In this episode, I will present an expert opinion from Germany. My guest is a prominent German historian, Dr. Jan Class Behrends. He’s a leading expert on the history of Soviet and Russian security services and is known for his research on Stalinism propaganda and wars in the Soviet and post-Soviet space. Dr. Behrends, what is your opinion about the relationships between Germany and Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union? In particular, what Germany and the collective West did wrong that Russia couldn’t become a civilized partner?
Behrends: Well, I think that we cannot only talk about the West and Germany when it comes to the terrible situation that we have to face now. As a historian of Russia, also, not only in Eastern Europe, I study Russia. And I’ve written a lot about Russia that basically, the Kremlin decides its own fate. They decide where they want to go. And I’m not very much convinced of who did what and when did we lose Russia or who lost Russia debate? Because in the 1990s there was a fair amount of help for Russia. From the German side, there was a lot of monetary and logistical help for post-Communist Russia, and there was a genuine try under the Kohl government to establish a friendly relationship and long-lasting partnership. And it was Russia under Putin who chose not to go down this road. So, I don’t think that the West is mainly to blame for this war or this bad relationship. Russia went back to its authoritarian and imperial past. As a historian, I can argue. We can argue that this is the “Russian normal” for the last 300 years and that maybe Gorbachev was a very, very short exception to that “normal”. We can see that the problems with Russia don’t only start under Putin. I’m very much convinced that the problems of Russia are in the continuity of its elites. There were always the old elites. There were no new elites like in Poland or the Czech Republic. There’s no Russian Wałęsa or Havel. However, there is continuity of institutions. The army and the KGB were never reformed. And then, last but not least, the continuity of the Russian and Soviet mindset. It’s a very imperial mindset, and it could never deal with the result of the imperial collapse of 1989-1991. I think this has rather little to do with what the West or Germany did. I think that at the end of the day, we made fair offers to Russia: the so-called modernization Partnershaft to modernize Russia that was launched in 2000, and that would have been mutually beneficial. But this was a road not taken by the Kremlin.
Kovalenko: Dr. Behrends, what do you think about the personality of Vladimir Putin as a Russian leader? How did that happen, that he evolved from the KGB agent on a mission in eastern Germany into a Russian government official, and then into such a monster like Stalin?
Behrends: Well, we only got to know him in 1999. Or at least I didn’t know him before. I didn’t know him as a deputy mayor of Petersburg. I only knew him when he became prime minister. And I think many Germans, you know, from a German perspective, at first were very impressed by him, also because of the very bad figure of Boris Yeltsin, due to his, you know, alcohol problems and other problems. And suddenly there was this young person and he was even speaking German and he was invited to the German Bundestag. And a lot of people had initially a positive reaction. I was much more skeptical personally because I knew that he had this KGB background. But to tell you the truth, at the beginning of 2000, I thought that you should give the guy a chance and that maybe he could do things better than Yeltsin.
The first thing that got me very skeptical about Vladimir Putin and his policies was his media policy – the very strong assault on free media that started almost immediately after he took power. And then, of course, his war in Chechnya. The war in Chechnya was a terrible war from the beginning, including war crimes against civilians, the complete destruction of Grozny, and so on. So, there were very bad signs. But I also remember going to Moscow at the beginning of 2000 and seeing this economic boom. Many of my Russian friends didn’t like Putin personally, but they thought that they were living in very good times initially. So, I think it was only when he came back to power after this Medvedev intermezzo that most of my liberal Russian friends realized what this would mean. And they were already back then in 2011-2012, very very skeptical about the future and thought that this would turn into a real dictatorship.
