TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

8 December 2024: Digging in, plus texts and tunes

“The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons”, JWM Turner, 1810

With apologies, shit happens.

A lot has gone on in the two weeks since the last edition of this newsletter. US sanctions on Gazprombank sent the ruble into free fall—and then it quickly recovered. While the ruble was erasing most of its losses, however, Syrian rebels erased in a matter of days almost a decade’s worth of Russian military intervention, toppling Assad’s regime. Meanwhile, Georgia’s dubiously elected Georgian Dream government seemed on track to consolidate control—until it provoked arguably the largest uprising in the country’s post-Soviet history. Elsewhere, South Korea was plunged into martial law, until it wasn’t, and then its president was headed towards impeachment, until he wasn’t.

Everywhere you look, then, it’s whiplash. Matt Gaetz was going to be US Attorney General, and then he wasn’t. Pete Hegseth wasn’t going to be Secretary of Defense, but now he is. Probably. France lost its government but regained its cathedral. A far-right candidate won the first round of Romania’s presidential election, and then he didn’t. I could go on.

Like I said, shit happens.

What I’m thinking about

In this midst of all of this volatility, what is on my mind is contingency. (Apologies in advance for an academic tangent — but I promise this will all make sense in the end.)

Way back in August 2022, I wrote about how people deal with moments of peril and uncertainty, riffing on the sociologist Ivan Ermakoff’s theory of contingency:

Imagine a situation in which something potentially momentous seems to be happening: a law is being passed that restricts your rights, for example. You personally may be upset by this. You may even feel moved to act. But you are aware that action may involve risk, and you have no way of knowing whether it will succeed in overturning the law. What you do know is that the only way to overturn the law is if a large number of other people not only share your view of the law, but decide to act together with you. Your decision on whether to act is thus contingent on your reading of other people’s likelihood of making the same decision at the same time. Those people’s decisions are similarly contingent on their ability to read other people’s intentions — including yours. And the outcome of the whole thing is contingent on the contingent decisions that individuals are making in a context rife with uncertainty.

In such situations — contingent situations — Ermakoff argues that uncertainty itself becomes part of the chain of cause and effect. Uncertainty (or, more precisely, indeterminacy) drives people to look for signals and cues, as they try to figure out how to behave, while the basic human desire to reduce uncertainty simultaneously encourages people to flock together and to hedge their risks.

I was thinking about this when I was watching hundreds of thousands of Georgians take to the streets—in the face of increasingly brutal repression—undermining a Georgian Dream juggernaut that seemed unstoppable only a few weeks ago, and when I watched events unfold in South Korea. These are the kinds of moments when power is discovered. After all, if it was clear a priori who had the power, moments like these would never occur. If President Yoon Suk Yeol had known that he did not have the political strength to impose martial law, he likely never would have tried; but neither could the opposition have know that they had the strength to stop him. Both sides believed they might have the upper hand, but one would inevitably turn out to be wrong. Similarly, the Georgian government and ordinary Georgian citizens are now discovering exactly how much power resides in the street, and the extent to which political leaders can transgress against the core beliefs and interests of the public. It is, then, uncertainty itself that enables both sides to act, and they continue to act until a new certainty about the distribution of power emerges.

But I was also thinking about this when I was reading the increasingly belligerent noises coming out of Moscow. I have in mind, of course, Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear-capable, high-powered missiles against Kyiv and to base such weapons in Belarus, but not only that. There is also Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s re-upped insistence that Ukraine not be given multilateral security guarantees, and Kremlin ideologue Konstantin Malofeev’s declaration that Moscow would reject any deal with the US that did not amount to a Yalta-style redivision of spheres of influence in Europe. Given that a Yalta 2.0 is not available, and that multilateral security guarantees are central even to Trump’s emerging vision of the end of the war in Ukraine, these sorts of statements seem designed to increase anxiety among Western policymakers and the public and soften them up for concessions. And that brings me back to Ermakoff.

