The West is deeply implicated in Putin’s crimes

A recently released Russian political prisoner has suggested that the West bears responsibility for the Putin regime and thus its crimes.

According to the prominent anti-Putin dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, “The responsibility for what the Putin regime is doing there is shared by Russian society, a large part of which chose to close their eyes to the abuses and repression.”

Who could disagree?

“But,” continues Kara-Murza, “let’s not forget the responsibility of those Western countries who for years preferred to deal with Vladimir Putin and do business, knowing full well who he was and what he represented.”

Ouch. You mean we’re also guilty?

Kara-Murza is wrong to imply that Russians and the West bear equal responsibility. They don’t. But he’s absolutely right to argue that the West can’t pretend not to have made Putin possible, and perhaps even inevitable.

The lion’s share of responsibility for Putin and his crimes belongs to the Russians, above all to the political and economic elites, but also to the broad masses. The former shared Putin’s imperialist dreams and fascist inclinations, and they wholeheartedly supported his killings, wars and invasions.

But the Russian people, for the most part, closed their eyes to their country’s transformation into a monster or nodded understandingly, even approvingly. Some, such as the murdered oppositionist Alexei Navalny and his colleague, Kara-Murza, openly protested; others took part in mass marches. But the vast majority did nothing.

In contrast, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets for months in 2020-2021; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians staged two impressive manifestations of people power, in 2004 and 2014. The far more numerous Russians, who often think of themselves as more civilizationally advanced than their neighbors, showed that their understanding of civilization was, alas, perverse.

Could the Russians have stopped Putin? We’ll never know, because they never tried. Could they have stopped his invasion of Ukraine and the genocide that followed? Those who opposed the war fled abroad — in stark contrast to the courageous Kara-Murza, who actually decided to return to Russia in 2022. Those who stayed looked the other way.

How could they have expressed their rejection of the regime? We know from the Nazi German case that resistance to a murderous regime usually means death. That said, we still condemn Germans for not resisting — or not resisting enough.

The tragedy of Russians is that they didn’t resist when easy resistance was politically possible, in Putin’s early years, and couldn’t easily resist when it became morally imperative, when he had consolidated power. Either way, there is a dark stain on the “Russian soul,” one that will take many years of repentance to wash away.

But the democratic West is not blameless either. Too many of its policymakers and publics assumed the best about Putin, even as they watched him quash the opposition and transform Russia into a dictatorial, muscle-flexing, imperialist state.

Where was the West when the Chechens were being blown to smithereens? Or when Georgia was dismembered? Or when Ukraine was first invaded in 2014 and then again in 2022?

Indeed, it’s hard to avoid looking at the 1930s and how the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union consciously abetted Nazi revanchism. The 1938 Munich agreement implicated the democratic West in Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment, while the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was as clear-cut a case of extended collaboration with Nazi imperialism as one can imagine. The U.S. watched Hitler’s rise to power from the sidelines, while Hollywood purposely avoided producing films that might annoy the Führer.

The West’s greatest sin regarding today’s Russia is to have failed to see Moscow as it truly was and look beyond it, at Russia’s neighbors. The West imagined that fascism and imperialism were passé after the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in “the end of history.” Moscow and its rulers could only do good. Why worry about the Ukrainians and Belarusians when nirvana was around the bend?

But the West’s sins weren’t only of omission, of failing to see the reality and acting accordingly. The West actually empowered Putin and his regime by granting them legitimacy and respectability, explaining disturbing behavior with reference to the mysterious workings of the Russian soul, and pursuing increasingly close economic relations with a regime that made no secret of its war-mongering goals.

To make matters worse, some Western policymakers and analysts still insist that Ukraine doesn’t matter, that Putin should be appeased, that resisting him with arms is wrong. Like it or not, they thereby side with Putin’s regime and express indifference to its crimes.

When the war ends and Putin and his comrades are eventually behind bars, average Russians will have to examine just what made them so pliable, so open to exploitation by a criminal. But the West will have to ask just why it didn’t — and doesn’t? — care with whom it does business, as long as the price is right.

In the meantime, both Russians and the West would do well to follow Kara-Murza’s advice: “Putin can’t be allowed to win this war. Ukraine must win, and there should be more support from Western countries so that happens.”

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”