When it comes to Putin as a personality, I think we have to understand what is his generation. He is what I call the last Soviet generation. So, his mindset is very much set on the order of Yalta. I think he believes that in 1945, a European order was established that was justified by the Russian victory, by Stalin’s victory in World War II. And when Putin looks at a map – whether we like that or not – he thinks that places like East Berlin, Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw should at least be under some sort of Russian influence and so on, because that’s how it was historically when he grew up and he has never made his peace with this collapse of the Order of Yalta. Additionally, I think that he is very much, of course, influenced by his KGB past. He thinks like a KGB agent. He thinks of conspiracies and covert actions. He thinks that the West is after him and his regime and that the CIA is very powerful and all these things. But then also, I think he’s very much influenced by his first position in political power, which was in criminal St. Petersburg in the 1990s. So, at the end of the day, I think if we want to understand who he is and how he does his policies, we have to understand that Putin is a mixture of the KGB and the Russian mafia of the 1980s.
Kovalenko: My next question is about how Putin and his propaganda machine manipulate history to justify the war against Ukraine. For example, Putin said that there is no such country as Ukraine and those are Russian lands. But the reality is different and Ukraine is a sovereign country for 31 years. He claimed that Ukrainians are the same as Russians. They are not. I think such historical arguments are simply not valid.
Behrends: Well, again, I think he’s a very typical representative of his generation. First of all, let me start like this. I don’t think that Vladimir Putin knows very much about Ukraine and understands Ukrainians very well. That’s where the problem starts, right? That’s true for very many Russians whom I’ve met and who only went to Ukraine maybe during Soviet times, especially of his generation. They think that Ukrainians are Russians who speak with “a funny accent” and are more like peasants or “little brothers”. They have this feeling of superiority toward Ukrainian culture. I think this is very typical. You can find it a lot in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Although, if you look at it more closely, it’s not justified. But it’s part of this ignorance about Ukraine, Ukrainian culture, and the Ukrainian nation that I think is very typical for his generation. I don’t think that he is so much fixated on the Stalin era. I think that Putin is very much more influenced by imperial Russia. He wants to get back to the conquests of Katherine the Great. He wants the imperial lands that Katherine took for Russia, so-called Novorossiya, Crimea, Galicia, Poland, and so on. These are conquests of the 18th century. And he believes in this 19th-century idea of Slavic Brotherhood, especially the Orthodox Brotherhood between Belarussians, Ukrainians, and Russians, and believes that basically, you know, just like Solzhenitsyn and other Russian imperialism nationalists, that this is the same nation just in three different tribes, and which is a very typical, as we know, 19th-century belief. And he uses this together with the myth of World War II to justify the war. This is, I think, where the imperial 19th-century thinking, which is very important for Putin, comes together with the Stalinism of the 1940s when he claims that this is a war against Fascism again and that the Russians have to fight the Second World War all over again to defeat Fascism in Ukraine.
So, I think it’s a very interesting but also a very stereotypical mixture of historical narratives from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that Putin uses very eclectically and artistically. And I think these are also offers for different parts of the Russian population because some people can maybe more identify themselves with the antifascist narrative, and some people can more identify themselves with the imperialist narrative. Certainly, all of these narratives are not about Ukraine. They show how little they know about Ukraine. And I also think that the war, that started in 2014, already showed that Putin had underestimated the resistance of the Ukrainians. And he again underestimated this because he knows so little about the Ukrainian identity of the postwar era, but he has strong beliefs in imperial and Soviet mythology.
Kovalenko: My next question is about the previous chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. There are some not very favorable stereotypes among Ukrainians about her. First, she was a friend of Putin, allowing him to build the Nord Stream pipelines, which damaged the Ukrainian interests. On the other hand, Chancellor Merkel was a chief peacemaker during the first Russian invasion in 2014-2015. But again, Ukraine had to make territorial and political concessions, and the Minsk peace agreements mediated by Merkel never actually worked.
Behrends: Well, I think it depends on the years of Merkel’s 16-year-long rule that you talk about. You will see more bright years and more dark years and more shadow and more light depending on where you look. But, if we look at the outcome – the second all-out war of Russia against Ukraine – then we can say that her Russian policy failed and was very bad for Ukraine, and also for Germany because she cemented the energy dependence of German industry on Russia and she very consciously did this. We have to talk about different years, right? During the Obama administration, I think she was left with the Russian problem alone because the Obama administration did the so-called pivot to the Pacific. They were not very interested in Russia. They did the reset in American-Russian relations and hoped to have the Russian problem solved. And those were the times of Medvedev. I think that they [Americans] were very much caught by surprise when Russia attacked in 2014.
