– For Putin, Ukraine is an ideological threat. If Ukraine is a democracy, if Ukraine is a normal country, maybe Russia will strive for something similar. Of course, Putin will have none of this. He would put an end to his regime and it annoys him enormously, says Anne Applebaum.
– If you are looking for why Putin is obsessed with Ukraine, then I think we are at the core here.
It’s five in the morning in Washington DC. On the phone, American author, historian and journalist Anne Applebaum seems to be talking for hours already.
– So you mean that Putin is afraid of some kind of contagion effect?
– It’s probably not that simple. But Ukraine has contracted the virus of democracy and it could spread to Russia. Thus, Putin concluded that Ukraine has no right to exist. Not only do they have no right to be a nation, they also have no right to live. He has no problem killing them. It has no problem destroying their power grid. Putin feels he has the right to destroy Ukraine as a nation, he says.
AWARD-WINNING: Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and historian. You have been writing about Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 1990s. Photo: Rex/NTB.
sea View
Holodomor
There’s a lot to say about Anne Applebaum (58), but we can keep it as simple as possible. She is an award-winning journalist, historian and author with areas of specialization in international politics and Eastern Europe. Moreover. She has published several books and in 2004 she was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for the book “The Gulag – A History of the Soviet Camps”, about the Soviet labor camp network.
It was during the work on this that he became interested in the stories of the so-called “kulaks”. Starved, killed and displaced Ukrainian farmers in the 1930s. In 2017 he published the book “Red Hunger – Stalin’s War against Ukraine”, about what Ukrainians call Holodomor, the famine that claimed the lives of nearly four million Ukrainians in 1932/1933. The purpose of the book was, among other things, to document how the Holodomor was a deliberate policy by Stalin to intimidate Ukrainian peasants and stifle Ukrainian culture.
Anne Applebaum believes she sees many similarities between this story and what is happening today.
– The way Putin looks at Ukraine eerily parallels how Stalin looked at Ukraine. For Stalin, the country was a potential source of nationalist and anti-Soviet ideology. He perceived it as a place he had to destroy, tame, repress, says Applebaum.
Embarrassingly superficial
Cannibalism
In “Red Hunger” he writes about the collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside. How Soviet activists go from house to house looking for food to confiscate. They dig gardens, lift floorboards, drive stakes through pipes to find what families may have hidden. They take livestock, strip family members of their clothes, and send them out into the cold. The book describes how starving people suddenly fall dead along the roads, in the bread lines, in the fields. Desperate ones eat grass, frogs, belts, anything. There are stories of cannibalism.
Just before Christmas, the European Parliament passed a resolution recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide against Ukrainians.
– The Holodomor is part of why Ukrainians are fighting so hard now. Because they know that if the Russians take over, they will be eliminated as a nation and society. They will not be allowed to speak their language. They don’t want the right to their own culture. They will not have the ability to govern themselves. They will be colonized. They know the consequences of not fighting are death, Applebaum says.
In Russia, the history of the Holodomor remains a non-history. It’s embedded in the overall narrative about the Soviet famine of the 1930s, he says.
– Firstly, Russians do not know history, and secondly, recognizing it would also mean recognizing that Ukraine has a unique history. Russia’s goal is to insist that the two countries have the same history, Applebaum says.
– The end of Putin
“Same Tactics”
“First comes dehumanization. Then come the murders,” Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year. “In Russian propaganda, Ukraine is a fake country, a place which, as Putin himself says, is nothing more than the southwestern Russia”, an inalienable part of the “historical, cultural and spiritual territory” of Russia.
Applebaum therefore believes he is hearing the same “genocidal attitude” from Russia today as he did ninety years ago.
– Russia wants to destroy Ukraine and has no guilty conscience. Whether that means starving Ukrainians in the 1930s, or torturing them and taking away their food and electricity now. They systematically threaten civil society. They take over cities, kill leaders, bring the Russian language back into schools and bring Russians to run social institutions, he says.
Blacklisted
Applebaum has been called “a conservative idol”. She is married to former Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski. Two weeks before the interview, she was blacklisted by the Russian authorities and will no longer be allowed to enter Russia. She believes the war has led Europe to “finally see Russia as a physical threat”.
– Russia is a rational country. You just have to understand the logic behind it. I don’t think Putin is crazy. I don’t think he’s psychotic. He just has a different view of the world and it’s very important that we understand what it is. His world view is that Russia is a great power and deserves to crush whoever it wants to crush. The reason why it’s so important that Europe in particular opposes it is that yes, I think it’s true that if it takes Ukraine, then Norway could be the next country. Or Poland. Or the Baltic states, says Applebaum.
Putin has no respect for borders, international law or human rights, Applebaum believes. As he sees it, a large country has a perfectly right to crush a smaller country.
– It’s not stupidity or madness, it’s not illogical. But it’s evil. And we need to be able to understand it in order to identify it. And we have to say no, as often as possible. What we have to do is protect Ukraine and restore borders. When Russia sees others react, it will stop invading. I think it really is that simple, she says.
– Right now Russia is on the sidelines, it is the Ukrainians who are winning. But since Russia is unable to occupy new areas, it is trying to destroy the Ukrainian economy and infrastructure. And there they had some success. But I can’t imagine a scenario where the Ukrainians surrender. From what I understand they will continue to fight until they run out of weapons. What we need is to get to a point where Russia realizes it has lost. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re there yet, says Anne Applebaum.
