There are two ways guaranteed to extend the impact of a piece of journalism: query climate change and question the right of divorced fathers to see their children. I can now add a third: offend Mother Russia. On 4 March the Age ran my op-ed on the war and peace propensity of Putin’s Russia. It has become the most assailed 900 words that I have ever written.

Over 10,000 people signed an online petition. Made up of both Russians and Russian émigrés, the petitioners demanded (even as Putin readied for an invasion of Ukraine) that I publicly apologise for ‘nationalism, bullying and abuse’.

My offending line? ‘From the terror of the Stalinist purges and the barbarity of the Russian invasion of Germany in 1944-45, through the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the laying waste of Chechnya in the 2000s, to the propping up of the Syrian regime today, Russia has been far more effective at suppressing civil society than facilitating it.’

Editorials in mainstream Russian media outlets quickly labelled this ‘racism’. I was, they said, calling ethnic Russians ‘barbarians’. One tweet called me an ‘Australian Goebbels’. My inbox was bombarded. One woman, Soviet-style, began her campaign by requiring me to seek psychological counselling. She is lobbying George Brandis to retain section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act so I can be prosecuted for not sharing her view of the Red Army.

Many petitioners, applying Stalin’s maxim ‘remove the man and you remove the problem’, demanded I be fired. A young woman apparently tore up her university application form and resolved to attend an institution where her assumptions would not be questioned. The otherwise incensed trawled my previous publications for evidence of further thought crime. Surely, they asked, Australian law must prevent this man from writing, let alone teaching, such things?

The ‘president of the Russian Youth Council of Australia’ reminded me cryptically that ‘if apology does not come in soon, the situation will get out of control. Consider this yet another warning.’ One denouncer, I am assuming from overseas, signed off with ‘Wellcome to Russia to discuss about it. funсking kiwi sneak [sic]’.

Surely the petitioners acknowledged the academic debate that surrounds Russian foreign policy? Have they never read Antony Beevor? Did not the rape of two million German women and girls by the Red Army — even if stoked by the barbarity of Nazi occupation — dilute its pristine moral virtue? Did two wrongs make a right? ‘Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!’ as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, travelling with the Red Army in 1945, put it. Does all this, because it upsets people, lie beyond historical investigation and reference?

Let me suggest some overlapping syndromes at work here. First, there is an unsettling illiberalism built into Russian public discourse which the west, with its post-Cold War ‘end of history’, ‘we can all get along’ narratives has missed. Anglosphere school children are taught that large parts of their history are shameful — slavery, invasion and colonialism must be atoned for. Many Russian students imbibe their own history in far less critical fashion and eschew counter-narratives.

The indiscriminate Allied bombing of German cities in 1944-45 is the subject of enduring historiographical argument. But imagine if only one interpretation — that such bombing was a just and necessary response to Nazi aggression — were legally and socially acceptable. Imagine a law passed in Canberra making it illegal to condemn the firebombing of Dresden because such condemnation ‘vilified’ the relatives of the now dead Allied pilots who pulled the levers and dropped the incendiaries.

And yet such strictures apply too readily when it comes to a discussion of the Russian past. The years 1939-41 when, in a pact with Nazi Germany, the USSR invaded Poland and the Baltic states, were ignored by my detractors. Instead, they demanded protection from any version of the second world war which did not depict them as victims of fascism and/or as liberators of Europe from it.

Second, there is a perplexing nationalist hypochondria on display here. This is evidenced in the paradox between the petitioners’ appreciation of their hard-fighting, long-suffering Red Army ancestors and their own contemporary sensitivities. The staggering bravery of many of the soldiers and civilians who fought against Germany in 1941-45 stands in marked contrast to their modern-day defenders who, in the face of even minor, unintended provocation, exhibit none of their stoicism and resolve.

Finally, the petition illustrates an entrenched concept of Mother Russia. Many Russians today cling desperately to the one piece of folklore that validates their Soviet past, that sustained them during the Cold War and that gives legitimacy to Putin in the current crisis over Ukraine.

What the petitioners are desperately trying to do is make emotional and psychological sense of their grim history. It’s an ontological issue; their sense of identity and moral worth is at stake. That is why it’s not simply a historical controversy to them. It ties in with the notion that goes way back to the tsars, of Russia as a ‘holy’ nation, possessed of characteristics that make its people unique. It is a secular form of the idea of ‘the chosen people’. It mirrors the Jewish orthodox concept and explains why great suffering is bearable, indeed necessary, as proof of this uniqueness.

Stalin was, of course, a communist but only insofar as communism provided the means of establishing ‘socialism in one country’, his term for resurrecting the greatness of Russia. How ironic that Stalin as a Georgian should have embraced so absolutely the Russian ideal. A similar irony extends to Adolf Hitler, an Austrian, for whom Germany became the consuming ideal.

All this emphasises the reality that the 1941-45 Russo-German war was not basically an ideological struggle between communism and fascism (which is the standard western interpretation), but the bitterest of national conflicts, whose outcome — victory for Russia/USSR — has sustained Russians ever since in their faith in their providential destiny. The response of the petitioners is an illustration of the intensity and longevity of Russian self-belief.

I have learnt this at the cost of a hate-filled inbox; the consequence of western diplomats learning this lesson too late may be a Ukrainian civil war.

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