I think that her first mistake was much earlier in her tenure. It was in 2008 when she together with the French denied the fast path of Ukrainians and Georgians into NATO. All other post-war and post-Cold War German governments of Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder had supported NATO’s expansion and EU expansion. But Merkel was the first one to say “no” to Ukraine and Georgia. This left these countries in limbo. This created a very dangerous situation starting from 2008 onwards. We saw it with the Russian-Georgian war in the summer of 2008. That happened right after this decision. But she didn’t learn from that.
I am not that negative about Minsk Accords. You know, in 2015 during Minsk-2 the Americans had outsourced this Russian policy to Germany and maybe Germany was a bit overwhelmed. It was the first time after the Second World War that we had to negotiate a European peace. And I think this piece was very bad, of course, for Ukraine. But it left also a breathing space. I think that militarily Ukraine was in a very bad situation during the time of Minsk-1 and Minsk-2. And maybe it was good to stop the fighting, at least for the most part through these negotiations. I would not blame Merkel for this. I would blame her, however, that after seeing that the Minsk Accords didn’t work, she resisted, for example, the armament of Ukraine. I mean, we know now that she always resisted the sending of NATO’s weapons and advisors to Ukraine until the very last minute. And, of course, also after the invasion of Crimea and Donbas, she signed the treaty for Nord Stream 2 which I think maybe was the biggest mistake of her whole time in office.
So, we have to be ambivalent and fair about her. Not everything she did was bad. But, generally, I think that her legacy is very problematic. Her legacy is war in Europe and Germany’s dependence on Russia and, by the way, also dependence on China. She has always been very soft on these post-Communist dictatorships of Russia and China. She always wanted a partnership with Beijing and Moscow. And I never understood why? As someone who had grown up in East Germany and who knew what communist dictatorship was, why she decided to be so soft on the Kremlin and China and bring us, the Germans, and also all parts of the European Union into such a dependence on these dictatorial states?
Let me also ask the question – why did she have so little empathy for Ukraine? I mean, she went to all the parades on the Red Square to sit next to Putin but resisted publicly supporting Ukraine in a very visual way. I’m not sure why this is the case. This is maybe for historians of the future to research. She had a much warmer relationship with Russia than, for example, with the smaller countries of Eastern Europe, like Czechia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. It always seemed to me that she was not so interested in developing Germany’s relationships with our allies in Eastern Europe, and was much more interested in developing our relationship with the Kremlin. This is certainly a part of a very, very problematic legacy that needs to be talked about in Germany and that needs to be discussed and analyzed in the coming years.
Kovalenko: During the war, we hear criticism of Germany from Ukraine regarding slow supplies of weapons. The US are also criticizing Germany for that. For example, retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe tweeted that Germany should be a leader of Europe and it needs to help Ukraine to defeat the Kremlin and be seen as having contributed significantly to Ukrainian success. Can we expect the turning point in German foreign policy, the so-called Zeitenwende?
Behrends: Well, I think this criticism is fully justified. I think there should be more help for Ukraine, especially more heavy weapons. But on the other side, we have to remember what is the legacy of the 16 years of Angela Merkel is, that we have an army that is very low on supplies for the defense of NATO and our country. So, we don’t have that much to give. We could give more. I agree with that. But, certainly, we are also not in a position like Americans or British, that they have tons of supplies that we could ship to Ukraine.
