Putin has destroyed Russia for future generations

Germans have spent the last 80 years apologising for what their predecessors did. Putin is cursing Russians with that same burden.

Today my friend in Kyiv, a mother who had just been separated from her children as they were evacuated out of the city, wrote on Twitter,

‘second time in 3 months I had to hand over my baby girl, not knowing if I will ever see her again. This is a pain only a mother can know. It’s more painful than all of war put together. The hatred in me grows every day.’ 

This brought home to me what Putin has now done, irreversibly, to Russia and to all Russians. Germans have spent the last 80 years apologising for what their predecessors did. Putin is cursing Russians with that same burden.

I grew up around that hatred. My grandmother’s whole extended family were killed in German concentration camps. My father was evacuated to America and didn’t really know his father until he was seven. My grandfather liberated Belsen concentration camp, and never really recovered from what he saw. That deep hatred lasts for generations, not years. It becomes embedded in the collective identity and culture.

Putin is lost in his own false propaganda and twisted version of history. He does not really live in the 21st Century so he didn’t realise Ukraine has been open to the world ever since it kicked out his last puppet dictator. Westerners have been there for holidays, and Ukrainians live and work in towns and cities across Europe and America. Ukraine is not a far-away place with which we have no emotional ties (as may be, to our shame, the case with Chechnya and Syria). Many of us in the West are watching the shelling of cities we’ve visited and seeing people we know share videos and photos on our social media feeds of their homes and families under attack. Soon, I fear, we will start to hear reports of people we know being killed by Russian soldiers and bombs.

This is a European war. Putin failed to understand that Ukraine is already Europe. He is far too late to prevent that. The reaction has been fast. Everyone is siding with Ukraine. Everything Russian is being boycotted — the Russian economy is now toxic. Russia, as a brand, is now so poisonous that no business can afford any connection with it. Everything is being withdrawn from Russia. Putin’s Russia is becoming North Korea, not the great Imperial Russia of its past. Like so many Tsars and dictators before him, Putin has become so isolated in his high castle that he has completely lost touch with the present.

As a result, Putin has quickly made Russia hated around the world. From UN votes, to Social Media, to boycotts, Russia has very, very few friends.

I feel for the Russians who do not support this war or dictator. For decades to come, their country will be like Germany after the last war; they too will be apologising for for the next 50-80 years.

To give it some context, and as an insight for those younger than me, when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s plenty of the older generation around me refused to buy German or Japanese products. Germany was openly hated and mocked. What we would now consider racist jokes about Germans were completely acceptable. This was because - like today’s Ukrainians - the people I grew up around had been bombed by Germans, fought against Germans, known people who were killed by the Germans. I grew up around war veterans, Holocaust survivors, women who had been mothers during the Blitz, just like Ukrainian mothers now in Kharkiv.

It is no coincidence that despite travelling all over Europe as I grew up, I only visited Germany for the first time in my 30s. By the time I was in my late 30s I had German friends, and grew very fond of the country and people, but by then my grandparents’ generation had mostly died. Whilst they were alive, and I was younger, I would have received harsh comments and surprised looks if I had gone to Germany or had German friends, let alone bought a German car.

Once my grandparents’ generation had died, that really raw hatred started to subside. I now live in a Europe where it would be inappropriate and irrational to hate Germans or Germany because of what happened in the war. We haven’t moved on or forgotten those crimes, but Germany is a new country, with new generations of people, and both have set an impressive example when it comes to owning and building positively on their history.

And yet even a few years ago I was out one night in Berlin. Kreuzberg was bustling, as ever. We saw a teenage boy sitting in a doorway weeping. Concerned, we went over to ask if he was ok. He was a little drunk and very emotional. With tears in his eyes he told us he had just been studying what his country had done in the war. As he was entering adulthood and his perspective and sense of self was developing, the full gravity of what his grandparents’ generation had done, or had failed to prevent, had just started to sink in. He was owning it all, feeling the full weight of history press down on him, he was genuinely distraught, overflowing with guilt, anguish, and shame.

