This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
Orlando Figes is a British historian who has taught at both Cambridge University and the University of London. His latest book, The Story Of Russia, describes how President Vladimir Putin has used the mythologization of past figures and events in Russia to promote his imperial ambitions.
But in a recent interview with Vazha Taberidze of RFE/RL’s Georgian Service, Figes says Putin is more Nicholas I than Peter the Great, and that while a Russian defeat on the battlefield is not only desirous for Ukraine but Russia as well, a humiliating outcome for Putin could spell instability inside Russia, ending possibly with civil war or even “warlordism.”
RFE/RL: In light of your latest book, The Story Of Russia, we’ll be talking today about Russia’s history and how much it informs its decisions today, as this modern chapter of Russian history is being written. And I wanted to ask you about the essay Vladimir Putin penned back in 2021, On The Historical Unity Of Russians and Ukrainians, but with perhaps a slightly unusual twist. You’ve taught Russian history for more than 35 years now. In an alternate reality where Putin is your student and you’re his professor, and he hands in this essay as an exam paper what grade is he leaving your class with?
Orlando Figes: You know, there’s not that much factually wrong, according to the 19th-century imperial historiography on which it is based. But that is precisely the problem. Putin really just repeated a lot of commonplaces of 19th-century historians, like [Nikolai] Karamzin and [Sergei] Solovyov, who all argued that Ukraine was really always part of Greater Russia, that whenever it tried to break away from Russian tutelage, Ukraine became vulnerable to hostile Western powers using it against Russia. All of these are commonplace, really. So, I’d give him probably a D minus, I think, mainly on the basis of plagiarism of very old ideas that have long ceased to be relevant.
And I think that’s the point about the historical dimension of this war, it might have been brought about by Putin’s bad reading of history, his very out-of-date imperial reading of history. But that history has nothing to do with anything in the world since 1991. Ukraine is a sovereign, independent country and must be defended as such. So, these arguments he’s used or any other arguments — the Donbas is really Russian; or the southern littoral coast of Ukraine, New Russia, as it used to be called, is really part of Russia — I mean, it’s all irrelevant.
RFE/RL: In that essay, I think, one of the major takeaways at least was that he claimed Ukraine was not a nation. And that was not the first time he claimed that — it goes back all the way to his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. He claims Ukraine is not a nation, but has he, against his wishes, made them into one for good and became some sort of unwilling “founding father”?
Figes: Absolutely. You’ve hit the nail on the head there. You could say that until 2014, Ukraine was a complicated and divided society, East-West, generationally in many ways. But yeah, boy, since 2014, Ukraine has come together as a nation. And, you know, it’s proven it in the way it’s fought to defend itself since February 2022. So yeah, he’s sort of his own worst enemy. And in that, in that sense, he’s made the very beast that he didn’t want to exist and denied could exist. Well, he’s gone and made it.
RFE/RL: A founding father with Cronus syndrome (broadly, the fear of being replaced). He wants to devour his child. He is not only obsessed with history, many claim that he also seeks for himself a place in the history books, and he often invokes the names of Peter the Great, Empress Catherine and so on. So, what place do you think history has in store for him?
Figes: Well, it looks to me like he doesn’t have much longer the way things are going but who knows, things are very unpredictable. But my guess would be he’s going to end up rather more like Nicholas I (Russian tsar from 1825-55) than Peter the Great (or Peter I, who ruled the Russian Empire from 1682 until his death in 1725).
Peter the Great obviously took back, as Putin would say, the Baltic lands into Russian sovereignty. Nicholas I went to war against the whole of Europe in order to defend what he saw as the Greater Russia stretching to the Balkans, and indeed in a metaphysical sense to the Holy Lands where he went to war to bully the Turks into giving the Orthodox the rights over the holy shrines and that involved what we now know as the Crimean War, which went disastrously badly for him. He underestimated the ability of the Turks to defend themselves, just as Putin has underestimated the ability of the Ukrainians to fight back. And he underestimated the unity of the Western powers to support even a Muslim power such as the Ottoman Empire against a bully state, an aggressive state like the Russian Empire.
And Nicholas I lost the war and died in miserable circumstances, possibly a suicide, which is one of the historical theories about Nicholas I’s death, and went down in late-19th-century history as the worst tsar of all times, really. And to me, it looks increasingly like Putin might end up with that destiny rather than any great stature he wants for himself…. I doubt very much at this point, he’s going to get that.
RFE/RL: If your prophecy is indeed coming true, and he ends up as Nicholas I, will history repeat itself to the letter? Out of two possible scenarios, will Putin be dethroned from inside [Russia] or through external influence?
