And there is a limit to the abilities of observers of it, or of any extreme event such as a volcanic explosion, a rock-strewn snow avalanche or a Titanic-level loss of life when a great ship goes down, to express the intensity of the experience. One has to be there, to live and to survive it, if permanently traumatized.
Thanks to satellite communication in real time, we now see war in our living rooms, face to face and overwhelmed with horror as a massacre of Biblical proportions emerges in the City of Mariupol, Ukraine. It and other cities like it in Ukraine display scenes of utter destruction.
The Russians have been driven east, after taking hideous Putin-style revenge on resistant citizens, and bodies of men, women and children, some with restraints, lie for days motionless in the road, shot dead or cut to pieces. Children were not spared, still less the old and infirm. Death has visited all of these, indiscriminately: they are gone, and suffer no more.
Such is the grisly scene in Ukraine’s unfortunate towns and villages, formerly full of people who loved their country and one another, now gone to glory or hiding in basements trying to breathe quietly and remain undiscovered.
There are no words known in any language to clearly express the extreme horror and revulsion felt by people of any free country which has open media, and who see this endless stream of valor, resolve, and unimaginable cruelty in eastern Europe. We watch, aghast, as such scenes seem unprecedented, never having existed on earth since the fall of man from paradise. For aged Europeans, or their adult children who have lived through or been told about the atrocities of WWII, these things are not unknown.
They are here, right now, on a drastically focused scale, as Russia makes total war on Ukraine. If Putin, and his henchmen, who have grown rich by his largesse, are not stopped there, and soon, the maelstrom will spread.
The world is now 80 years on from the evils of Hitler and his “Deutschland Uber Alles!” fanatic supporters. In the interim, Germany has emerged from defeat and disaster as a near-model democracy with a GPN off the charts. From being formerly considered a repository of violence far down the scale of human depravity, this nation now has largely got it right.
We might hope for a similar future for Russia, but the anguish visited by this ancient, brutal country upon Ukraine will, at conservative estimate, take centuries to heal. We cannot now know what will happen in Russia when the war finally ends and the dust settles; its people, some of whom vigorously opposed the war and others who indifferently let it happen, will be confronted with their own reckoning, for war harms both the aggressor and the victims in insidious ways.
Some of Russia’s poorer citizens have now begun fighting over sugar bought off the back of trucks, as the Russian elite and middle class, who credit Vladimir Putin for their comfortable lives, slowly wake up, one by one to the unstable, dangerous reality which their blind allegiance to an absolute dictator has brought about. Echoes of 1941 are inescapable; the similarities of a nation of rich and varied heritage which gradually atrophies until it goes berserk and blindly follows a certifiable madman over the edge of human decency are all too recent a history.
This must be stated and restated – Putin does not act alone, he has enjoyed broad national support for his leadership in Russia for many years. His face bloated from steroids and with a large team of medical specialists always on call, this man leads a cosseted, protected and luxurious lifestyle which dwarfs that of the most megalomaniacal emperor, and Russia has been unfortunately dominated through history by several of these.
Like many rulers of the past, as well as the ancient Greeks and the Italian Borgias, Putin’s pursuit of total self-insulated protection has included knowledge and use of the most exquisitely agonizing poisons, with which he has publicly and privately dispatched anyone out of his favor. His parents cannot shoulder full blame for this – Putin was the third and last surviving child of two ordinary Russians not known for excessive evils, but who seem to have been simple, salt-of-the-earth types.
His mother was a factory worker, but his father served as personal chef to Lenin and later to Stalin. As a consequence, his bosses would have expected the man to become knowledgeable about uses of food and drink for other purposes than nourishment, as need or executive whim arose. One is grateful for never having lived in their time, or been invited to a banquet at the Kremlin when either of these tyrants was in ascendancy there.
One imagines the father telling his surviving son about the unlimited power of his employers, and the young boy forming a deep resolve to become like them.
But what is the secret to understanding Vladimir Putin? He is not complex, a man whose soul is transfixed with the desire and drive to dominate, perhaps to make up for the humiliations of his humble childhood in which he was bullied by bigger boys. There are no photos of Putin from this period in which he looks happy – only wary and detached.
When a young man chooses his destiny early in life, as Putin did in joining the notorious Russian KGB, he becomes subject to the culture with which he affiliates. Rules of conduct are off the table – nothing is too extreme or too unthinkable, if done in the service of Mother Russia, which for years was synonymous with Communism as the USSR. A creature of this epoch, Putin fears the United States and has all but said so.
During my years of working with the US military, I never heard comments or suggestions that the US intended to go to war on an overt level with Russia, or that this nation, when Communism ceased, was still considered a perpetual powder keg. Men and women just did contingency planning in all of the commands, fine tuned our firepower and capabilities to use it, but stayed ready if the worst occurred. They went about their jobs, uniformed or suited, with conviction that they were doing their best to honor the legacy of freedom into which they were born and the mandate thereby given. One does not go into the military for an easy, safe life. Active armed service is understood otherwise.
Continuing difficulties with cyberattack from Moscow or China were well known, but largely downplayed in the news. It was thought that this would be the extent of hostilities between our nation and Putin’s.
But Putin had not yet come into absolute power. Now, he has, at least in his mind, but there are signs internal and external to the forbidding Kremlin walls that he, like Khruschev, Antonov, Molotov, Brezhnev and the other would-be kings that his time in power is limited, as is his life.
Such a man is not to be feared, but he is to be pitied. For such total surrender to the worst of human or animal instincts to possess or kill, there is a coming reckoning, and the US must stand strong through these months and years until it comes about.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
