The 37-year-old Soviet officer nervously eyed the angry crowd as it swelled against the gates of Dresden’s KGB headquarters. It was December 5th, 1989, and his call for armed backup had elicited, down a crackly line, the curt response. Moscow is silent.
Lieut Col Vladimir Putin marched to the gate and told the heaving mass of East Germans they would be shot by non-existent armed soldiers inside the building if they tried to enter. The bluff worked, and the crowd shuffled back and turned away to find other offices of the Stasi state to ransack.
The loyal Soviet Russia KGB officer felt as if his world and identity were collapsing around him: “I had the feeling that the country was no more . . . It had disappeared,” he later revealed.
He believed that, a speech to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on April 25th, 2005, shows: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.”
Putin’s major preoccupation was not about the economic or political tribulations of his country. Instead, he was concerned with the psychological effects on his beloved Russia. This intensely personal feeling of national humiliation was at the core of his reaction, as also seemed to be the case for millions of Russians.
Russians have the lowest level of trust in their public institutions in the world. The quality of life of the average citizen has declined to a level below that of China’s. Yet Putin retains a remarkable 63 per cent approval rate because of his success as a national psychologist. The rating of his principal adversary, Joe Biden, in contrast, is 33 per cent.
Europe stands on the brink of the first major war since 1945. Russia is very likely to invade Ukraine
After the fall of his much-regretted Soviet Union and the subsequent chaotic free-for-all, Putin managed to rebuild national confidence and collective self-esteem by focusing on Russian courage, endurance and victory during the second World War (or the Great Patriotic War as it is known there). Harnessing this historical narrative was crucial in garnering popular approval for his subsequent ruthless actions in Russia and abroad.
For the first time in the past 200-300 years, Russia faced the real danger that it could be relegated to the second or even the third tier of global powers, Putin warned in 1999. He called on Russians to unite to make sure that the country remained what he called a first-tier nation.
He built on the wartime notion of material self-sacrifice in the cause of national pride. The aim was to create a highly nationalist and belligerent stance towards the western world. This stance rebuilt a sense of self-worth and confidence in tens of millions of people who had experienced a national humiliation as a very personal one.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance that such national collective emotions play in human affairs throughout history. In Russia at least, they seem powerful enough to compensate for plummeting standards of living and negligible trust in government; and sufficient to yield an approval rating to an autocratic Putin that is twice that of his US democratic counterpart.
Europe stands on the brink of the first major war since 1945. As President Joe Biden confirmed on Wednesday, Russia is very likely to invade Ukraine. From Putin’s perspective, the 100,000-plus troops massed on the Ukrainian border cannot – and won’t – simply pull back. Why? Because that would be experienced as a slight, a defeat and even a humiliation by Putin – and by tens of millions of Russians.
Excessive power can make a leader impulsive, risk-blind and narcissistic. The interests of the person and his country are welded together and he feels omnipotent, even god-like
Putin and Russia feel as if they are under attack by Nato and the West and deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov has refused to rule out deploying military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela. Comparisons with the 1961 Cuban missile crisis – that he also made – are not trivial. This may seem a little rich after the deployment of chemical weapons by Russian agents in London and Salisbury, and the annexation of Crimea, but this is a widespread perception reinforced by the sight of Nato troops in former Soviet Union countries such as Estonia and Lithuania.
Putin is an autocrat who has dismantled all the institutions that human beings have invented to constrain the effects of unlimited power on leaders’ brains – free elections, free press and an independent judiciary. No human brain can survive unconstrained power for 21 years without it becoming distorted in predictable ways.
Excessive power can make a leader impulsive, risk-blind and narcissistic. The interests of the person and of his country become welded together and he begins to feel omnipotent, even god-like. His judgment and decision-making are often distorted by these changes. It is no surprise that Donald Trump was so in awe of Vladimir Putin.
If Europe is to avoid a wider war, two things must happen. First, the West must not appear weak – Putin’s background, personality and power addiction give him a contempt for weakness. Nato’s withdrawal from the Baltic states, for example, would be a fatal mistake.
But Ukraine is another matter. It is historically complex and an emblem of competing and deeply held world views. A comparison with Northern Ireland, while probably infuriating to many Ukrainians, is worth making.
Second, Putin and those majority of Russians who support him must not feel disrespected, and the West must try to ensure that they do not feel humiliated. Quite how these two competing requirements of strength and humiliation-avoidance can both be delivered in order to avert war will require some of the diplomatic genius that gave rise to the Belfast Agreement.
Prof Ian Robertson is professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin and author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief