Adnan R. Khan is an independent writer and photographer who has covered migration and refugee issues for the past decade.
A year ago, when Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian army to invade Ukraine, his declared goal was twofold.
First, the Russian president claimed, ethnic Russians living on Ukrainian territory needed protection from a “Nazi” regime in Kyiv determined to cleanse the region of all traces of Russian culture and history. But this had no basis in fact. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish; his parents are Holocaust survivors. And Russians in Ukraine’s east, in cities like Kharkiv, Kherson and Odesa, have long spoken Russian and carried on their Russian traditions; it is only since the start of the invasion that many have reportedly turned away from their mother tongue.
Mr. Putin’s second reason for invading was more far-reaching, and far more troubling. He laid claim to a vast territory spanning all of current Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and declared that huge swathes of this region had been catastrophically carved away from Russia by the Soviets, whom he blamed for betraying the Empire. “May God judge them,” he intoned.
Whether his appeal to God was genuine or merely instrumental is impossible to know. But his rhetoric certainly echoed the “Russian World” mythology peddled by the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. According to that ideology, the Russian Empire represented the fabled “Holy Rus,” a beacon of moral righteousness that had withstood the forces of evil for centuries. In the past, the enemy was the Roman Catholic Church; today it is the decadent, liberal West, including its military alliance, NATO.
Millions of Russians – even those who wouldn’t call themselves practicing Orthodox Christians – accept this worldview. In its secularized form, the Russian political scientist Emil Pain calls this the ”imperial syndrome”: a phenomenon by which ethnic Russians believe they are pursuing a civilizing mission, and that rebuilding the Russian Empire is the only way to ensure Russia’s national survival.
We’ve seen this kind of mentality before. Germany was at a historical nadir in the early 1930s, as it faced crushing economic hardships because of the reparations it was forced to pay following its defeat in First World War, compounded by the Great Depression. The atmosphere was primed for the emergence of a strong leader promising to return Germany to the great-power status its people believed it deserved.
Mr. Putin ascended to the presidency at a similar low point in Russian history. The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 hadn’t delivered the prosperity western powers had promised. The 1990s was a period of hardship and uncertainty, and of deep disappointment in western political and economic systems.
Russians remember that time vividly, according to Nikolay Zyuzev, a philosophy and sociology professor from Russia’s northwest who came to Canada in 2009 to escape Mr. Putin’s growing authoritarianism. Despite all his flaws, Mr. Putin did bring some stability to the Russian economy, Mr. Zyuzev told me, and a sense of security emerged from his promises to rebuild Russia’s military. He created a decent standard of living for many Russians, especially those in the cities. People could afford to go to cafes and restaurants and theatres; they could afford vacations to the beaches of Turkey.
But when Mr. Zyuzev returned to Russia in 2015 to take up a prestigious post at the Pitirim Sorokin Syktyvkar State University, what he found was unsettling. During his absence, many of his Russian compatriots – even well-educated colleagues – had succumbed to the imperial syndrome.
“Life was good, but it had come at cost,” he said. “People had lost the ability to think critically. They ignored the facts in front of them and instead believed everything state media said: ‘Ukraine was overrun by Nazis, NATO was preparing to destroy Russia...’ ”
Even today, a year after the invasion and the imposition of sanctions, the everyday lives of Russians remain largely unaffected. St. Petersburg’s cafes and bars are still open, life in Moscow looks much as it has over the past two decades, and Russians are still flocking to Turkish beaches or sipping beers on the banks of the Bosporus.
It’s a frustrating sight for Russian dissidents who escaped to Istanbul after the invasion, horrified by the dark turn their country had taken. They are baffled by the constant flow of Russian tourists filling up shopping districts and Mediterranean beaches, seemingly oblivious to the damage Mr. Putin is doing to the country.
“It’s like they’ve turned their brains off,” Leonid Zilberg, the owner of 7X7 Magazine, an activist publication focused on the plight of Russia’s minority groups, told me recently. “They see only what the government wants them to see.”
They see only the Empire.