Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine - Masha Gessen (The New Yorker)

 Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not.

By Masha Gessen

The New Yorker, November 1, 2022 

On October 23rd, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, made phone calls to the defense ministers of four NATOmember countries to tell each of them that Ukraine was planning to detonate a “dirty bomb”—that is, a conventional weapon spiked with radioactive material—on its own territory. Three of the four recipients of this information—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—responded that day with an unusual joint statement denouncing the claim. (Shoigu’s fourth interlocutor was Turkey.) Russian leaders and propagandists, who covered the phone calls in some detail, don’t necessarily think that anyone, anywhere, will believe that Ukraine would use a radioactive weapon against its own people just so it can blame Russia for the attack. Shoigu’s phone calls were preëmptive, another example of Russia creating information noise, sowing doubt, asserting the fundamental unknowability of the facts of war. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin said that he had personally directed Shoigu to make the calls, and this claim underscored their true meaning: Russia is preparing for a nuclear, or nuclearish, strike in Ukraine.

This was not the first, second, or third time that Moscow had sent this message. Putin has been rattling the nuclear sabre since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, and, indeed, for many years before. In 2014, months after annexing Crimea and at the height of engineering a pro-Russian insurgency war in eastern Ukraine, Russia changed its military doctrine to open up the possibility of a nuclear first strike in response to a threat from NATO. In 2018, Putin first profferedhis promise—since reprised, and replayed many times by Russian television—that, in a world-scale nuclear event, Russians will go to heaven while Americans “just croak.” The threat of a nuclear strike has become more apparent—more frequently repeated on Russian propaganda channels—since the Ukrainian counter-offensive began, at the end of the summer.

The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not. Earlier this month, the U.K.’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, reassured the audience at a Conservative Party conference that, although Putin’s actions could be “totally irrational,” he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons because he couldn’t risk losing the support of China and India—both of which, Wallace asserted, had put Putin on notice. President Biden has offered a different perspective: Putin, he said, is a “rational actor who has miscalculated significantly” in launching his offensive in Ukraine, and this was the reason he wouldn’t use nuclear arms. (On another occasion, Biden said that a Russian nuclear strike would unleash Armageddon.) Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, has consistently said that the White House takes Putin’s threats seriously and would respond decisively in the case of a nuclear attack. Still, in recent weeks, as Moscow has ramped up its warnings, it has become conventional wisdom, or perhaps just good form, to say that Putin isn’t really going to use nukes. “Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably not drop an atomic bomb on Ukraine,” a September Washington Post editorial began, axiomatically. Bloomberg’s European affairs columnist Andreas Kluth started a recent column by instructing the reader to “put aside, if you can, the growing anxiety about Russian President Vladimir Putin going nuclear in his barbaric war in Ukraine” because, Kluth asserted, the risk “remains small.”

These reassurances tend to rely on arguments that fall into three categories: Putin fears the consequences of a nuclear strike, Putin is unwilling to put Russian citizens at risk, and a nuclear strike will not help accomplish Putin’s strategic goals. Back in July, James Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, laid out most of these arguments in a Bloomberg column. He wrote that Putin understands he needs to work to maintain the political support China has reluctantly given him, and the economic coöperation of Latin American, African, and South Asian countries—especially India—that continue to buy Russian oil and gas. Putin also, according to Stavridis, “likes his life and loves his country”—and the use of a nuclear weapon would jeopardize both. Stavridis argued that the conceivable strategic objectives of using a nuclear weapon—to cut off military supply lines by destroying the western Ukrainian city of Lviv; to decapitate the state by annihilating the capital, Kyiv; to devastate Ukraine’s economy by pulverizing the Black Sea trade-port city of Odesa—could be achieved with less risk by using conventional weapons. Finally, Stavridis noted, if Russia used a nuclear weapon, it could not deny that it had, the way it was able to at least attempt to deny that it had used chemical weapons in Syria.

In an October 5th Substack newsletter, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, one of the most knowledgeable observers of the war in Ukraine, cautioned his audience against caving to Putin’s “nuclear blackmail” and advanced several new arguments for why Putin is not about to use nuclear weapons. With a military draft in effect since late September, Russia is putting hundreds of thousands of men on the ground in Ukraine, and Putin wouldn’t want to risk killing them by detonating a nuclear bomb, Snyder argued. Russia has unilaterally (and illegally) declared a chunk of Ukraine to be part of Russia—which makes it impossible for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb in eastern Ukraine, where it would presumably devastate lands and people Russia claims as its own. The country has had so much trouble holding on to its military equipment, and, conversely, Ukraine has proven so adept at shooting down and capturing Russian weapons, that Moscow would not risk bringing a nuclear weapon even close to Ukraine. Finally, Snyder argued, given that Russia has been losing to Ukraine for months, if Putin were going to detonate a nuclear bomb as a desperate response to military defeat, he would have done so already. What Putin really needs, Snyder argued, is to shore up his power at home, something he is more likely to accomplish by finding a way to end the war—a nuclear bomb, Snyder suggested, would almost certainly prolong it.

Snyder is making the case that a nuclear attack against Ukraine would risk too much collateral damage to Putin, his people, and his troops—and that Putin’s awareness of these risks has so far held him back. And, like Stavridis, he suggests that Putin doesn’t need to use nuclear weapons to end the war. But, as the nuclear-arms expert Ankit Panda told my colleague Isaac Chotiner, Putin has been consistently—and unproductively, from the point of view of Western war science—running down his conventional arsenal; soon, cannon fodder, Iranian drones, and nuclear arms may be all he has left. “He’s making tactical military decisions that really don’t make sense from the perspective of rational military planning,” Panda said.

When we say that someone isn’t acting rationally, what we mean is that we do not understand the world in which the person’s actions are rational. The problem is not so much that Putin is irrational; the problem is that there is a world in which it is rational for him to move ever closer to a nuclear strike, and most Western analysts cannot comprehend the logic of that world. Robert Jay Lifton, the pioneering psychiatrist and historian who has written about nuclear arms for half a century, is fond of quoting the philosopher Martin Buber’s phrase “imagine the real.” That is what we fail to do when we talk about Putin and his nuclear threat: we can’t imagine the very real possibility that he will follow through.

We have three sources for understanding what the world looks like to Putin: Putin’s own statements, Russian propaganda, and the voices of Russian defectors. During the Soviet period, memoirs by men who fled to the West—such as the former Party functionary Abdurahman Avturkhanov and the former spy Anatoli Granovsky—served as manuals to the thinking of the Soviet leadership for generations of researchers. These days, it’s much easier to leave Russia than during the Soviet Union, when citizens were rarely allowed to travel abroad and, if they were, had to endure constant surveillance. And yet few highly placed Russians have left recently, and so far only Boris Bondarev, a diplomat who defected following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has written in detail about his experience. Bondarev’s article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is a fascinating account of a conspiracy of distortion. “Even some of my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their televisions all day,” Bondarev, who had been stationed in Geneva, wrote. “It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves.”

After Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the U.S., members of the European Union, and some other Western nations imposed economic sanctions on the country. Putin responded with counter-sanctions, effectively isolating the Russian economy even further. The Kremlin spun the entire affair as a victory, a boon for domestic manufacturing—and in some sectors this was true. But, Bondarev writes, some essential components used in defense production—sensors for aircraft, for example—came from Western manufacturers, and sanctions cut off the supply. “Although it was clear to my team how these losses undermined Russia’s strength, the foreign ministry’s propaganda helped keep the Kremlin from finding out,” Bondarev writes. “The consequences of this ignorance are now on full display in Ukraine: the sanctions are one reason Russia has had so much trouble with its invasion.”

Similarly, diplomats covered up losses on the international-relations front. In 2018, when Russia stood accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, the Kremlin attempted to derail the investigation by introducing a resolution before the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It was easily defeated, but Bondarev writes that cables to Moscow reduced the loss to a single sentence, surrounded by paragraphs “about how they had defeated the numerous ‘anti-Russian,’ ‘nonsensical,’ and ‘groundless’ moves made by Western states.”

Such is the feedback loop of propaganda, ambition, and fear that shapes Putin’s perceptions of the world. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Bondarev writes, many of his colleagues “took pride in our increasingly bellicose behavior.” When questioned, “they gestured at our nuclear force.” This was during the very early days of the full-scale war, when Russians and much of the world believed that Ukraine would quickly lose. As the Russian offensive faltered, the deployment of the nuclear threat went from triumphant to menacing. “One official, a respected expert on ballistic missiles, told me that Russia needed to ‘send a nuclear warhead to a suburb of Washington’”, Bondarev writes. “He added, ‘Americans will shit their pants and rush to beg us for peace.’ He appeared to be partially joking. But Russians tend to think that Americans are too pampered to risk their lives for anything, so when I pointed out that a nuclear attack would invite catastrophic retaliation, he scoffed: ‘No, it wouldn’t.’”

Although it may be evident to a non-Russian military strategist that the use of a nuclear weapon would be strategically disastrous for Russia, Putin sees his mission in grander and less pragmatic terms. He believes that, on the one hand, he is facing down an existential threat to Russia and, on the other, that Western nations don’t have the strength of their convictions to retaliate if it comes to nukes. Any small sign of a crack in the Western consensus—be it French President Emmanuel Macron pressuring Ukraine to enter peace negotiations, or the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy criticizing what he sees as unconditional aid to Ukraine—bolsters Putin’s certainty. An army of yes-men and the propaganda machine amplify both the threat Russia ostensibly faces and the support it supposedly enjoys.

Last week, Putin hosted his annual Valdai policy conference, an invitation-only junket that has traditionally served as a way for him to broadcast his message to the world. In the past, the audience has consisted largely of Western journalists and Russia scholars. But the crowd at this year’s event was different. The topic was “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for All.” Putin delivered a nearly hour-long talk on the need to liberate the non-Western world from the choke hold of “cancel culture” and “the ten different genders” that the West inflicts on countries in place of “traditional values.” For a couple of hours afterward, he fielded questions from representatives of Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and others; most speakers began by expressing respect bordering on adulation. “Many countries are tired of living under the rule of external powers,” Putin remarked at one point. “The more they see us pushing back against that pressure, the more they support us. That support will only grow.”