We sat with him for some time, talking. We told him it was not him, there was nothing he should feel responsible for. It was history, and he was part of the new Germany — here we were, a British Jew and a young German in a wonderfully diverse and open city, talking freely, embracing. It was OK now. But I knew he would spend the coming years working out how to disentangle himself from his country’s history, as so many other German friends of mine have done.

This was far from being the first time I had seen a young German struggle with their history, try to understand what being German means in the shadow of the last century. It is tough, unfair, and a betrayal of them by previous generations. It is also a personal and collective process that has contributed to what makes Germany such a great nation now, and a beacon for peace and freedom.

I thought of him today, on the tube in London. A Russian couple were sitting opposite me chatting in Russian. I felt myself looking up at them, I noticed other people looking at them. I realised that things have just shifted for all Russians, without many of them yet realising it. They will start to experience hatred, racism, aggression, sideways glances, animosity. It may not be fair or justified. They may be the best and kindest people, they may be anti-Putin activists, they may themselves be amongst the many refugees from his dictatorship, but they are now under the shadow of his crimes, because crimes against humanity illicit a response from humanity.

I’m afraid that by the end of this war, many of us in the West, sitting in London, Paris, New York, will have seen streets in Ukraine that we have walked down bombed to rubble, and will know friends, or friends of friends, who were killed by Russian bombs and soldiers. That scar will not heal, because grief does not end. If the Russian army kills my friends, I will never forget that or forgive it. It will shape my whole relationship with Russia for the rest of my life, and part of that will pass down to my children and grandchildren, just as it did from my grandparents to me last century.

Our children will grow up with stories of this war, with the raw grief and anger we are feeling. No matter that so many Russians do not support this war. Once it starts to kill people we know, we will find it hard not to hold them accountable — it was their country, their leader, and their army. I pity them just as I found myself pitying young Germans. It is not a rational response, but it is inevitable. It is unfair on all those thousands of Russians who have been arrested for protesting against this war, and all those who are as horrified as we are.

This is what Putin is doing to Russia now. He is damning the entire Russian people, even those not yet born, to bear the burden of his crimes for generations. This will not be forgotten in a few years, or even in a few decades. He wanted to shape Russian history and secure his place in that history; he has succeeded. He will now be remembered for bombing civilians, destroying beautiful cities, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has re-written Russian history from a failed dictatorship into an aggressor that brought death and destruction to Europe. It is already too late for him, and for Russia now.

As time passes, he will never be forgiven. At some point, just as with Stalin, even the most brainwashed Russians will understand the truth about Putin, that he sent a huge army into a peaceful country and killed women, children, and fellow Slavs for no reason beyond hubris and ego. Like Hitler and Stalin, he will be hated forever.

But I feel for the Russians — the good Russians, the young Russians, who have either had to flee, or are trapped in their dictatorship. I feel for the next generation of Russians, who will have to disentangle themselves from these crimes just as young Germans have had to do. The damage Putin has done to Russia over the last week is greater than all the harm he has done over the last few decades. It is now a hated country, a pariah, there is no pretence anymore that Putin’s Russia has anything good about it. The veils of civility have fallen, the lustre of Russian money is tarnished. The party is over for the oligarchs, and the West will now start to shift away from tolerating both Russian aggression and Russian money.

I was going to write that it will take generations for the Ukrainian people to forgive Russia, but when you think about the crimes already committed by Russia against Ukraine over the last century, I think that Ukraine will never forgive Russia. A visceral, almost genetic anger and hatred will now flow down through the generations. For the rest of the world, Russia will spend a generation or more rebuilding its image. Even after Putin falls, which is now a certainty, and even if someone like Navalny manages to come to power and rebuild the country into some sort of vaguely functioning democracy, Russia will always have this war in its history. It will be the country that broke the peace Europe has enjoyed for two generations.

History has seen men like Putin before. Hitler set out to build a greater Germany, and ended up destroying everywhere else including Germany. Putin is destroying Ukraine, and he is also destroying Russia. By the time he is finished, he will have scarred generations of hatred, pain, and grief into the collective memory of the Ukrainian people and ruined the future for his own people. There is no other end. It is a tragedy for everyone.