Figes: Wow, that’s the question everyone is asking. And who knows? I mean, certainly, it’s important to keep the Ukrainians armed as much as possible, supported in every way possible to continue fighting, because the pressure of the war is the most likely to bring down this Putin regime. My hope, I mean, it is only really a hope, but it’s just possible if this summer counteroffensive manages to break through and create pockets of collapse on the Russian side…and the Russian troops begin to see through the lies of what they’ve been told, why they’re fighting the Ukrainians.
And maybe, just maybe, we will have a repeat of 1917, when a similar exposé of the lie of the World War I — actually through the myth of Rasputin as a center of a court of treachery in the Romanov dynasty — all of that could just turn things very quickly. In February 1917, soldiers joined the demonstrations on the street very fast. And that led to a whole nine-month period of state and military collapse, unfortunately, culminating in the October Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power, and four years of civil war, and that is precisely the problem here.
You know, we may wish for the Putin regime to collapse under military pressure, with dissent, opposition street protests, possibly too. But if there’s a military collapse, we could end up with a sort of civil-war situation or something even worse, which is the complete breakup of Russia with a sort of warlordism — you know, [a Yevgeny] Prigozhin (head of the mercenary group Wagner) type of warlord emerging as a political, military leader. A sort of power struggle with arms, with parts of the army, parts of these mercenary armies that have been mobilized and paid for by the state and by oligarchs and all the rest. And with…a tactical-nuclear-weapons armory possibly at the disposal of these people.
We want to defeat Russia, for sure. But we don’t want to push it into a catastrophe of civil war and chaos. So, there’s a balance to be had. And I suspect that it’s a discussion being had in NATO, in Washington, and in all the Western capitals at the moment: How far one allows it to escalate because it’s escalating quite fast, it seems to me, and I thought that the policy previously, which was, if I understand it correctly, just to keep the Ukrainians supplied with arms to fight and defend themselves without necessarily going on a strong offensive that would escalate the war from the Russian side. I’ve thought that was, on the whole, the best policy, because in this war Putin thinks time is on his side, meaning that he thinks that he will outlast the willingness of the West.
RFE/RL: Does he have reason to believe that?
Figes: Well, yes, he does. Because even if this summer brings about some success for Ukraine, I think it’s going to take more than one counteroffensive to, you know, weaken and destabilize the military political system to the point where they start suing for peace or suffering from an internal crisis. And, you know, we’ve got the American [presidential] election coming up; if [former U.S. President Donald] Trump wins the election, or if other big geopolitical players like China weighed in on the Russian side, which is another big unknown as of yet, then who knows? So, it’s going to be a long haul, I think, unless there’s a more precipitous collapse this summer on the Russian military side than perhaps we had hoped for.
So, on that basis, I think Putin has some reason to think that there are some time factors really on his side. Does the West really care about Ukraine as much as Putin and his cronies do? That’s one question. And they’re assuming that the West doesn’t. Will the next American president support another three, four years of arming the Ukrainians? And, ultimately, I think, probably the biggest factor there is China, because I don’t think China’s interests are served by letting Russia lose this war. Whether it is prepared to go and support it, and even cross the Rubicon to supporting it with direct military aid in order to win it, I don’t know. But it’s fairly obvious that it’s not in China’s interest to let Russia lose.
RFE/RL: We touched upon what Russia could look like post-Putin. And what I wanted to ask is: What does it look like, this “day after” for Russia? And let’s take two scenarios, eventual Russian victory and eventual Russian defeat.
Figes: Well, I guess it depends what you mean by victory and defeat. But if you meant by victory that in some form Putin stayed in power and declared a victory by annexing the four territories that he’s declared Russian, and keeping Crimea and getting some security deal over NATO expansion or some fudge over that, that’s about as good a victory as I think he’s able to get, then it’ll be more of the same. And Putin will be able to step down with all the laurels of victory and the status in the history books that he will have written on his agenda. And eventually, we’ll get a Putin 2. And so, this is really unthinkable. And I don’t think any peace is even possible with Putin in power.
So, we have to really only think ahead to what Russia would look like in defeat. And then, going back to what we were discussing before, my worry is that if Russia is humiliated, brought to its knees, ruined, and the economy allowed to suffer to the point where we get the real possibility of a new revanchist movement, anti-Western nationalism, which is likely to be even worse than whatever base of support there is for this war.
But whatever happens — and I argued this at the end of my book that we started our discussion on — whatever happens in victory or defeat, it seems to me that Russia is going to be a lot weaker, and a lot poorer for this war. And very much more isolated from Europe and the West, in general, because of this war, and effectively will become a sort of client state of China. It will be providing discounted fuel, raw materials, minerals to the Chinese economy. And that’s where its future will be, which is a great tragedy. But the Russians have brought it on themselves, I’m afraid.