I would insist that there is a policy change, of course, because the whole Nord Stream was stopped and in the foreseeable future will be no more energy partnership with Russia. There will be no partnership with Russia at all. You know, this was always what Merkel was trying to save after 2014. I mean, after 2014, from the side of German academia, of German experts on Eastern Europe, there was a lot of criticism already of this Merkel policy with Nord Stream. It was not only criticized in Ukraine and Poland but it was also criticized by the experts and the specialists here in Germany, including myself, if I may say. But Angela Merkel always tried to save the partnership with Russia. And I think this has gone. This is, if you will, the type of Die Zeitenwende, the strong part of Die Zeitenwende. The weak part is that we could do more for Ukraine. You have to see the reluctance of Germany when it comes to supplying weapons and when it comes to war, which is sort of a legacy of World War II and the sort of Pacifist agenda that is very strong in parts of German society.
Also, a part of the government seemed to think that it would be very unpopular to send too many weapons to Ukraine. You can also see that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction in German society. Many Germans think that we should do more for Ukraine. This is not necessarily a very popular policy and we also have to see that German society, along with Polish society, did even more and did a lot for Ukrainian refugees and welcomed them and integrated them into our schools and football clubs and everything, churches and so on, and provided them with living space and donated a lot of money for them. So, I wouldn’t say it’s all black and white. Many things going on in this country. Many debates going on. I think our government – maybe this would be my conclusion – is moving much slower than our society. I think our society is much more ready to help Ukraine than parts of the establishment in the Foreign Office, in the Chancellery, and so on. We want to keep this very timid because they don’t want to get too much involved and want to outsource these things to the Americans. But in German society – if you travel around the country – there’s a lot of sympathy for Ukraine. You can still see a lot of Ukrainian flags on public buildings and private houses. Even in the villages where I was over the summer people have Ukrainian flags in front of their houses. So the stereotype that large parts of German society are supporting Russia is certainly not true.
Kovalenko: I am pessimistic that Putin’s era of nostalgia for the Soviet Union will end in Russia anytime soon, even if President Putin will leave his post. What is your opinion, Dr. Behrends? Does Russia have a chance to overcome the Soviet past and finally pursue a path toward a civilized country?
Behrends: Actually, I’m rather more optimistic. I think that Russia also has positive sides. Well, let me start like this! Of course, Russia at this point is losing its best people. The best people are leaving for the United States and Europe, Israel, and so on. And this is very, very tragic. Many of them are already in Berlin and I’ve met them here. This will be a big problem because these are the most educated and liberal people that are leaving now. But still, I think that in comparison to other countries, Russia has a rather educated society and that we should not just give up on the Russians, per se. Why do I say that? Because I think most Russians that have come to Germany or the United States, or France, or any country in the last 30 years, they integrated very well into our system. Because they understood that here in our system, you have to behave differently and you get different opportunities. They just behave in the way they behave because they live in the terrible Russian system. Not everybody carries these values of the Russian political or societal system. But I think, you know, if you live in Russia, you sort of have to go along with it, whether you like it or not.
My second point – I don’t think that there is such a thing as stability in autocracies. I don’t think that the legitimacy of Putin goes very far. You know, I think even in the Russian elites, many people don’t care much about Crimea. They would rather have their houses on Miami Beach or Niece. You know, all of this Russian patriotism always seems sort of shallow to me. Why do I say that? You know, none of these people would send, for example, their kids to the Russian army. On the contrary, the Ukrainians are very patriotic. They sign up for voluntary duty. They sign up for the army to defend their country. But if you look at the Russian elites, none of them would be so stupid to go into the Russian army and fight for these things that Putin says Russians should fight for. They all would rather be in Miami or Paris, or Switzerland.
So, I don’t think it goes very far, and we don’t know how it will end. Rather, there are only two options. If you look back at Russian politics over the last hundred years, there is no civilized transfer of power like in democratic states or like even in Ukraine, where we had the first civilized transfer of power in the 1990s from Leonid to Leonid. As we all know, in Russia, it’s always death or “putsch” [a coup]. So, for Putin there will also be death or “a putsch”, right? He’s not that old and he could go on for another 20 years. But there could also be “a putsch” like with Khrushchev or Gorbachev. Then all it could end tomorrow. So, I think what smart European politicians, and also American politicians should do is to be prepared for both [scenarios]. Be prepared for Putin hanging on because nobody dares to kick him out of office. But also, be prepared for the eventuality that it ends tomorrow. Why would it end tomorrow? Because, if you think about it, the Russian leaders that lose wars or rather don’t win wars, always get into trouble. And there will also be a sort of reform or a revolution that is triggered by these events.
