Soviet historians often portrayed the days of 1945 as the glorious liberation of Europe from the Nazi threat. That could have some merit if it was not for the fact that the majority of their rape and murder victims were women and children. On their march through Europe in 1945, the British historian Antony Beevor, based on Soviet and German archives, estimated the number of rapes at about 2.5 million. About 1 million civilians were murdered by the Red Army. We all have our buried atrocities. The British in India at Amritsar with the murder of innocent women and children. Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. The Belgians in the Congo under King Leopold. The Japanese throughout the second world war. Most countries have ghosts in the cupboard. If you read humanist anthropologists such as Rutger Bregman, however, the atrocities are due to hierarchy and our ability to ‘follow orders’.
Yet the current bewildered shuttle diplomacy by the Americans to placate Russia is based on a serious misunderstanding of the Russian mindset. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History was an attempt to make the case for the essential ‘decency’ of human beings. The Bregman hypothesis presumes a standard type of anthropology of human nature. The debate centres around the age-old views of human nature; the Hobbesian view of the nasty-sided homo sapiens dependent on the Leviathan of the state to control them, and the Rousseau-led hypothesis of the noble savage corrupted by civilisation. Despite the atrocity-packed 20th Century with the Holocaust and endless wars, crime, and drug abuse, we are sometimes shown a narrative that presents a benevolent view of human beings. The infamous Stanley Milgram experiments in the 1950s showed how 65 per cent of people would, when instructed, elicit possibly fatal electric shocks to people under experimental situations. Milgram saw this as the essential cruel nature of homo sapiens.
Bregman, however, suggests the Holocaust and other atrocities of war are attributable to conformity to orders. He comes from the post-Enlightenment liberal school of rationality. It is the idea that first you set up the abstract human type (a set anthropological specimen which fits all). The conceptions of human rights, universal law etc stem from these ideas. This dominated 20th Century liberal thinking i.e. John Rawls with his concept of the ‘original position’. There is a correct position a person needs to adopt in their thinking about justice and it is universal. Rawls’ position calls for a neutral ‘a priori’ standard view of people irrespective of race, gender, history, location etc. This idea, which underpins liberal philosophy, is prima facie, inaccurate.
More nuanced was the attempt of ‘Phenomenology’ to locate peoples in specific locations, times and cultures. Heidegger maintained that you are thrown into a specific environment, and a specific social context. Hence there is no one anthropological ‘type’. Consciousness is a result of your existence; being in the world.
Trump last week called Putin ‘crazy’ for the latest huge drone and missile strikes on Ukraine. This would appear to suggest an inability to understand the Russian enigma. According to the RUSI think tank (Royal United Services Institute), Russia is mobilising another 160,000 troops. The historical Russian narrative encompasses a civilisational Slavic empire. It occupies Russian culture and literature; it pervades Alexander Dugin’s (Putin’s philosopher) Fourth Political Theory which calls for a Third Way between Russian Bolshevism and fascism. It is evident in the campaigns in Chechnya, Syria, Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine and the belligerent espionage and criminality abroad. This narrative exists throughout Russian society. It also stems from a deep-rooted inferiority complex of Russians towards the West. Russians have never been accepted into the European cultural diaspora; therefore their brutality doubles down, whilst hatred of Europeans is inflamed by constant state propaganda about the second world war and their ‘sacrifice’.
In 1994 The Budapest Memorandum meant Ukraine removing its nuclear capability in exchange for security guarantees from the US, Britain and Russia. The inadmissibility of International agreements is not lost on the Ukrainians. Hence Zelensky’s desire to elicit concrete ‘boots on the ground’ guarantees for any agreements with Russians.
In the Lord of the Flies novel by William Golding, the boys stranded on an island resort to savagery rather than cooperation. This was akin to Hobbes’ view of ‘war of all against all’ in the state of nature. The State and civilisation is needed to control men. Bregman puts it all down to rationalisation and ‘conformity’. Bregman found a real-life example of a group of boys from Tonga, shipwrecked on an island, who, he says, cooperated. Yet this is cherry-picking. The well-documented atrocities of ordinary Russian soldiers during the Ukrainian war appear systematic. Unfortunately, there are, in place and time, certain countries that exhibit different behaviours based upon specific geographic and cultural histories. The Russians, in this sense, are the ‘King of the Flies’. A Soviet Major remarked in 1945 that:
‘Our fellows were so sex-starved … they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty-much to these grandmothers’ surprise, if not downright delight.’
Beevor mentions, ‘It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act of rape, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.’ When the Russians arrived in East Germany, Penicillin became the most demanded product due to venereal disease brought by the Red Army. Although it is estimated that 90 per cent of German women had abortions, this figure is unrealistic. Anecdotal evidence suggests many German women abandoned the children in hospitals due to the social stigma of a Russian child.
The novelist Vasily Grossman later wrote, ‘The extreme violence of totalitarian systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.’ And this environment is the same today. Russia brutalises its own people. They cannot be seen as equals to other nations when their levels of violence are so horrendous. The Russian nomenklatura operates as a huge kleptocracy. Stalin, Beria, Putin, and Lavrov are ideologically asexual. We are now paying the price for the logical outcomes of Enlightenment and rational thinking. Anyone fighting on the frontline for Ukraine will know the limits of idealistic humanism.
The Russians cannot be beguiled or negotiated with. Europe must face the beast with massive force or face the horrors of 1945.