RFE/RL: Let me ask you what this “day after” would look like for Russian society, for the Russian people, because in your books you seem to suggest that Russians have almost a supernatural penchant for god-like tsars, this penchant for authority. They want to be ruled and, if possible, ideally, they want to be ruled by a strong ruler. So where does this leave the Russian people? And what does it tell us, if history is anything to go by, about their capacity to change?
Figes: Well, if I may, I’m not sure I do argue that. I mean, I’ve certainly handled it and discussed it as a phenomenon of Russian mythology that the people want a tsar; that people need a tsar. And for sure, if you look at Russian history, it’s mainly been dominated by powerful tsars. But that is not necessarily somehow in the Russian DNA, or in the cultural mix of what it is to be a Russian, as your question suggests.
Firstly, as Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century Russian anarchist wrote, for the Russians the tsar is like a god because he’s a projection of their utopian dreams…. And there are many, many examples of Russian people following a tsar because they thought he was some sort of deliverer from tsarism, deliverer from injustice, deliver from exploitation and enslavement, and someone who would represent their old ideals of freedom and justice.
And, indeed, on a more general point, one might argue that the basic institution of Russian society until collectivization in the 1930s was the Russian “obshchina,” the Russian commune, which was basically village self-government. For sure, it was patriarchal. It was dominated by men, mostly old men until the 1917 revolution. But it did have, at its heart, some basic principles of the Russian people, which were quite egalitarian, even socialist. I mean, Marx’s theory of the labor theory of value, that value is derived from labor, not capital. That’s at the heart of the Russian peasant culture, the peasant commune.
So, I would say that this idea that the Russians needed to or wanted a tsar is actually what they’ve been told for hundreds of years, and which they might have believed, because they’ve had no alternative, because they’ve had no tradition of parliamentary rule, of republican governance to go by.
I write in the book an example in 1917, the Tsar Nicholas II has just been overthrown. And there are lots of soldiers, meetings going on. And one of the Mensheviks (a Russian political faction that was less radical than the Bolsheviks), I think, attends one of the socialists’ meetings of the soldiers, and they all say, “Long live the republic! Now, let’s elect a tsar!” And they want to elect him as a tsar. And he leaves that with a sense of, “Oh, my God, you know, what hope for the Russian people if as soon as they get their freedom, they want to elect a tsar?”
But the point is that mythology has to be burst. The Russians have to be presented with an alternative vision of statecraft, which involves them, which is politically accountable, which is elected, rules by law, which respects human rights. I mean, if they were given that, I don’t think they would object to it. It’s just that they haven’t had it.
RFE/RL: Rather cynically, an option that will be at least more attractive than being a serf in the 21st century?
Figes: Yes, absolutely. And when a democracy in the full meaning of the word is offered to people, as you know, in Georgia, people want it. I mean, it’s basically a people-friendly way of government. And I don’t think that the Russians are any less human in that sense of not wanting their human dignity and freedom.
RFE/RL: Stalin is often brought up as somebody Putin is inspired by, or he’s borrowing something from. So, let me ask you, how much has Putin borrowed from Stalin?
Figes: Well, an awful lot, but not in necessarily a direct, straightforward way. I mean, the cult of Stalin is…parallel to some degree to the cult of Putin, in the sense that he’s projected this image of himself as the strong man, the only man really capable of defending Russia against foreign, hostile powers. And certainly, he’s not afraid to use Stalinist methods of terror and threat. For example, when he talks about fifth columnists and enemies of the people, he doesn’t have to go to the lengths that Stalin went to kill people or send them to the gulag, because the memory of that is still strong and passed down through the generations in Russia.
So, all he needs to do is wave a stick and arrest 20,000 people — that’s quite a lot of people to arrest, but not as much as Stalin — as Putin did at the beginning of the war to repress the street protests against it. And that’s enough for people to scurry away and be quiet in a way that leads many Western people, certainly a lot of Ukrainian people to say, “Well, they’re cowards.” But the thing is, people remember what Stalin was like. And that is the power that Putin indirectly takes from Stalin.
But the other thing I would say about the Stalin legacy is that I don’t think fundamentally [that] the Putin state [is] built effectively on the Stalinist state. Stalin built a very effective police state and probably a lot more efficient than this police state, which is inept, clumsy, brutal, and it does things that are intimidatory and barbaric to its own people, but not as efficiently as Stalin did.