You know, you can see this with the Crimean War. Russia got great reforms after the Crimean War. You can see it in 1905 when Russia got the Constitution because they lost the war. You can see the complete breakdown in 1917. You can see the collapse of the Soviet Union after the Afghanistan war that ended in 1989. So, I think something similar could also happen very easily if this war is not successful. And I don’t think it is very successful at this point, right? I mean, if the aim was to destroy the Ukrainian state – and I think this was the aim in the beginning – then Putin is not doing very well. I think it could be a very dangerous situation for him. Because the Russian elites would let someone like Putin get away with all these massacres and war crimes if he wins the war. But if he doesn’t win the war, then things can change very quickly. And we know if there’s a new leader in Russia, what they always do? What did Khrushchev do in the secret speech? Or what did Gorbachev do after Brezhnev? They blame everything on the guy who was in power before them. And what was the person saying? You know, this is my historical prediction for you! What will the [Russian] president say that comes after Putin? He will look at Russia and say, “Well, we are in a terrible state. We have a terrible economy. We have terrible relations with the rest of the world. And why is this all the case? Because Vladimir Vladimirovich did all these horrible things, so now we’re going to do it differently all over again.”
And they’re going to be some sort of people’s choice whether this will change Russia or not. I don’t know. It might be that it [time after Putin] won’t change Russia that much. We have to see. I mean, Gorbachev tried and he failed. I think what is very important – if Putin should go – is to watch whether the Russians will dismantle this criminal apparatus of the Russian secret police that has existed basically since 1917 under different names of Cheka, NKVD, KGB, FSB, and so on. As long as this exists, I don’t think there will be a civilized Russian state. I also think that Russia has to get rid of this imperial view of the world and start nation-building. If Russia could see itself not as an empire, but as a nation that needs so much nation-building. Most Russians live so terribly. If the Russian government wouldn’t concentrate everything on being a world power and spending money on this, but on the welfare of their citizens, then we could see a very different Russia. But of course, at this point, I have to admit that this is sort of like a utopia, or it seems somewhat utopian. But, you know, if you study Russian history, then you see that you have long periods of stagnation. And if the changes come, they sometimes come very, very fast. And we also have to be prepared for these very, very fast periods of revolutionary changes that I think are so very typical of Russian history.
Kovalenko: After the war, will Europe return to business as usual with Russia? I don’t believe that Ukraine will return to business as usual with Russia after so many atrocities, deaths, destruction, and genocidal war crimes.
Behrends: Yes, I agree with you. As a German, I would say that there’s still no business as usual between Germany and Poland or Germany and Israel, although the war was 80 years ago. I mean, for a very long time, Russian relations are going to suffer from this horrible genocidal war that we’re seeing now. And the Russian name will be tainted for a very long time. But still, I think, as with Germany, we should set conditions for re-integrating post-Putin Russia into the world because what other chance do we have? But Russia would have to pay reparations. It would have to punish war criminals. It will have to rebuild its political system. And then we can talk about, you know, slowly getting back to something like business as usual. Russia would have to accept, of course, the full responsibility for this war of aggression against Ukraine, but also against Georgia and other post-Soviet countries, and make it the same way as West Germany accepted responsibility for the Second World War after 1949. I think this is sort of the condition for getting slowly back to something like business as usual with Russia. But it will take decades and it will be very difficult. It will be a very difficult process of reconciliation. And of course, also Ukraine will have to play a role in this. So, here is a question for Ukrainians – how much in the future they will be willing to get back to some sort of well, not exactly friendly maybe, but normal relations with Russia? We see from the German-Polish example or even the German – Israeli example that this is possible. But we also know that we’re talking about many decades and very sincere efforts.
Kovalenko's Blog 