In his book Ruling Oneself Out, Ermakoff questions the assumed role of coercion and fear in leading people to abdicate power. Focusing initially on the example of the German parliament’s decision to cede power to the Nazis in 1933, Ermakoff writes:

Fear is a convenient explanation of abdication, because it offers a simple, readily available, and commonsensical solution to the problem. Yet the apparent obviousness of the explanation is deceptive. Implicit in the coercion explanation is the notion that threats are naturally effective, that they produce enough fear to incapacitate any attempt at resistance. This assumption is more problematic and paradoxical than it may seem. Groups also decide to resist in the face of coercive pressures, and threats of reprisal sometimes have effects opposite to those intended, yielding cohesion among those under challenge and providing them with a new impetus to resist….

The paradox of coercion is that it often highlights what it attempts to suppress: the possibility of resistance. In relying extensively on threats and intimidation, one acknowledges the irreducible character of the other party’s capacity of decision; and the more coercive the threats, the greater the acknowledgement that resistance is a possibility. Ultimately, actors can choose to disregard the threats that are deployed against them. They can decide to challenge the odds. At the final moment, the decision is theirs.

Any episode of violence or threatened violence is inherently indeterminate: neither the aggressor nor the intended victim can know how much violence will be exerted, whether the aggressor’s nerve will hold, or how the victim will in fact react, and thus whether the violence will be effective. Whether groups decide to resist violence or acquiesce to it depends on how they interpret the uncertainty they face—and more exactly, how they create certainty out of indeterminacy.

Groups facing an indeterminate threat will interpret the signals of the moment—chiefly, the threats being made by aggressors and the news that filters in of violence, rumored or real, perpetrated by those aggressors elsewhere—in a social context, looking to the people closest to them, from whom they might expect solidarity. In some cases, perhaps even in most, emergent events that may or may not be materially meaningful can create cascades of emotion that lead either precipitous capitulation or fervent resistance. Indeed, both the would-be aggressor and the intended victim are subject to these cascades: one need only look to the rapidity with which the Assad regime collapsed for an illustration. In these sorts of situations, people gain certainty by embedding themselves in the prevailing thoughts and emotions that surround them. It is a fallacy, of course, to believe that consensus makes something true, and yet it is a shortcut that most of us use more often than we’d care to admit.

In some circumstances, however, cooler heads prevail. Some groups prove more resilient to the news of the day, refusing to let events—whether setbacks or victories—knock them off their slow and steady course. It’s not that these groups are impervious to the kind of social logic I just described. Rather, it’s that these groups tend to be bound together by a deeper sense of common purpose and a shared analysis of the world (even an ideology). In her book Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tufekci (another sociologist!) shows that movements who have spent years or decades building deep reserves of trust and accountability are much better able to persist in the face of repression and disaffection than even much larger groups who come together rapidly on a wave of public emotion. The logic here extend beyond protest movements, though: the deeper and more complex a group’s sense of what they’re after, why they’re after it and how they’re going to get it, the more likely they are to be able to impose themselves on uncertainty, rather than letting uncertainty impose itself on them.

And that brings me back to Russia’s threat-mongering. In his interview with the Financial Times, Malofeev hypothesized about what would happen when Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s intended envoy for Russia and Ukraine, comes to Moscow to propose a deal involving a cease fire in Ukraine.

“Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don’t like any of it. That’d be the whole negotiation,” Malofeyev said in an interview at a luxury resort in Dubai. “For the talks to be constructive, we need to talk not about the future of Ukraine, but the future of Europe and the world.”

Putin’s use of Russia’s experimental ‘Oreshnik’ missile in Dnipro and his threat to rain them down on Kyiv—and to base them in Belarus, from where they could more easily strike Western Europe—was Malofeev’s intended trump card: Russia, he was suggesting, had the means and the intention to continue this war and to escalate it until such time as the West recognizes Moscow’s right to military, political and economic dominion not just in Ukraine, but in some larger part of Europe.

How people are reading these sorts of threats—which have been coming out of Moscow increasingly thick and fast of late—is, I think, a good illustration of why we should keep the idea of contingency in mind. In Europe, to my reading at least, these threats have had very little effect at all. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz used the escalation to justify his long-standing decision not to give Ukraine long-range arms, while accusing his political challenger, Friedrich Merz, of being a reckless hawk. British Prime Minister Kier Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, by contrast, met to discuss putting together a joint ground force to deter further Russian aggression after a potential cease-fire in Ukraine, exactly the kind of thing Lavrov insisted Russia would reject.

