security part of the regime, which is the dominant part, the West is your enemy, the West is trying to undermine you, it’s trying to overthrow your regime in some type of so-called color revolution. What happened is that the balance between those groups shifted more in favor of the military security people––let’s call it the thuggish part of the regime. And, of course, that’s where Putin himself comes from.

The oligarchs were never in power under Putin. He clipped their wings. They worked for him. If they didn’t work for him, they could lose their money. He rearranged the deck chairs. He gave out the money. He allowed expropriation by his own oligarchs, people who grew up with him, who did judo with him, who summered with him. The people who were in the K.G.B. with him in Leningrad back in the day, or in post-Soviet St. Petersburg––those people became oligarchs and expropriated the property to live the high life. Some of the early Yeltsin-era people were either expropriated, fled, or were forced out. Putin built a regime in which private property, once again, was dependent on the ruler. Everybody knew this. If they didn’t know, they learned the lesson the hard way.

Sadly, this encouraged people all up and down the regime to start stealing other people’s businesses and property. It became a kind of free-for-all. If it was good enough for Putin and his cronies, it’s good enough for me as the governor of Podunk province. The regime became more and more corrupt, less and less sophisticated, less and less trustworthy, less and less popular. It hollowed out. That’s what happens with dictatorships.

But such people and such a regime, it seems to me, would care above all about wealth, about the high life, about power. Why would they care about Ukraine?

It’s not clear that they do. We’re talking, at most, about six people, and certainly one person as the decision-maker. This is the thing about authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything. They can’t feed their people. They can’t provide security for their people. They can’t educate their people. But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. If they can deny political alternatives, if they can force all opposition into exile or prison, they can survive, no matter how incompetent or corrupt or terrible they are.

And yet, as corrupt as China is, they’ve lifted tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty. Education levels are rising. The Chinese leaders credit themselves with enormous achievements.

Who did that? Did the Chinese regime do that? Or Chinese society? Let’s be careful not to allow the Chinese Communists to expropriate, as it were, the hard labor, the entrepreneurialism, the dynamism of millions and millions of people in that society. You know, in the Russian case, Navalny was arrested—

This is Alexey Navalny, Putin’s most vivid political rival, who was poisoned by the F.S.B. and is now in prison.

Yes. He was imprisoned in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine. In retrospect, it could well be that this was a preparation for the invasion, the way that Ahmad Shah Massoud, for example, was blown up in Northern Afghanistan [by Al Qaeda] right before the Twin Towers came down.

You have the denial of alternatives, the suppression of any opposition, arrest, exile, and then you can prosper as an élite, not with economic growth but just with theft. And, in Russia, wealth comes right up out of the ground! The problem for authoritarian regimes is not economic growth. The problem is how to pay the patronage for their élites, how to keep the élites loyal, especially the security services and the upper levels of the officer corps. If money just gushes out of the ground in the form of hydrocarbons or diamonds or other minerals, the oppressors can emancipate themselves from the oppressed. The oppressors can say, we don’t need you. We don’t need your taxes. We don’t need you to vote. We don’t rely on you for anything, because we have oil and gas, palladium and titanium. They can have zero economic growth and still live very high on the hog.

There’s never a social contract in an authoritarian regime, whereby the people say, O.K., we’ll take economic growth and a higher standard of living, and we’ll give up our freedom to you. There is no contract. The regime doesn’t provide the economic growth, and it doesn’t say, Oh, you know, we’re in violation of our promise. We promised economic growth in exchange for freedom, so we’re going to resign now because we didn’t fulfill the contract.

What accounts for the “popularity” of an authoritarian regime like Putin’s?

They have stories to tell. And, as you know, stories are always more powerful than secret police. Yes, they have secret police and regular police, too, and, yes, they’re serious people and they’re terrible in what they’re doing to those who are protesting the war, putting them in solitary confinement. This is a serious regime, not to be taken lightly. But they have stories. Stories about Russian greatness, about the revival of Russian greatness, about enemies at home and enemies abroad who are trying to hold Russia down. And they might be Jews or George Soros or the I.M.F. and NATO. They might be all sorts of enemies that you just pull right off the shelf, like a book.

We think of censorship as suppression of information, but censorship is also the active promotion of certain kinds of stories that will resonate with the people. The aspiration to be a great power, the aspiration to carry out a special mission in the world, the fear and suspicion that outsiders are trying to get them or bring them down: those are stories that work in Russia. They’re not for everybody. You know many Russians who don’t buy into that and know better. But the Putin version is powerful, and they promote it every chance they get.

The West has decided, for obvious reasons, not to go to war with Russia, not to have a no-fly zone. Economic sanctions have proved more comprehensive and more powerful than maybe people had anticipated some weeks ago. But it seems that the people who these are aimed at most directly will be able to absorb them.

