When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the world witnessed astounding scenes of jubilant Germans crossing from East Berlin into freedom. But the celebration over the demise of one of the Cold War’s cruelest landmarks wasn’t universal. The following month in Dresden, a KGB lieutenant colonel tried to phone the Soviet military to request armed support to crack down on protesters drifting freely across the city as the East German regime collapsed.
As historian Mary Elise Sarotte wrote in “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of a Post-Cold War Stalemate,” the KGB officer was told “Moscow is silent,” meaning the Soviet state would not send in tanks to maintain order or save the East German Communist leadership, words that would haunt him for decades afterward.
The officer’s name was Vladimir Putin.
Fast forward to today, and Mr. Putin, in his decades-long drive to reverse the loss of Russian state power after the collapse of the USSR, finds himself stuck in a war of choice against his neighbor. The Russian autocrat’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February did not go as planned. On the contrary, the war has been a string of humiliations for the Russian army, which is now running low on ammunition. Mr. Putin is no closer today than he was in February to subjecting Ukraine to the status of a client state, while Ukraine continues to receive the necessary support from the U.S. to keep up its war effort.
Yet despite these abject failures, Russia’s president retains his grip on power. The country’s elites have not abandoned him. And the most reliable polls suggest that most Russians continue to support the war, although passively out of fear of what defeat might mean for the stability of their state.
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In this episode of History As It Happens, Russia expert Thomas Graham at the Council on Foreign Relations discusses why Mr. Putin’s power base remains secure for now, and the historical importance of military defeat in the Russian imagination.
“Many of the people in the elites were initially supportive of the war. Those that had their doubts still thought that Ukraine in some way posed a threat to Russia’s security and national identity in some way. And while the war is clearly not going as planned as this point, there is still not a widespread belief that it will inevitably end in defeat for Russia,” said Mr. Graham, who served on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration from 2004 to 2007.
Listen to Mr. Graham discuss Putin’s grip on power by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