Putin’s world view—in which he, a once-lowly K.G.B. bureaucrat, wields a mighty sword that will save the world from decadence and decay—is the product of his specific background and historical moment, but it also belongs to a recognizable type of thought. Charles Strozier, who founded the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, has written extensively on what he calls the “fundamentalist mindset,” the kind of thinking that can fuel genocidal violence. And he has recently written about the evidence that suggests Putin, like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, has it. Strozier told me, “The thing that psychologically infuses the leadership style of someone like Putin, or Hitler, is the certainty that comes with paranoia.”

That Putin is paranoid is an observable fact: he is obsessed with the idea that Russia is surrounded by enemies; he is terrified of all protest and dissent, even though he has long since disabled any levers by which either could influence his regime; his fear of the coronavirus and, possibly, assassination, has driven him into near-total isolation and compels him to hold in-person conversations across giant tables. “The certainty that comes with paranoia is a strength of their leadership style, but, because they are inflexible, they make huge mistakes,” Strozier said.

The fundamentalist mind-set is apocalyptic and millenarian. Hitler had the idea of the “thousand-year Reich,” which positioned him as a successor to Roman and German emperors. Putin’s excursions into history have been similarly grandiose: he views himself as the last of a lineage of Russian emperors, and he explicitly dismisses historical facts—such as the existence of the Ukrainian state—that interfere with this narrative. Snyder, the Yale historian, has written extensively about the apparent influence on Putin of Ivan Ilyin, a twentieth-century Russian émigré philosopher who believed that the world, corrupted by Western-style liberalism and individualism, was ripe for radical renewal at the turn of the new millennium. I think that Snyder may overestimate the primacy of Ilyin’s teachings in Putin’s thinking: Putin uses ideas instrumentally, picking up and wielding them when he needs to say something that affirms his intuition. He has, similarly, used the ideas of the contemporary philosopher Alexander Dugin, another mystical thinker who believes that Russia’s mission is to restore traditional order to a world endangered by chaos coming from the West. The specific words and concepts are less important than Putin’s sense of his own vast historic mission.

In a 1990 book called “The Genocidal Mentality,” Lifton, the psychohistorian, discussed the term “nuclearism,” which he viewed as an ideology akin to Nazism. The politics of deterrence, he argued—the entire school of thought that saw the survival of the world as contingent on a balance between powers capable of annihilating it—activated “a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations.” Both nuclearism and Nazism offered themselves as cures for historical disasters: Nazism for the humiliation Germany supposedly suffered in the aftermath of the First World War and nuclearism for the catastrophe wrought by the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both Nazism and nuclearism positioned themselves as preventive, as hedges against a greater threat—to the Aryan race by Jews and others, or to all of human life by nuclear holocaust. Both ideologies are peculiarly modern in that they “include near worship of science and technology.” And both feature “vast societal involvement in a genocidal project, creating dangerous forms of bureaucratic momentum that can carry one across the threshold into genocide.”

In May, I wrote about the way Russian television was broadcasting Putin’s nuclear threat on repeat. Since then, the threat has morphed into a sense of inevitability. “We are not calling for nuclear war,” Margarita Simonyan, the chief of the RT propaganda consortium, said, shortly after Putin ordered the draft in September. “We are telling you that we have no other choice.”

The threat against which Russia must wield its nuclear shield is the encroachment of the West, framed variously as the expansion of NATO, an assault on traditional values, the advancement of “gender ideology,” and a spreading decadence. All of it adds up to an existential threat to Russia, which in Putin’s view is a besieged island of heterosexuality, whiteness, and truth. Strozier has written that the fundamentalist mind-set involves an overarching mission that justifies all means. “The salvational notion is always present in genocide,” he told me, citing Hitler’s belief that inferior forms of life had to be exterminated to enable the thousand-year Reich. “Large-scale violence, genocide is embarked upon for a moral purpose.”

Putin and his propaganda machine have also framed the war in Ukraine as a struggle that flows directly out of the battles of the Second World War. Over the years, Putin has reminded Russians that they sacrificed the most in the fight against the Nazis—at least twenty six and a half million killed, according to post-Soviet historians. (A disproportionate number of those lost lives were Ukrainian, but Russia lays claim to their legacy, too.) He has also asserted that Russia was “alone” in fighting the Nazi menace and therefore Russia has the right to determine who is a Nazi now. But Russia is not just cosplaying the Second World War—the country is still prosecuting it, fighting to regain the superpower status once achieved by beating back Nazi Germany. This narrative bolsters Putin’s belief that he has the moral right to use nuclear arms. The Americans did it, so the Russians can, too.

