The Trump administration is trying to coerce Ukraine into accepting a peace settlement with Russia even though Russia may not want peace. The deal would basically have Ukraine capitulate to Putin. This reminds me of the books The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) by Timothy Snyder and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) by Masha Gessen. Both books were written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and our 2020 and 2024 elections, but the two books complement each other in their portraits of Putin and Russia. They present pictures that aid in understanding the present Ukraine situation and illuminate for me aspects of our own politics. Reading them did not lead to a full-blown depression, but it did not improve my mood.

          Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is longstanding. The Soviet Union, founded in 1922, was a federation of national republics that included Ukraine. However, during the 1970s and 1980s every Soviet Republic increasingly felt as though they were being exploited by some other republic. In March 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the USSR, organized a referendum on whether to maintain the Soviet Union as a single entity. Voters in nine of the fifteen constituent republics voted in favor of unity, but six republics boycotted the vote. A few weeks later, Georgia held its own referendum and voted to secede from the USSR. Two months later, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR, as did Chechnya, which had been part of Russia. The latter led to a destructive war with Russia. (In August 1991, President George H.W. Bush went to Kyiv and urged Ukrainians not to leave the Soviet Union, saying “Freedom is not the same as independence.”) More than 90% of the Ukrainians voted for independence.       A coup to remove Gorbachev failed, but in the aftermath, Gorbachev resigned and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, became increasingly popular. He was soon head of the Soviet Union and removed Russia from the USSR ending the federation. Putin followed him as president of Russia in 1999. After a brief hiatus (2008-2012), Putin has been elected president ever since.

          Putin proclaims religious, ethnic, and near mythical connections between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder says Putin sees Ukraine as “an inseparable organ of the virginal Russian body” and that Putin has said that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people.” The independent Ukraine that came into being in 1991 may have been tolerable to Putin as long as it remained receptive to Russia’s desires and provided it with oil, food and precious metals. Viktor Yanukovych was elected head of Ukraine in 2010 and, according to Snyder, began his term “by offering Russia essentially everything that Ukraine could give, including basing rights for the Russian navy on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.” At the time it was understood that this installation would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

          The Ukrainian population, however, increasingly looked not to Russia for guidance and inspiration but to the West. When Yanukovych canceled an association agreement with the European Union in 2013, pro-European demonstrations broke out in Ukraine. After several elections, the present government took power, and as we all know, this is not a Ukraine that takes orders from Moscow.

          The westward turn by Ukraine has been especially troubling for those who have “Mother Russia” feelings about Ukraine. While former Soviet satellite countries and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007, the EU had not extended into any territory that had been part of the original Soviet federation of 1922.

          This history and Putin’s viewpoints about Ukraine struck me as quintessentially Russian. The first time I read in Crime and Punishment about Raskolnikov’s kissing the soil at the crossroads, I tried to understand his semi-mystical feeling for Mother Russia. Snyder writes that Russian slavophiles believe “that Russia was endowed with a particular genius. Orthodox Christianity and popular mysticism, they maintained, expressed a depth of spirit unknown in the West. The slavophiles imagined that Russian history had begun with a Christian conversion in Kyiv a thousand years before.”

          But as I thought about these aspects of Russian culture, I wondered whether there were counterparts in American history. Putin apparently believes that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, and it is Russia’s destiny to include Ukraine. How much different is that from the nineteenth century American faith in “manifest destiny”? At the time, many felt that it was the express mission of Americans to push onward to the Pacific even though other peoples already lived there. Didn’t the use of the word “destiny” imply that this path was preordained by the Almighty? Putin and others believe that Russia is exceptional, distinct and more holy than other lands. And Americans? Of course, America is exceptional, and just below the surface of that notion is a kind of religious belief. Surely when Jesus returns, he will not go to Galilee, but instead will come to the holiest of holies, America. (That is, if he can navigate our immigration laws, for nothing in them would allow him to enter. He might be able to walk over the river, but what if a border wall keeps him out, and he is consigned to a squalid camp on the Mexican side?)

          Perhaps finding links between Mother Russia, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism is a stretch, but comparing some aspects of recent Russian and American political history is not.

(Concluded April 30)