Sanctions are a weapon that you use when you don’t want to fight a hot war because you’re facing a nuclear power. It’s one thing to bomb countries in the Middle East that don’t have nuclear weapons; it’s another thing to contemplate bombing Russia or China in the nuclear age. It’s understandable that economic sanctions, including really powerful ones, are the tools that we reach for.

We are also, however, arming the Ukrainians to the teeth. And there’s a great deal of stuff happening in the cyber realm that we don’t know anything about because the people who are talking don’t know, and the people who know are not talking. And there is quite a lot of armed conflict, thanks to the courage of the Ukrainians and the response and logistics of NATO, with Washington, of course, leading them.

We don’t know yet how the sanctions are going to work. The sanctions often inflict the greatest pain on the civilian population. Regimes can sometimes survive sanctions because they can just steal more internally. If you expropriate somebody’s bank account in London or Frankfurt or New York, well, there’s a source where that came from originally, and they can go back inside Russia and tap that source again, unfortunately. Putin doesn’t have money abroad that we can just sanction or expropriate. Putin’s money is the entire Russian economy. He doesn’t need to have a separate bank account, and he certainly wouldn’t keep it vulnerable in some Western country.

The biggest and most important sanctions are always about technology transfer. It’s a matter of starving them of high tech. If, over time, through the Commerce Department, you deny them American-made software, equipment, and products, which affects just about every important technology in the world, and you have a target and an enforceable mechanism for doing that, you can hurt this regime and create a technology desert.

In the meantime, though, we saw what Russian forces did to Grozny in 1999-2000; we saw what they did to Aleppo. For Russia, if precision doesn’t work, they will decimate cities. That is what we’re seeing now in Kharkiv and in other parts of Ukraine. And it’s only just begun, potentially.

Russia has a lot of weapons that they haven’t used yet, but there are a couple of factors here. First of all, Ukraine is winning this war only on Twitter, not on the battlefield. They’re not winning this war. Russia is advancing very well in the south, which is an extremely valuable place because of the Black Sea littoral and the ports. They are advancing in the east. If the southern and eastern advances meet up, they will encircle and cut off the main forces of the Ukrainian Army. What’s failed so far is the Russian attempt to take Kyiv in a lightning advance. Otherwise, their war is unfolding well. It’s only a couple of weeks in; wars last much longer.

But here are some of the considerations: after three or four weeks of war, you need a strategic pause. You have to refit your armor, resupply your ammo and fuel depots, fix your planes. You have to bring in reserves. There’s always a planned pause after about three to four weeks.

If Kyiv can hold out through that pause, then potentially it could hold out for longer than that, because it can be resupplied while the Russians are being resupplied during their pause. Moreover, the largest and most important consideration is that Russia cannot successfully occupy Ukraine. They do not have the scale of forces. They do not have the number of administrators they’d need or the coöperation of the population. They don’t even have a Quisling yet.

Think about all those Ukrainians who would continue to resist. The Nazis came into Kyiv, in 1940. They grabbed all the luxury hotels, but days later those hotels started to blow up. They were booby-trapped. If you’re an administrator or a military officer in occupied Ukraine and you order a cup of tea, are you going to drink that cup of tea? Do you want to turn the ignition on in your car? Are you going to turn the light switch on in your office? All it takes is a handful of assassinations to unsettle the whole occupation.

Let’s take the story back to Moscow. We know the story of how Tsar Paul I was assassinated by people around him. Khrushchev was overthrown and replaced, eventually, by Brezhnev. Under Putin, is there any possibility of a palace coup?

There is always a possibility of a palace coup. There are a couple of issues here. One is that [the West is] working overtime to entice a defection. We want a high-level security official or a military officer to get on a plane and fly to Helsinki or Brussels or Warsaw and hold a press conference and say, “I’m General So-and-So and I worked in the Putin regime and I oppose this war and I oppose this regime. And here’s what the inside of that regime looks like.”

At the same time, Putin is working overtime to prevent any such defection while our intelligence services are working overtime to entice just such a defection––not of cultural figures, not former politicians but current security and military officials inside the regime. This happened under Stalin, when General Genrikh Lyushkov of the secret police defected to the Japanese, in 1938, with Stalin’s military and security plans and a sense of the regime. He denounced him at a press conference in Tokyo.

So now we’re watching Moscow. What are the dynamics there with the regime? You have to remember that these regimes practice something called “negative selection.” You’re going to promote people to be editors, and you’re going to hire writers, because they’re talented; you’re not afraid if they’re geniuses. But, in an authoritarian regime, that’s not what they do. They hire people who are a little bit, as they say in Russian, tupoi, not very bright. They hire them precisely because they won’t be too competent, too clever, to organize a coup against them. Putin surrounds himself with people who are maybe not the sharpest tools in the drawer on purpose.