Lifton won the National Book Award in 1969 for a book about survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, in which he described the predicament of the city’s residents as a “lifelong immersion in death.” The phrase can just as well be used to describe the experience of Russians who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. Putin was born in the first postwar decade, and raised in Leningrad, a city that lost a still uncounted number of civilians—the official toll was six hundred and thirty-two thousand, but estimates range upward of a million—during a nearly nine-hundred-day siege. The siege of Leningrad was, by contemporary standards, a war crime, one that Russian troops have repeated this year in Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine. The devastation of the city and the degradation of its residents were total: people died of hunger, but not before they had eaten, pawned, or used as fuel whatever remained of their lives.

After the war, Soviet propaganda glossed over the ugly brutality of the siege while it valorized its victims and survivors. Polina Barskova, a Russian poet, literary scholar, and historian at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “What distinguished books about the siege that could be published from those that couldn’t was that the former claimed the sacrifice had a purpose. It was Victory with a capital “V” over Enemy with a capital “E” and Evil with a capital “E.” It’s the kind of goal for which you can sacrifice any number of human lives.” For Leningrad natives, this myth is a birthright. For Putin, it is further proof that he has the moral right to kill, or condemn, entire human populations.

Putin’s older brother died, as a toddler, during the siege. His parents survived—barely, miraculously. “No one could survive by living solely off the ration cards issued by the government,” Barskova, whose book of short stories and essays about the siege, “Living Pictures,” was recently published in an English translation, said. “That is just a fact. Every survivor was a miracle, and most acts of surviving were transgressive, criminal.” Survivors had access to state power—nomenklatura rations—or committed crimes to pull through, or both. Putin is now the head of the criminal state that is Russia. He believes that he is exceptional and will survive the nuclear disaster he unleashes. It also helps that he has built a series of bunkers, underground palaces where, he imagines, he can survive the nuclear holocaust in luxury.

In the end, every “rational” case for why Putin won’t use nuclear weapons in Ukraine falls short. He is not afraid of losing support from his current allies, because he misapprehends Russia’s position in the world; he sees Russia as politically, economically, and militarily stronger than it is. Chinese and Indian leaders may express alarm at the use of extreme measures such as nuclear weapons, but to Putin this points to their lack of resolve—their weakness, not the Kremlin’s. And, if need be, he is prepared to make outlandish denials, no matter how implausible. Russian propagandists have argued that the Malaysian airliner shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2015 was packed with corpses by bad actors trying to frame Russia and that the scenes of war crimes in Bucha were “staged.” Indeed, Shoigu’s Sunday phone calls opened the possibility of Russia deflecting blame for a nuclear strike by claiming that it was a Ukrainian false-flag operation.

The arguments that Putin won’t use nuclear weapons because doing so would endanger Russians, including himself, are blind to the fact that Putin believes he has the right, possibly the moral obligation, to sacrifice hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The argument that a nuclear strike wouldn’t help Putin achieve his strategic goals mistakes Russia’s strategic goals as anything but inflicting terror on Ukrainians. The losses the Russian military is suffering now can only motivate Putin to create more terror, against more people.

The one credible argument remaining is that Putin may fear repercussions. He is not afraid of nuclear retaliation—because Ukraine doesn’t have its own nuclear weapons and NATO is unlikely to mount a nuclear response against the use of a nuclear weapon inside Ukraine. (And, if NATO did, Putin believes that he would have a totally mobilized, albeit diminished, nation.) What he may fear, however, is an extreme response from NATO using conventional weapons—a series of strikes, for example, that would devastate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and destroy all its remaining military capability in Ukraine. This would be a blow so humiliating that nothing but a second, more powerful nuclear strike could avenge it. Is that a prospect that Putin is unwilling to contemplate? Possibly not, but it is as close as the West can get to deterrence these days. ♦

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

• How Ukrainians saved their capital.
• An artist captures the fight for airspace over Kyiv.
• The conflict is a colonial war.
• Is the Russian military a paper tiger?
• The case for placing an immediate energy embargo on Russia.
• Why do so many Russians say they support the war?

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.

Masha Gessen became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2017. Their latest book is “Surviving Autocracy.”

More:Vladimir PutinUkraineNuclear WarRussiaNuclear WeaponsForeign Policy

The War in Ukraine Launches a New Battle for the Russian Soul - Masha Gessen (New Yorker)

 

The War in Ukraine Launches a New Battle for the Russian Soul

The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties, when Soviet citizens were confronted with the terror of the Stalinist past.

By Masha Gessen

The New Yorker, October 17, 2022 Issue

 

Russia says that it has expanded. On September 30th, President Vladimir Putin signed a document that ostensibly accepted four Ukrainian regions as members of the Russian Federation. The residents of those regions, Putin said in a speech, “have become our citizens forever.” He made this assertion as the Ukrainian Army was liberating territory to which Russia was laying claim. He was not just trying to snatch propaganda victory from the jaws of evident military defeat; he was laying the groundwork for fighting for those lands ever more aggressively. A week and a half earlier, he had ordered the military to draft hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, and had threatened to use nuclear weapons.

