The ruthlessness of Russia‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its disregard for the lives of Ukrainian civilians and the appalling slaughter of innocents in towns such as Irpin and Bucha have led many to believe in the inherent evil of Russia, Russians and all things Russian. Donnacha Ó Beacháin, professor of politics at Dublin City University, pursues this view relentlessly in Unfinished Empire. He puts forward indisputable material to support his views and goes back through Russian history to make this case but eschews references that may exonerate some Russians from guilt.
In Putin’s Sledgehammer the journalist and academic Prof Candace Rondeaux of Arizona State University concentrates on the odious exploits of Russia’s private military companies, especially Wagner and its rival Redut, in Ukraine and elsewhere. Her story is more nuanced than Ó Beacháin’s Manichaean version and tells us of non-Russian as well as ethnic-Russian involvement in atrocities.
In one excerpt Rondeaux points out an Irish connection when the military supplies of Redut were paid for by the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, owner of the Aughinish Aluminum plant in Co Limerick; a stark reminder of the international tentacles of Vladimir Putin‘s allies.
After the Tsarist empire came to its bloody end, most of its territory was inherited by the Bolsheviks who fought their way to victory in the even bloodier Russian civil war and established the Soviet Union in 1922. In Unfinished Empire, Ó Beacháin leads us from there through the territorial ambitions of Stalin, his heirs and successors, with a brief pause for the hectic and corrupt reign of Boris Yeltsin, followed by Putin’s current Ukrainian bloodbath.
The conclusion he comes to, and it is shared by many of Russia’s neighbours, is that Moscow is determined to reconstitute the Soviet Union in territory, if not in ideology, through force of arms in the Baltics and Poland, in the Caucasus and even in the steppes of central Asia.
But there are strong reasons to believe that Russia does not now, and may never, have the military capacity to fulfil these ambitions.
Most Russians may support the so-called special military operation in Ukraine. Some may support the reconquest of former colonies but most simply have rallied to the flag on being insistently told by a craven media that their country is under threat not only from Ukrainians but from “the West”.
Others should know better and I know two of them. Dmitry Trenin’s defection from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to the pro-war ranks came as a shock, though when we last met over lunch in Dublin he spoke of his annoyance at a growing Russophobia in the West. Volodya Alexandrov, a charming man who was the Moscow office manager of a leading western newspaper
, has to my great surprise taken to posting his support for the war on social media.
On the other hand I know many Russians who oppose the conflict in particular and Putin’s policies in general. Some of them have fled to the West. One was killed when reporting the earlier Ukrainian conflict and another, my friend and colleague Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin, died a horrible death from poisoning at the hands of the Russian State.
Had Ó Beacháin taken the time to mention the many decent Russians who have risked their lives in opposition to state power through the centuries and had he pointed out that many of his Russian imperialists were not Russians, his book might have given the impression of balanced research rather than polemic.
He correctly describes the racism of many Russians towards the “lesser breeds” of their former empire and towards foreigners in general. I have witnessed the continuous harassment of central Asian and Caucasian workers in Moscow by the police who immediately pounce on those with a darker-than-Russian complexion. One of my neighbours was a frequent victim but shocked the cops when he showed his passport; Michael Slackman, then of Newsday, is now the international editor of the New York Times.
As for the non-Russian Russian imperialists, Catherine the Great, born Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst, was 100 per cent German and Stalin, born Iosif Djugashvili, was 100 per cent Georgian. Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu, accused of war crimes as Putin’s defence minister, is from the Turkic Tuvan community in Siberia.
In many cases those non-Russian leaders of the Soviet Union favoured those from their home regions. Stalin, the Georgian, looked to the Caucasus for associates including Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a friend from Georgian revolutionary days; the great Soviet survivor Anastas Mikoyan from Armenia; and, most evil of all, the merciless killer and torturer Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria from Abkhazia.
As for Ukraine, Mikhail Zygar, in his book All the Kremlin’s Men, writes: “The ‘Ukrainian Clans’ inside the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were traditionally the most powerful. They can be said to have ruled the Soviet Union for decades.”
Their main rivals were the clans from St Petersburg, whose successors are now in charge. Zygar’s views are partially backed by Harvard’s Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy, who has ranked the Ukrainian clans as the second most powerful Soviet political force.
In a rare reference to events in which Russians were the victims, Ó Beacháin touches on a matter in which I have a personal interest, when he deals with the series of apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1992 which cost 300 lives. I took the opportunity to ask Putin directly about what happened. I could see him tense up immediately. His face reddened with anger as he blamed Chechen rebels for the killings.