But the fundamental thing about the Stalinist revolution, which remains at the heart of the Putin system, is that Putin reversed the notion of accountability. Political accountability is at the heart of democracy; that politicians are leaders [that] answer for their mistakes. And Stalin managed to reverse that, in a way that actually the people who answered for the mistakes of the bosses were the people underneath them. And he did that in a very sophisticated way, through police methods of effectively collecting kompromat.
Everyone was encouraged to collect kompromat on their subordinates, and they would keep incriminating evidence about their subordinates to use [against] them. So that, instead of them taking the fall, someone beneath them did. And that’s so important to get that message across to the Russians, because that’s what’s happening now. And that’s what’s keeping people in line with Putin at the top of the system. They know that if they step out of line, they will very quickly end up in prison on some trumped-up charges of corruption or whatever. So that is really the core of the Stalin system, I think. I mean, it wasn’t even there under Lenin. Lenin wrote in 1922, as part of his last writings, that it was important for the Bolsheviks to learn the principle of political accountability. And that has never really been there in Russia since, I’m afraid.
RFE/RL: In an interview with Intelligence Squared, about half a year ago, you said you expected that Putin would end up using nuclear weapons — how close have we come to that so far, do you think?
Figes: I certainly think, still believe now, as I did six months ago, that we have to take the nuclear threat seriously. That’s not to say we have to appease Putin because he’s got a nuclear weapon. And that’s not to say that we should necessarily change the mechanisms and the degree of our support for the Ukrainians. I think that it has to be handled very carefully.
And the Russians have made it clear when they might use nuclear weapons. If it’s a case of NATO-backed Ukrainian forces marching into the Crimean Peninsula, and Putin, with his back against the wall, thinking that his regime’s going to collapse, then, yes, I mean, I wouldn’t put it past him to use nuclear weapons. I mean, we were talking about Stalin [and] I’m researching a life of Stalin now. One thing I have learned in [the] three to five years that I’ve been working on it hard is that I wouldn’t have put anything past Stalin. And I don’t think I [would] put anything past Putin.
RFE/RL: In the very same interview, you said, with regret, that you also saw almost no chance for Ukraine to get Crimea back, given the almost sacred importance of it for Putin. How does it look today? Did this “almost no chance” become something more tangible, or on the contrary, become an outright “no chance, not going to happen”?
Figes: What you’re asking me is a very unfair question, if I may say, because war is very unpredictable by its nature. And so, six months have passed, [and] the beginning of a summer offensive is always a time of hope, right? So, you think maybe the Ukrainians will manage to break through, and maybe they’ll manage to reclaim Crimea, if not this year, then maybe in the next year or two. So, I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but maybe if I said it was impossible, six months ago, maybe I think it’s now possible in a way that I’ve moved.
But I think that the most likely scenario is ultimately that Ukraine has to reach a peace with Russia in which its boundaries are different, I’m afraid. Because what matters to Ukraine, it seems to me, is to be a functioning state, to be a part of Europe. I think it should be part of the European Union as soon as possible. I also think it needs to be part of NATO, because that now is its only security guarantee. Nothing else is worth a security guarantee. So, that’s the important thing.
And if it’s a question of you can create a Ukrainian state, which is prosperous, part of Europe, has its security, and people are safe, and it’s got a status vis-a-vis Russia that every other NATO border state has. Then that’s probably — I mean, the Ukrainians may hate me for saying this — but that’s better than five, maybe 10 years of war, and the total destruction of the country. The destruction of it — as I believe probably is the Russian destruction of this Kakhovka dam — the willingness of the Russians to ruin Ukraine if they can’t conquer it, is real. And so, any peace deal could, it seems to me, be packaged in a way that doesn’t have to come across as a great treachery in terms of land for peace.
If the Russians can’t conquer it, they will lay waste to it. And that is not a price worth paying to anybody. So, at the moment, yes, the Ukrainians will see it as treachery, any suggestion that they should accept any change of their territorial [boundaries]. But I think everybody probably knows, even if they don’t admit it on Radio Free Europe, that, in the end, that is likely, unless Russia can be defeated.
Now, obviously, I hope Russia can be completely defeated; it needs to be completely defeated, not just for Ukraine’s sake, but for Russia’s sake. Because Russia can’t become a democracy, can’t become a country that is at peace with its neighbors, until it has gotten rid of its regime. And the only way to get rid of this regime is to give it a complete military defeat. And likewise, the only way to give Ukraine peace, is to give this regime a complete military defeat. So, let’s see how far the war gets. Let’s see how far the Ukrainians can push back the Russians and if they can push them out of the borders of 1991.