A Russia that includes parts, or all, of Ukraine and untold other lands is the Russian World, a vague and expansive idea pioneered by the self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, some of whose ideas have been adopted by the Kremlin. In August, his thirty-two-year-old daughter, Darya, also an imperialist pundit, was killed by a car bomb that may have been intended for him. Last week, the Times reported that U.S. intelligence believes a part of the Ukrainian government may have been behind the attack. If true, this suggests that the government puts strong, probably unfounded, faith in the power of the concept of the Russian World.

Putin, in his speech, described both the Russian World and the larger world as he sees it. According to him, the West destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991, but Russia came back, defiant and strong. Now the West wants to destroy Russia. “They see our thought and our philosophy as a direct threat,” he said. “That is why they target our philosophers for murder.” The ultimate goal of the West—specifically, the United States and Great Britain—is to subjugate people around the world and force them to give up traditional values, to have “ ‘parent No. 1,’ ‘parent No. 2,’ and ‘parent No. 3’ instead of mother and father (they have completely lost it!),” and to teach schoolchildren that “there are some other genders besides men and women and offer them sex-change operations.” Putin has said, repeatedly, that only Russia can save the world from this menace. This is the story of a world in which his war in Ukraine—and the draft, and even, perhaps, a nuclear strike—makes sense.

But when the world shaped by the feedback loop of propaganda collides with the world of facts on the ground, things begin to crack. On October 5th, two videos circulated widely on Russian-language social media, including in normally pro-war quarters. The videos show a crowd of men in uniform. They say that there are five hundred of them and that they were recently drafted. They complain of “animal-like” conditions, of having to buy their own food and bulletproof vests, and of a lack of organization. “We are not registered as part of any detachment,” one man says. “We have weapons, but these are not officially issued to us.” Meanwhile, some Russian television propagandists have been acknowledging Ukrainian victories, and urging Russians to prepare for a long wait before their country can attack again.

It’s too early to make assumptions about where these tiny cracks may lead. It is not too early, however, to think about what a future, militarily defeated Russia might look like. This is what Alexey Navalny, the opposition politician who has been in prison since January, 2021, has been doing. The Washington Post recently published an op-ed, smuggled out by Navalny’s legal team, in which he writes that Russia deserves to lose the war and that, once it does, it must be reconstituted as a parliamentary, rather than a Presidential, republic. This, he argues, will insure that no one person can usurp power in Russia as Putin has.

Navalny’s op-ed serves to illustrate Putin’s wisdom, of sorts—the wisdom of keeping his most important political opponent behind bars. Navalny seems to have missed a cultural turning point. In the seven and a half months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their country. Many of them are journalists, writers, poets, or artists, and they, along with some who are still in Russia, have been producing essays, poems, Facebook posts, and podcasts trying to grapple with the condition of being citizens of a country waging a genocidal colonial war. Some of their Ukrainian counterparts have scoffed at their soul-searching. Ukrainians, indeed, have bigger and more immediate problems. But they also have certainty—they know who they are in the world, while for Russians nothing is as it once seemed to be.

One of the earliest examples of this outpouring was a poem, by the children’s-book author Alexey Oleynikov, about the incongruity of trying to flee Russia with a pet hedgehog in tow. One stanza reads, “We will not wash the shame off until our old age, until we die / There have been worse times, but there has never been a more ridiculous time.” Posted on Facebook, the poem went viral in March. May’s viral poem, by the actress and poet Zhenya Berkovich, tells of a young Russian man visited by the ghost of his grandfather, who fought in the Second World War; the ghost asks his grandson to forget him, lest the memory of his valor be used to justify the current war. This month’s viral poem, by Eli Bar-Yahalom, an Israeli Russian, is a dialogue between God and a Muscovite who hopes to return home someday. “There is no resurrecting Bucha, no raising up Irpin,” God says, referring to suburbs of Kyiv where Russians appear to have committed war crimes. There are also at least two Russian-language podcasts devoted to the issues of individual and collective responsibility for the war. And Linor Goralik, an acclaimed Russian writer born in Ukraine and living in Israel, has founded an online journal called roar (Russian Oppositional Arts Review), which has published three packed issues.

The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties. Soviet citizens back then had been confronted with their past—the Stalinist terror. That moment gave Russia, among other things, Memorial, the human-rights organization that, along with Ukrainian and Belarusian activists, won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Now Russian citizens are being confronted with their present. The writers in exile have physically fled their country (as has much of Memorial’s leadership) and are trying to write their way to a new Russia. Their imagination extends far beyond the Russian constitution to a world that’s radically different, and better than not only Putin’s revanchist Russian World but the world we currently inhabit. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 17, 2022, issue, with the headline “Different Worlds.”

 

 

The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina - Masha Gessen (The New Yorker)

Photograph by Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina

Whoever killed Dugina likely meant to kill her more famous father, but that reveals little about the motives and identities of the perpetrators.

By Masha Gessen

The New Yorker, August 26, 2022

The murder of Darya Dugina will almost certainly foment further pro-war mobilization in Russia.