In other words, the competing camps in Europe’s approach to Russia interpreted the latest signals from Moscow in ways entirely in keeping with how they have been interpreting the war all along. They have not allowed themselves to be distracted, but have instead imbedded the news in deeply held analytical positions. In short, neither Oreshnik nor Malofeev nor Lavrov have caused any real uncertainty in Berlin, Paris or London.

Not so in Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump administration in waiting—which is not quiet about much of anything—has all of a sudden gone quiet on Russia and Ukraine. Yes, Trump met with Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris, but we heard none of the usual rhetoric about how Zelensky is a conman, how Putin is brilliant, or even about how Trump is on the brink of ending the war. The chatter from Team Trump about various approaches to a ceasefire, which had been coalescing around the idea of a negotiated ceasefire monitored by European troops but likely without a NATO perspective or robust American security guarantees. The fact that the Kremlin blew even that deal out of the water—despite delivering much of what Moscow wants and little of what Ukraine needs—has clearly been jarring to Trump’s nascent foreign policy team. They are, it would seem, adrift.

While the strategic outlook may vary from one European capital to another, the reality is that for most European policymakers, Ukraine is an issue of core strategic importance, a fact that helps explain why they are, by and large, less susceptible to Moscow’s attempts at coercion and distraction. While I have my analytical differences with the outgoing Biden administration, I concluded over the course of my time in Washington that they, too, saw the war as a vital American interest and thus refused to abandon it in the face of gale-force political headwinds.

I think we already knew that a Ukrainian victory was not a priority for Trump. The evidence of the last week or so, however, suggests to me that no one in Trump world thinks of any aspect of the war’s end as a priority. Trump’s bluster about ending the war before taking office may have been predicated on the misconception that a deal was available. Some pundits have predicted that, finding no negotiating partner in Moscow, Trump will now double down on support for Kyiv in an effort to force Putin to the table. Seeing this from the perspective of contingency theory, however, puts paid to that idea. Were the Trump team endowed with a resolute commitment to ending the war, they would now be giving as well as they’re getting from Moscow. Their reticence, however, seems symptomatic of the lack of a deeper theory of the war. If I’m right about that, then the most likely outcome may be gradual acquiescence to Moscow’s demands.

What I’m reading

A lot of this week’s reading list (or, rather, the list for the past two weeks) is embedded in the discussions above, so what follows is relatively brief, but hopefully still useful.

• On the ruble—first down, then up—I highly recommend by CEPA colleague Alex Kolyandr’s piece from 27 November on the increasingly bad choices facing Russia’s economic policymakers. And it’s well worth reading Tony Barber’s 30 November piece in the Financial Times on the pitfalls of trying to interpret Russian economic data. Both pieces taken together will provide useful context for this 6 December piece in Kommersant on the ruble’s recovery.

• On the internal Russian politics front, two recent—but very different—pieces stand out. One is Andrei Vinokurov’s 2 December piece in Kommersant on the lengths the Kremlin is going to in order to help shape the way regional governors talk about the war and its consequences. The other is Yaroslav Rasputin’s sobering 30 November longread in Meduza on the paroxysms of bottom-up violence that systematically accompany top-down repression of Russia’s LGBT+ community. The violent reality of the Meduza piece is a useful corrective to the anti-septic picture painted by Kommersant, but both are inalienable parts of Russian political reality.

• Sticking with longreads, the New York Times on 2 December published a history of the 1983 war game that convinced Ronald Reagan that nuclear war cannot be won. Some out there will argue that this piece is unfortunate, as it encourages readers to give in to Russian nuclear blackmail. I think that’s wrong. If anything, the piece is a clarion call for not letting an aggressor get away with nuclear blackmail—and the role of deep, serious thinking in that process.

• If you have the patience for another longread, I highly recommend the Financial Times interview with former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, from 29 November. Apart from being engaging and informative, it’s an excellent example of what I mean when I talk about policymakers not letting themselves be blown off course by events outside their control.

What I’m listening to

How did I miss this?

Laura Marling—whom I’ve featured in this newsletter before—put out a new album back in October, the day before my birthday, no less, and it completely passed me by. I’m clearly losing my touch. Marling, clearly, is not. The whole album, Patterns in Repeat, is worth a season of long, slow listens. “Caroline,” though, is the song that will knock you down.