Putin Might Be More Dangerous Than Stalin

In the finale of Winter Dreams, Tchaikovsky makes reference to a Russian folk song before his symphony explodes into an enveloping, expressive sound. The dividing line between East and West was at the forefront of the 24-year-old composer’s mind as he tried to blend his early education in western musical forms with his Russian sensibilities. That perennial theme, East and West, is the subject of federal judge Stephen P. Friot’s Containing History: How Cold War History Explains US-Russia Relations (Oklahoma, 2023). In Containing History, Friot seeks to explain the present state of U.S.-Russia relations through a historical account of twentieth-century Cold War history. The book advances three key themes: that we disregard the lessons of history and geography at our peril; that disappointment lies in store for those who hope to coerce or induce democratic reform in Russia from outside Russia; and that we should never bet against the will of the Russian people. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.

Your book talks about the ideological nature of the Cold War. What can this history of ideas teach us?

One of the blessings of the Cold War is that there was on both sides an ideological component, and that ideological component made both sides more predictable. And that, in turn, led to what I refer to repeatedly in the book as the rules of engagement. We learned over the years, and this was certainly reinforced with the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Berlin and with the formation of NATO and then the Warsaw Pact, and the consolidation of Soviet control over Eastern Europe. There has always been an ideological component, and that actually lent itself to the development of rules of engagement that kept both sides from going into the abyss.

One thing that makes the current situation more dangerous is that Putin has no ideology other than self-preservation. His foremost priority is the elimination of threats and alternatives, and that makes him a less stable geopolitical adversary. Amazingly enough, he does not have the guardrails that even Stalin had in the form of the Politburo. And that makes this a more hazardous situation than we had during the Cold War. But the necessity of Western resolve–I’m emphatically talking about the United States and its allies—is no less than it was during the Cold War. There is more potential for serious instability if our resolve weakens.

Your book advances the idea that Putin is less constrained than Stalin was during the Cold War, and that there is less foreign policy stability today than there was during the Cold War. How so?

Well, let's take a counterfactual. Let's assume that at Yalta, Stalin had given away a big chunk of the territory controlled by the Red Army. If Stalin had returned to Moscow from Yalta and if he had to sit down and explain to senior diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov, senior Stalin deputy Georgy Malenkov and secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, that he had just given away thousands of square miles controlled by the Red Army, it is by no means a safe assumption that even Stalin could have gotten away with that and remained in power. If Stalin had given away any significant chunk of the territory controlled by the Red Army, I think the Politburo would have held him accountable. That's a guardrail that was there in a very meaningful way, that has no modern counterpart in Russia.

Your third major point in this book is never bet against the Russian people. Why shouldn’t we?

Notwithstanding Putin's efforts to close off some channels of communication, Russia cannot be hermetically sealed from outside influence and external sources of information in the way the Soviet Union could be. The internet cat is out of the bag. Unlike China, an attempt to suppress internet-based sources of information on a pervasive scale would trigger a more outraged, perhaps even violent response in Russia than anything that we might see in China.

Secondly, one should bear in mind the taste for travel in Russia. For upwards of 30 years, the educated urban middle class in Russia has gotten a taste for the freedom to travel. Where do they travel? Well, they travel to Turkey, Western Europe, and to the United States, to a lesser degree. But the interaction between the educated urban middle class in Russia and Western Europe is influential and will continue to be influential. Even though Putin no longer wants Russians to think in Western European terms, he cannot erase those experiences. And I have personally seen the impact of those Western-oriented experiences of the educated urban middle class in Russia.

But he won't be with us forever. Dictators typically don't get deposed by an uprising from the masses; they typically get deposed when they fall irrevocably out of favor with the elites. We have seen some signs that Putin’s standing with the elites in Russia has seriously eroded. He still has them intimidated; he still has layers of security around him. But we have certainly seen some signs in the last few months that his standing with the elites has been eroded. So, when will Putin's string run out? Nobody knows.

How do you see the detention of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich? Are there parallels you can think of from history?

I am certainly not aware of any validly comparable historical parallel between kidnapping a journalist in 2023 and any of the machinations of the Soviet regime. Take Francis Gary Powers, the downed U2 pilot. He was caught upwards of 2000 miles inside of the Soviet Union. That was by every standard, a serious breach of territorial sovereignty of the Soviet Union.

But it's difficult to imagine any government seated in the Kremlin pre-Putin, within memory, that would've done anything like kidnapping a journalist. The sorts of things that Putin is doing with respect to both internal dissidents like Navalny and Western journalists is really in a class by itself. Now, I realize Stalin had the terror. Stalin had the gulag. But in terms of affronts to Western powers, Putin has put himself in a class by himself.

In the book, you talk about some of the internal legal history of the U.S. Supreme Court cases involving members of the Communist Party and the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free association. How do you reflect on fundamental American values, like openness, the competition in the marketplace of ideas, and how looking at Russia might tell us a little bit about ourselves?

In the United States, we have the benefit of historical and cultural roots that go into the Enlightenment and the Reformation, which cut strongly in favor of pluralism and tolerance. In our Colonial era and the Revolutionary era, we had the leadership of individuals like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Marshall, and Madison to take those liberal notions and build a government around them. We benefit from all of that in a way that is unique in the world. We have the benefit of those influences that were present in the ratification of the Constitution to say nothing of the Civil War amendments. That history benefits the American people every day, if we are willing to recognize and live the values that are embedded in the Constitution and the values that we have inherited from the founders of this country.

In the past we have expected Russia to incorporate and internalize civic and cultural values in a matter of decades that took literally hundreds of years to develop and internalize within the Western nations in general and within the United States in particular. That's a definite contrast between not only East and West, but certainly between Russia and the United States.

Neil Hassler is an attorney and writer in Nebraska.