 

Darya Dugina, a twenty-nine-year-old Russian television commentator, was laid to rest at an undisclosed location in Moscow on August 23rd. Three days earlier, Dugina had attended a festival called Tradition, a daylong event that, this year, included a lecture by her father, the self-styled political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, on the metaphysical dualism of historical thinking. The gathering concluded with a concert called “The Russian Cosmos.” Afterward, Darya Dugina drove away in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The car exploded, killing her. Aleksandr Dugin was apparently travelling in a different vehicle, and it seems likely that whoever killed Darya had meant to kill her better-known father. There has since been much speculation about the identity and motives of the killers, but little is known for certain. Still, some theories are better than others.

Western media accounts have portrayed Dugin as a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology. He is not that, but his story tells a lot about recent Russian history and the current state of Russian society. Dugin came out of the Moscow cultural underground. The son of minor members of the Soviet nomenklatura, he was expelled from college and educated himself by reading banned and restricted literature. When I was researching Dugin’s story for my book “The Future Is History,” an ex-partner of his and the mother of his older child, Evgeniya Debryanskaya, remembered that Dugin, then in his early twenties, procured a copy of Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” on microfilm. He did not, of course, have a microfilm reader at home, so he rigged up a device designed for showing simple children’s reels and projected the book onto his desk. The arrangement was not ideal: it showed a barely visible mirror image of the text. Dugin read Heidegger backward, in the dark, and, according to Debryanskaya, lost some of his eyesight in the process. The symbolic potential of this story is staggering. Its literal meaning is informative: Dugin’s ability to self-educate was limited by censorship, isolation, and ignorance.

Dugin taught himself languages in order to read the thinkers who interested him most. By the late nineteen-eighties, these were apparently mostly far-right, traditionalist, and fascist philosophers. The first book that Dugin translated was by Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher currently popular with a faction of the right wing in the United States. Steve Bannon has deployed Evola’s ideas. To the extent that the Russian political world can be compared to that of the U.S., Bannon can serve as a useful reference: not only are his views related to Dugin’s—and not only are both Dugin and Bannon connected to European neo-Fascist networks—but Bannon’s and Dugin’s relationships to actual political power are complicated in similar ways. There were certainly moments, early in the Trump Presidency, when Bannon’s ideas seemed to exert great influence on U.S. political life. But, in the end, Bannon’s vision of the world—and himself in it—served Donald Trump for a limited time only.

Totalitarian leaders use ideology instrumentally. Contrary to popular perception, totalitarian ideologies are not coherent or consistent; rather, they are opportunistic concoctions of ideas and words that are useful in times of crisis and mobilization. Dugin spent the nineties and much of the early two-thousands getting only incrementally closer to the Russian political establishment—he co-founded a fringe nationalist party, then launched an obscure imperialist movement. But he also got his academic credentials and, for a time, held a chair at Moscow State University. His star seemed to rise in 2014, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time. Dugin had developed an entire arsenal of language for this occasion. He had called for the creation of a “Russian World,” a geographically non-specific concept that imagined Russia on a civilizational mission rooted in traditional values and the Russian Orthodox religion. Annexing eastern Ukraine would have been the first step to building the Russian World. In 2014, the Kremlin, in its pivot from the politics of Soviet nostalgia to the politics of imperial resurgence, started speaking Dugin’s language.

Dugin’s right-hand person, Natalya Makeeva, told me at the time, “Our power is negligible, but our influence is infinite.” (Dugin knew that I was writing about him but refused to speak to me directly—likely because I am queer—so he sent a spokesperson to meet with me on his behalf.) Makeeva’s phrase seemed true at the time: Dugin was still nowhere near the Kremlin or the actual levers of power, but his words were everywhere. Still, influence cannot actually be infinite. In Dugin’s view, Putin didn’t go far enough in Ukraine eight years ago. Dugin railed against what he perceived as the Russian President’s weakness. In this role, Dugin was arguably just as useful to Putin as when he served as a sort of shadow ideologue. All political regimes need their critics to mark the margins, so that the leader can position himself at the imaginary center. Dugin’s imperialist ambitions made Putin look moderate.

Dugin’s daughter, Darya, followed a path similar to her father’s. She studied philosophy, spending a year in France. She wrote her master’s thesis on Plato. She also played in a band, performing in Moscow’s hipster clubs. The name of the band was Dasein May Refuse. (“Dasein” is a Heideggerian term that means a determinate being.) In her twenties, Darya started working more closely with her father, representing both him and his views, and she eventually left the music scene to devote herself fully to political propaganda. She signed her articles “Darya Platonova.”

On February 24th, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dugina was elated. She wrote on her Telegram channel, “Last night I was walking down a deserted Moscow street and saw a Russian flag flying in the distance. Something whispered, ‘The Russians are coming.’ A woman’s intuition is mighty. There is a reason I noticed that quiet and that flag. In my mind I heard the slogan, ‘Empire, be!’ When I woke up, the empire had come into being.”