It was when investigating these bombings as well as business corruption by former KGB officers that my colleague Yuri Shchekochikhin met his death by poisoning. He is buried near Boris Pasternak in the writers’ cemetery at Peredelkino. I went to his grave with another friend, Andrei Mironov, who survived torture by the KGB and confinement in a Gulag prison. He had been arrested so often in the Putin era that most Moscow policemen knew him by name. Andrei supported Ukrainian independence, was an unquestioned admirer of the Maidan demonstrations but ironically lost his life when decapitated by a Ukrainian shell in 2014 near the eastern town of Sloviansk.
Ó Beacháin’s conflation of Russia and the Soviet Union is particularly evident in dealing with the mass rape by Red Army soldiers of perhaps millions of women and girls. The historian Antony Beevor’s vivid description of the barbaric fate of these women is quoted. But the Red Army included Ukrainians, Belarusans, central Asians and soldiers from the Caucasus as well as Russians.
Beevor’s view that the frontline Soviet soldiers in Berlin, unlike those who came behind, often behaved with great kindness to German civilians is not deemed worthy of mention.
All in all, if one ignores the exceptions mentioned above, Ó Beacháin gives fair warning of the dangers posed by Putin and the possibly even greater dangers from some of his likely successors.
In Putin’s Sledgehammer, Rondeaux concentrates on the abhorrent behaviour of Russia’s mercenary forces in Ukraine and carefully distinguishes between these contract soldiers and the raw, barely-trained conscripts who found themselves in the front lines.
She goes on to deal with the rise and dramatic fall of the Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin from petty criminal to celebrity chef who wined and dined George W Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel at the G8 summit in St Petersburg, his move from cookery, and cooking the books, to the sphere of private armies, his short-lived rebellion against the Kremlin and his death in a not-so-mysterious air crash.
[ Yevgeny Prigozhin obituary: From ‘Putin’s chef’ to thorn in his sideOpens in new window ]
Rondeaux’s academic research and old-fashioned journalistic doorstepping, delving into Wagner’s involvement in the massacres of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha and Irpin, is a key section of the book. “One telling sign,” she writes, “that the Russian soldiers who stormed into Bucha that spring were no ordinary soldiers was a corpse, booby-trapped with explosives that was discovered after Ukrainian forces seized the town.” This was a vile Wagner trademark from its earlier campaigns in Libya, where Wagner, now sinisterly rebranded as Russia’s “Afrika Corps”, supports rebel leader Khalifa Haftar.
Rondeaux’s evidence in this case has been supported by German military intelligence, which intercepted radio communications in Bucha and came to the conclusion that Wagner “played the leading role” in the massacres.
In Irpin, the town’s deputy mayor Angela Makeevka spoke to Rondeaux of the raw conscripts being replaced by a different type of soldier: “There were Buryatis, Kadyrovtsi, Wagnerovtsi [ethnic Buryats from Siberia, Chechen troops loyal to the pro-Putin dictator Ramzan Kadyrov and Wagner mercenaries]. You could tell them apart because of the insignia they wore on their shoulders. They had better uniforms. They had better weapons and they had night-vision goggles. They carried themselves with more confidence.”
They also carried themselves with the utmost brutality and have continued to do so. Rondeaux combines vivid journalistic clarity and unbiased academic reflection in Putin’s Sledgehammer. Her work is a welcome addition to the growing library on Putin’s Russia.
Further reading
In Putin: His Life and Times (The Bodley Head, 2022) Philip Short details the rise of a mid-ranking KGB officer to the controller of Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal. He also details the changing political and personal stances of a man once regarded as a much-needed agent of stability in the chaotic Russia of the 1990s. It is a daunting read of 854 pages but a necessary one for those determined to avoid superficial judgments.
Prof Serhii Plokhy of Harvard in The Gates of Europe (Penguin, 2015) provides a sympathetic and detailed history of his native land. He is, all the same, critical of hasty and declamatory statements from Ukrainian politicians in the excitement of the Maidan days that gave Russia and its supporters in the Donbas the excuse to break away from the rest of the country.
All the Kremlin’s Men by Mikhail Zygar (Public Affairs, 2016) is a Who’s Who, often in their own words, of those who have served Vladimir Putin. It’s a must-read in order to understand the mentality of those who have brought themselves into Kremlin’s darkest recesses. Zygar, founder of the now defunct anti-regime TV Dozhd, has paid the price for his work. He lives in exile in Germany and has been sentenced to prison in his absence.
