The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

part of another state that Russia realized it had been not simply stolen from but robbed. . . . Millions of Russians went to sleep in their own country only to awaken in a different one. Overnight, they had become ethnic minorities in former Union republics. The Russian people became one of the largest, if not the largest, divided nations in the world.

The difference in meaning between the terms "stolen from" and "robbed" was subtle and unclear, but the implication of violence was unmistakable. In the story that Putin was telling, Russia had recognized the post-Soviet borders that made Crimea a part of Ukraine under duress, because it was too weak to object. Later, under Putin, Russia sacrificed its national interests and deep desires for the sake of peace in the region, and did not contest the post-1991 borders. But after being forcibly moved to another country, without physically moving, the Crimean Russians found themselves citizens of an unstable state:

Russians, like other Ukrainian citizens, suffered from the ongoing political and the permanent government crises that have been

seizing Ukraine for more than twenty years.

This was a reference to both the Maidan and the Orange Revolution, and this was the point where Putin's speech turned away from Russia and toward America—or, rather, from what Russia had lost to what the United States had gained. The United States, he said, had funded the Maidan, and once the Maidan won, it would crack down on its opponents:

Crimea—Russian-speaking Crimea—was the first in line for the crackdown. Because of this the people of Crimea . . . asked Russia to

protect their rights and their very lives Of course, we had to

respond to this plea. We could not abandon Crimea and its people to their plights. That would have been a betrayal.

Not only were Russia's actions right, continued Putin, but they were based on precedent created by the United States itself, when it facilitated Kosovo's secession from Serbia. The only difference between Kosovo and Crimea, he argued, was that the former had had the backing of the United States, which felt that it could make the rules in the post-Cold War world. "They had us all with that," he said. In fact, he said nagnuli, a crude expression most accurately translated as "They had everyone up the ass," conjuring the clear image of homosexual rape. The Kremlin's translators rendered it in English as "had everyone agree."¹⁷

Putin continued the litany of grievances against America: after Kosovo "there was an entire chain of 'color revolutions' managed from the outside"—Ukraine's were just two of many. Countries where these revolutions were "orchestrated" were then "forced to accept standards unsuitable for the way of life, tradition, and culture of the people":

They lied to us time after time. They made decisions behind our backs and then had us face a fait accompli. That's what happened with NATO's eastward expansion, when military outposts were

placed at our borders. They kept saying to us that it's none of our business. Easy for them to say.

Russia could no longer take it. "Like a spring that had been wound too tight," it had uncoiled:

We will clearly face opposition from the outside. We have to decide if we are prepared to stand firm in protecting our national interests or if we are forever going to be giving in, retreating when there is nowhere to retreat to. Some Western politicians are already threatening us not only with sanctions but also with problems inside the country. I wonder what they mean: are they placing their hopes in a fifth column, national-traitors of various stripes, or are they figuring that they will be able to have a negative impact on the Russian economy, thereby sparking popular unrest? . . . We must take appropriate action.

This was a war speech, though Putin laughed off concerns about war even as he spoke:

They are talking about aggression, about some sort of Russian intervention in Crimea. That's odd. Somehow, I can't recall any historical example of an intervention that went off without a single shot being fired, with no casualties.

Really? Gudkov could readily think of such an example. Hitler's Anschluss of Austria in 1938 was one. His takeover of the part of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland was another. That involved not a single gunshot—instead, it employed a plebiscite and a speech, among other bloodless tools. In his September 1938 speech Hitler decried the hypocrisy of Western democracies, which he said refused to recognize the true will of the people. He mentioned that France's sole interest in Czechoslovakia was in using it as a base for launching an attack on Germany. Most important, he mentioned the ethnic- German minority in Czechoslovakia, which, he said, was "robbed of its right to self-determination in the name of [Czechoslovak] self- determination." Germany, he said, had put up with this state of