Most likely, whoever killed her believed her father to be more important—more influential and closer to the Kremlin—than he actually is. Russia immediately accused the Ukrainian government of the murder. But one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisers, Oleksiy Arestovych, who started out as an anti-Western activist, formerly ran in the same circles as Dugin; he even appeared with him at an event seventeen years ago. Arestovych knows that Dugin is no Putin whisperer. Another adviser to Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, denied that official Ukraine had anything to do with the murder. “We are not a criminal state like Russia,” he said. “And we are certainly not a terrorist state.”

A variety of outlets have floated the conspiracy theory that the Russian secret police staged the murder in order to mobilize the Russian population in support of the war. But Dugin is hardly a household name in Russia; the masterminds of the crime would have to be misinformed to believe that his murder, or his daughter’s, would spark widespread outrage. Plus, people who are actual household names in Russia tend to travel with security, which Dugin apparently did not. On the other hand, secret-police agents charged with tracking non-Kremlin-controlled political movements may be susceptible to the hype of those movements. It is possible that certain members of the state security service, the F.S.B., think Dugin is more prominent than he is.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian opposition politician who has been living in Ukraine for the past seven years, claimed that an organization called the National Republican Army carried out the murder. The National Republican Army was effectively unknown before Ponomarev mentioned it on social media. This may mean one of two things: either the National Republican Army is a new group using terrorist tactics, and it killed Dugina to show what it’s capable of; or this is, in effect, a marketing move, a rush to take credit. In either case—whether the National Republican Army is real or fictional—this version is probably inching closer to the truth. Dugina likely died at the hands of non-state actors, probably a newly created group or a newly radicalized person. There is nothing surprising about such a group or individual appearing nearly six months into the war, after tens of thousands of war crimes committed by Russian troops have been documented. To whoever killed Darya Dugina, targeting a propagandist may seem like a pointedly mild response to the deaths of hundreds of children and the erasure of entire cities like Mariupol.

Two days after the car bomb went off, the F.S.B. announced that it had solved the case. The secret police pointed to a Ukrainian military officer, Nataliya Vovk, as the murderer. According to the prosecution’s story, Vovk entered Russia by car—a gray Mini Cooper—with her twelve-year-old daughter, and rented an apartment in the same building as Dugina. She was able to trace her victim’s every move. Once the remotely operated car bomb went off, Vovk, according to the F.S.B., changed the license plates on her car and left the country via the land crossing to Estonia. The F.S.B. has claimed that Vovk is a colonel in the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian Army. The Azov Regiment has disavowed the existence of such an officer, but that’s not the only issue with this story: anyone who has crossed Russian land borders knows that getting in and out in a car is usually a long, involved process. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that a Ukrainian citizen slipped in or out with fake license plates. Also, the F.S.B. has never been known to solve a political murder in a couple of days—or, really, at all.

In the meantime, Putin sent official condolences to Dugina’s parents and awarded Dugina a medal for valor. The official parliamentary newspaper broadcast her funeral live. At one point during the service, Leonid Slutsky, who leads the (misnamed) Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, called out, “One country, one President, one victory”—an almost exact translation of the German Nazi Party’s slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. The historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizofascism” to describe this sort of rhetoric: people acting like fascists while calling their enemies fascists, as the Russian propaganda machine continues to do with Ukraine. When Aleksandr Dugin spoke at the funeral, he said that his daughter had “fallen at the front, and the front is here. She lived for our victory and died for it—for our Russian victory, our truth.”

The murder of Darya Dugina will almost certainly foment further pro-war mobilization in Russia. Margarita Simonyan, who runs the RT network and often functions as the social-media mouthpiece of the Kremlin, has called for Russia to retaliate by striking the “decision-making centers” in Ukraine—a thinly veiled call for murdering Zelensky. (The Ukrainian President, for his part, warned of a possible escalation of Russian aggression, and government employees were asked to work remotely; on Thursday, Putin ordered the army to recruit a hundred and thirty-seven thousand new troops.) This does not mean that the murder was planned inside Russia, by people who wanted to use it to aid the war effort. We know now that the twentieth-century events that heralded unprecedented terror—the Reichstag fire in Berlin, in 1933, and the murder of Sergei Kirov, in Leningrad, in 1934—were, in fact, carried out by rogue actors. Still, they set in motion the totalitarian machine. Darya Dugina’s murder may serve the same—probably unintended—function, making her father’s influence infinite indeed. ♦

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

• How Ukrainians saved their capital.
• An artist captures the fight for airspace over Kyiv.
• The conflict is a colonial war.
• Is the Russian military a paper tiger?
• The case for placing an immediate energy embargo on Russia.
• Why do so many Russians say they support the war?

