Note on Whataboutism

Protesters in Venceslas Square, Prague. Photo by AFP-Yonhap via The Korea Times. It's getting very international.

 

Wild day yesterday, starting with the radio news that President Zelenskyy had rejected a Russian request to start peace negotiations in Belarus (Belarus, he said, was contributing to the Russian invasion and wasn't a neutral country) and going on to the news that he'd changed his mind after a call from President Lukashenka assuring him that Belarus would not be sending any missiles, planes, or helicopters across the border as long as the talks went on: 

“I will say frankly that I do not really believe in the outcome of this meeting, but let them try to make sure that no citizen of Ukraine has any doubt that I, as a president, did not try to stop the war,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, Russia's diplomatic isolation continued to grow: Germany announced that it would reverse decades-old policy and start contributing lethal assistance to Ukraine—antitank missiles and Stingers—and the chorus of countries ready to cut Russia out of the Swift bank transfer system grew to include Japan and Hungary. Europe and Canada joined to ban Russian planes from their airspace. As I noted yesterday, important classical music figures like Putin's pal Valery Gergiev are unable to perform outside Russia; the national Polish and Swedish soccer teams are likewise refusing to play against Russia in the World Cup heats. Ukraine filed criminal charges against Russia in the International Criminal Court, and demanded Russia's expulsion from the United Nations Security Council (no, that's not going to happen). Switzerland—Switzerland!—has tossed its I-don't-know-how-many-centuries tradition of unbreakable neutrality and joined the EU in imposing financial sanctions on Russia, and may even be sending weapons. Oil monster BP is outright dumping a $25-billion stake in Rosneft:

BP chairman Helge Lund said that, while BP had operated in Russia for more than 30 years and had "brilliant Russian colleagues", Russia's attack on Ukraine was "having tragic consequences across the region" and represented a fundamental change.

"It has led the BP board to conclude, after a thorough process, that our involvement with Rosneft, a state-owned enterprise, simply cannot continue."

And then there was Turkey: 

👇🏼👇🏼 https://t.co/HRynoAaCkF

— Laffy (@GottaLaff) February 27, 2022

Putin seemed more personally isolated inside Russia as well, when two very big oligarchs with Ukraine connections, Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska—yes, him—posted calls for peace on the Telegram platform, and the Facebook page of Anatoly Chubais, a mastermind of the 1990s privatization, posted a photograph of the politician and writer Boris Nemtsov, murdered, presumably on Putin's orders, on 27 March 2015:

Signs of cracks in Russian elite. First Fridman, then Deripaska. Now Anatoly Chubais has just posted picture of Boris Nemtsov on his Facebook page. Nemtsov, seen by some as Yeltsin’s first choice 4 president, was murdered in front of the Kremlin seven years ago today pic.twitter.com/2jrLm4A3Oe

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) February 27, 2022

And the war itself continues to go badly for them, as far as anybody can tell; not that the giant Russian army will actually be defeated, because its resources will always be far greater than those of its chosen enemy, but it's already much costlier than Putin seems to have imagined. The Ukrainian soldiers and irregulars fight furiously and with imagination, while many of the Russian soldiers don't even know where they are or why they've been put there and are fleeing or surrendering. Ukrainian forces are very good at disrupting supply chains, too, and Russians keep running out of stuff. The big plans of the invasion, where they were going to surround all the biggest cities and march in to "decapitate" the municipal governments (somebody on the radio keeps using that word, I believe figuratively but it's hard to be sure), have all failed so far. It could be that it just takes that bit longer than they planned, and they'll be in command of the whole country by April (something like half the army is still in reserve, I heard), or maybe by this Friday, who knows, but I'm thinking a slog like Iraq, or Afghanistan (theirs or ours), that could last for years, where no Russian soldier is ever safe because nobody can ever be trusted, the kind of error led to the death of the entire Soviet regime. Or the First World War, at the end of which an exhausted and enraged public was ready to say goodbye to the Romanov dynasty, and the Tsar and his family were all shot dead.

Obvious though it may seem to you and me, it's not obvious to the guardians of conventional wisdom that Russia's Afghanistan adventure destroyed the USSR, though the story begins in a familiar way, with Brezhnev's intelligence community lying to him about the possible consequences:

after a KGB report claimed that Afghanistan could be taken in a matter of weeks, Brezhnev and several top party officials agreed to a full intervention. Contemporary researchers tend to believe that Brezhnev had been misinformed on the situation in Afghanistan. His health had decayed, and proponents of direct military intervention took over the majority group in the Politburo by cheating and using falsified evidence. 