That does two things. It enables him to feel more secure, through all his paranoia, that they’re not clever enough to take him down. But it also diminishes the power of the Russian state because you have a construction foreman who’s the defense minister [Sergei Shoigu], and he was feeding Putin all sorts of nonsense about what they were going to do in Ukraine. Negative selection does protect the leader, but it also undermines his regime.

But, again, we have no idea what’s going on inside. We hear chatter. There’s a lot of amazing intelligence that we’re collecting, which is scaring the Chinese, making them worry: Do we have that level of penetration of their élites as well? But the chatter is by people who don’t have a lot of face time with Putin, talking about how he might be crazy. Always, when you miscalculate, when your assumptions are bad, people think you’re crazy. Putin pretends to be crazy in order to scare us and to gain leverage.

Do you think that’s the case with this nuclear threat?

I think there’s no doubt that this is what he’s trying to do. The problem is, we can’t assume it’s a bluff. We can’t assume it’s a pose of being crazy, because he has the capability; he can push the button.

Steve, Sun Tzu, the Chinese theorist of war, wrote that you must always build your opponent a “golden bridge” so that he can find a way to retreat. Can the United States and NATO help build a way for Russia to end this horrific and murderous invasion before it grows even worse?

You hit the nail on the head. That’s a brilliant quote. We have some options here. One option is he shatters Ukraine: if I can’t have it, nobody can have it, and he does to Ukraine what he did to Grozny or Syria. That would be an unbelievable, tragic outcome. That’s the pathway we’re on now.

Even if the Ukrainians succeed in their insurgency, in their resistance, there will be countless deaths and destruction. We need a way to avoid that kind of outcome. That would mean catalyzing a process to engage Putin in discussion with, say, the President of Finland, whom he respects and knows well, or the Israeli Prime Minister, who has been in contact with him; less probably, with the Chinese leadership, with Xi Jinping. Someone to engage him in some type of process where he doesn’t have maximalist demands and it stalls for time, for things to happen on the ground, that rearrange the picture of what he can do.

It’s not as if we’re not trying. The Finns know Russia better than any country in the world. Israel is another good option, potentially, depending on how skillful Naftali Bennett proves to be. And then China, the long shot, where they’re paying a heavy price and their élites below Xi Jinping understand that. There’s now quite a lot of worry inside the Chinese élites, but Xi Jinping is in charge and has a personal relationship with Putin. Xi has thrown in his lot with Putin. But how long that goes on depends upon whether the Europeans begin to punish the Chinese. The Europeans are their biggest trading partner.

The Chinese are watching this very closely. They’re watching (a) our intelligence penetration, (b) the mistakes of a despotism, and (c) the costs that you have to pay as the U.S. and European private companies cancel Russia up and down. Xi Jinping, who is heading for an unprecedented third term in the fall, needed this like a hole in the head. But now he owns it.

Finally, there’s another card that we’ve been trying to play: the Ukrainian resistance on the ground and our resupply of the Ukrainians in terms of arms and the sanctions. All of that could help change the calculus. Somehow, we have to keep at it with all the tools that we have––pressure but also diplomacy.

Finally, you’ve given credit to the Biden Administration for reading out its intelligence about the coming invasion, for sanctions, and for a kind of mature response to what’s happening. What have they gotten wrong?

They’ve done much better than we anticipated based upon what we saw in Afghanistan and the botched run-up on the deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians. They’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about the United States. We have corrective mechanisms. We can learn from our mistakes. We have a political system that punishes mistakes. We have strong institutions. We have a powerful society, a powerful and free media. Administrations that perform badly can learn and get better, which is not the case in Russia or in China. It’s an advantage that we can’t forget.

The problem now is not that the Biden Administration made mistakes; it’s that it’s hard to figure out how to de-escalate, how to get out of the spiral of mutual maximalism. We keep raising the stakes with more and more sanctions and cancellations. There is pressure on our side to “do something” because the Ukrainians are dying every day while we are sitting on the sidelines, militarily, in some ways. (Although, as I said, we’re supplying them with arms, and we’re doing a lot in cyber.) The pressure is on to be maximalist on our side, but, the more you corner them, the more there’s nothing to lose for Putin, the more he can raise the stakes, unfortunately. He has many tools that he hasn’t used that can hurt us. We need a de-escalation from the maximalist spiral, and we need a little bit of luck and good fortune, perhaps in Moscow, perhaps in Helsinki or Jerusalem, perhaps in Beijing, but certainly in Kyiv.