Você não é paranoico, mas está sendo perseguido por um autocrata? Leia Masha Gessen (2016)

Desde 2016, quando Masha Gessen escreveu estas cinco regras para escapar de um autocrata, as coisas pioraram muito na Rússia do neoczar Putin. Mas, veja, suas regras se aplicam mais ao trumpismo do que ao putinismo, que já é explicitamente autoritário, ao passo que o primeiro é apenas implicitamente autoritário
Se você acha que as coisas podem piorar aqui também, adapte estas regras à presente situação brasileira, que ainda é refresco comparada à da Rússia e talvez seja mais parecida com a dos EUA trumpista.
Aqui ainda se pode chamar o protoditador de fascista, sem arriscar a sua pele.
Só os fanáticos vão perturbar um pouco a sua paz no Twitter.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Autocracy: Rules for Survival

Masha Gessen

The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2016, 5:26 pm

Andrew Kelly TPX/ReutersProtesters outside Trump Tower the day after the election, New York City, November 9, 2016

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.

Hours later, President Barack Obama was even more conciliatory:

We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world….We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.

The president added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.

Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.

Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.

The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign—when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.

Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

Nos tempos do stalinismo fotográfico - Masha Gessen (New Yorker)

The Photo Book That Captured How the Soviet Regime Made the Truth Disappear

Masha Gessen

The New Yorker, July 15, 2018

How unreal can things get? As the sense of shared reality is eroded, more with each passing day, one wonders. Writing on the relationship between truth and politics in this magazine, fifty-one years ago, Hannah Arendt noted just how vulnerable factual truth is, using the example of “the role during the Russian Revolution of a man by the name of Trotsky, who appears in none of the Soviet Russian history books.” Thirty years after Arendt published her article, a British collector and historian of Russia, David King, published a study in the form of a photo album—a study of the disappearance of the physical record of Trotsky and a number of other Russians who fell out of favor, and out of history, during the Stalin era.

The book is called “The Commissar Vanishes.” The title is, incongruously, literal. Its specific reference is to a photograph, from 1919, of a second-anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. In the picture, Vladimir Lenin stands at the top of a set of stairs, surrounded by many unidentified men and children and a few recognizable men, including Leon Trotsky, stationed just in front of Lenin. By the time the photograph was published, in 1967, Trotsky had disappeared: he had been airbrushed out, along with several other commissars.

Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Red Square during the second-anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution, on November 7, 1919.

Photograph by Leo Ya Leonidov / Tate

Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev have been airbrushed out.

Photograph by Leo Ya Leonidov / Tate

Sometimes it is impossible to tell just who is missing from a photograph—only that someone is. One photograph in King’s collection shows a propaganda train—a train that crisscrossed the country spreading the message of the revolution. “When we look closely at the window on the right of the photograph,” King writes, “a ghostly apparition—the result of the retoucher’s inept hand—is all that remains of the person who had been looking out of the carriage.” We don’t know who is missing or why—only that someone has been elided. We are lucky even to know that there is something we don’t know.

The October Revolution agitational-propaganda train arrives in Sorotskinskoe Station, in 1919.

Photograph from Tate

There is so much more that we don’t know about Stalinist terror—we are no closer today to knowing how many people were killed than we were one, two, or five decades ago. Earlier this month, news came that the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., is destroying secret-police records from the terror era; that means that we are unlikely ever to form a significantly more complete picture than the one we have now.

Many of the photographs in King’s collection showcase falsification by commission rather than omission. There is the iconic photograph of Stalin and the masses, in which the image of Stalin is blatantly pasted in, and the masses, less noticeably, are composed of several repeating fragments of crowd. There are the movie stills of the 1905 Russian uprising and the pictures of the storming of the Winter Palace, in 1917—in fact, the images depict historical reënactments that were used as though they were documentary photographs. And there are the enduring myths that underlie the images. Much of the absence of documentary evidence of the Soviet regime—the destruction of personal archives and printed books alike—was a result of citizens’ fear that their neighbors or acquaintances might report them to the authorities. We have since learned that the role of such denunciations during the terror was relatively minor: people were arrested to fill specific quotas; the arrests were essentially random and not, as many have long assumed, the result of reports. But the myth persists, and so does its product—the visuals that have been destroyed can rarely be restored.

Vladimir Lenin speaking in Moscow to Red Army soldiers departing for the Polish front, in 1920. Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, behind, are on the steps to the right.

Photograph by G. P. Goldshtein / Tate

Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev have been airbrushed out of an image of the same scene.

Photograph by G. P. Goldshtein / Tate

Compared to the intentional, crude, and pervasive altering of the Soviet record, the lying currently prevalent in American politics is amateur hour, if not exactly child’s play. President Donald Trump’s routine alterations of the historical narrative, which seem to stem in equal measure from ignorance and ill intent, are ridiculed by the media even as the media reproduces them. Photographs often serve as the corrective to his distortions—as, for example, with his insistence that he had the biggest Inauguration crowd in history. Still, there can be no doubt that Trump is waging an all-out war on the media, the historical record, and the truth in general. In her 1967 essay, Arendt issued a warning:

“The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories—even the most wildly speculative ones—produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back.”

Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolai Yezhov walking along the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal, in April, 1937.

Photograph by F. Kislov / Tate

Nikolai Yezhov has been removed from the original image.

Photograph by F. Kislov / Tate