The conventional wisdom says it's liberalism, in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev, as you can hear from sources from a more or less neutral or even liberal standpoint, like Wikipedia,

the process of internal political, economic and ethnic disintegration within the USSR which resulted in the end of its existence as a sovereign state. It was an unintended result of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system, in an attempt to end the "Era of Stagnation".

or Seth Jones at Lawfare in 2019:

The Soviet Union crumbled because of a complex set of reasons that included: political and ideological factors, including years of relentless suppression of political opposition followed by Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring); economic challenges from a state-run economy; military factors, including the country’s exorbitant defense spending; and social factors like endemic corruption and the desire of ethnic communities in Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Western republics, and the Baltics to become independent. The war in Afghanistan was not a primary cause of the Soviet collapse, though it was an example of Moscow’s military overreach.

And I feel sure Putin would agree: the cause of the breakup, the "biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century", is the Party's turn to supporting democracy and public truthfulness, which destroyed the social discipline instituted by Comrade Stalin and left people doing whatever they wanted, and detestable anarchy ensued. 

But there's certainly another way of looking at it: that the Afghan war, along with the "challenges" of the ill-run (not merely state-run but incompetently and corruptly managed) economy, made it inevitable. As Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash argued in 1999, glasnost' began before Gorbachev, in response to the disasters of the war and the increasing cynicism with which the population responded to it, making the leadership reluctant to use the military, making the military look weak, making the multiethnic "union" look more like a racist empire, and making the public angry enough to start speaking out:

The war impacted Soviet politics in four reinforcing ways: (1) Perception effects: it changed the perceptions of leaders about the efficacy of using the military to hold the empire together and to intervene in foreign countries; (2) Military effects: it discredited the Red Army, created cleavage between the party and the military, and demonstrated that the Red Army was not invincible, which emboldened the non Russian republics to push for independence; (3) Legitimacy effects: it provided non-Russians with a common cause to demand independence since they viewed this war as a Russian war fought by non Russians against Afghans; and (4) Participation effects: it created new forms of political participation, started to transform the press/media before glasnost, initiated the first shots of glasnost, and created a significant mass of war veterans (Afghansti) who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the communist party.

It's worth remembering (as Seth Jones doesn't) that the disintegration of the empire began long before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, but after the Moscow government decided to quit Afghanistan—

At a Politburo meeting on October 17, 1985, Gorbachev read letters from Soviet citizens expressing growing dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan—including “mothers’ grief over the dead and the crippled” and “heart-wrenching descriptions of funerals.” For Gorbachev, the Soviet withdrawal was primarily about domestic politics. The downsides—including in blood—were too high and now outweighed any geostrategic benefits.

—in Kazakhstan, 1986, in student protests against the replacement of an ethnic Kazakh party leader by an ethnic Russian one, and then moving on to the nominally independent Warsaw Pact nations, Poland beginning in 1988 and Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in 1989. The Afghan withdrawal was completed by late 1989; Estonia seceded from the USSR in March 1990, and Lithuania, Moldova, Latvia, Armenia, and Georgia began the process of seceding as well, with local parties defeating the Communist Party in free elections, and so on. 

What emerges from considering the timeline from 1985 through 1991 is that everything Gorbachev did, including and especially the withdrawal from Afghanistan, was meant to preserve the Soviet Union and the "leading role" of the Communist Party. And it's clear that he failed at that. But it's equally clear that no other approach could have succeeded. The failures of Afghanistan (of which everybody was well aware before glasnost' began allowing them to talk about it publicly), and the unimpeded successes of the Solidarity union in Poland, showed the Warsaw Pact members that they were safe from an intervention like those of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and the Warsaw Pact members showed the constituent republics, from Estonia and Lithuania to Ukraine and Georgia, that they were safe too. What Gorbachev succeeded in doing was creating a space in which it was able to happen almost bloodlessly, and that's not a small thing at all, either.

What Putin is now attempting to do, from this perspective, is to prove that the USSR could have been saved by the opposite means of what these people think of as "toughness", violent and ruthless, the politics of fear, and indeed that it can still be restored. He is mistaken. He can bring about enormous damage and suffering if he isn't stopped or talked out of it (I believe people like Deripaska and Roman Abramovich are making efforts to bring this about, and the ongoing negotiations in Belarus could be an outcome of this), and he is already hurting himself and his friends very badly as well, but he will never get his wish.

The correct answer to whataboutism—like when you tell somebody that Russian forces shouldn't tell lies about Ukraine to justify their invasion and somebody replies, "Well, what about Iraq? remember Colin Powell and those aluminum tubes?"—is that nobody is the person who has never done anything bad, but you can aspire to learn from your mistakes, and those of others. Putin seems to have become unable to learn.