Vladimir Grozny (Владимир Грозный, or Vladimir the “Terrible”)

The English word “terrible” is a terrible translation of the Russian word grozny, now the historical moniker for the medieval Tsar Ivan the Terrible. As applied to either Ivan or Vladimir Putin, it misses the mark.

“Terrible” is a weak word in English. It connotes anything from a bad joke to a poor performance in a concert or on an exam. In contrast, the Russian word “grozny” (грозный) is sinister and specific. It has the same root as “угроза”: “threat” or “menace.”

Ivan the Terrible ruled by threat and menace. His acts included bits of sheer terror. According to legend, he blinded the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral to keep him from creating anything more beautiful for anyone else. According to history, Ivan murdered his own eldest son and heir in a fit of pique. Ivan’s reign was one of the bloodiest periods in Russian history, but it gave birth to the modern state.

So how does Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin compare? Let’s analyze.

Putin hasn’t (yet) resurrected Stalin’s system of prison camps—a system so vast that the great Soviet writer Solzhenitsyn called them the “gulag archipelago.” But Putin doesn’t have to. He’s a highly intelligent man living in a time of infinitely greater public access to information and real news. It’s enough for him to have intimidated and marginalized key figures who might have challenged his utter dominance of Russia. The rest—all but the reckless—took heed.

The highly popular Boris Nemtsov was gunned down, right near the Kremlin, reportedly just before he was to reveal the presence of Russian military in Ukraine. The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed for ten years and then exiled, reportedly after having had the temerity to propose international standards for doing business in Russia. And the highly popular blogger and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny is in jail right now, on charges of fleeing (made after he voluntarily came home), with more charges to come.

Add to this the deaths of dozens of journalists since Putin came to power in 2000, with few convicted of any crimes. The sum total is an ongoing threat and menace to anyone who challenges Putin for power, or even for control of information. When made real that often and that openly, a threat need not be verbally explicit.

Now let’s looks at geopolitics. Putin has made two explicit threats to foreign nations that might oppose him. He has accumulated an estimated force of 190,000 troops, replete with aircraft, warships, artillery and armor, surrounding Ukraine on all sides except the west. His recently broadcast videos of nuclear-capable ballistic and cruise missiles, not to mention hypersonic missiles that Putin insists can evade our defenses, make the nuclear threat as near to explicit as one can, without emulating Kim Jong Un or our own deranged Demagogue in response (remember “fire and fury”?).

And if Putin himself doesn’t make that threat explicit, he doesn’t have to. Russia has an over-the-top TV commentator, the mirror image of our own Tucker Carlson, who has touted Russia’s ability to reduce our American cities to “radioactive ash.”

So as the old joke about the prostitute goes, we know what Putin is. He’s grozny, just as “terrible” as Ivan. Given the power of modern Russia and modern weaponry, he’s far more grozny. He’s a man who lives and rules by threats and menace.

What we don’t yet know is how far he’s willing to go, against what resistance and beyond words. His acts today included recognizing the Russian-separatist enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent nations and flooding them with Russian troops.

Our media didn’t make clear whether what he recognized was the whole of the erstwhile Ukrainian provinces or just the separatist parts. Yet the logic of his position and of the situation suggest the latter. Russian troops would encounter little resistance in the separatist enclaves; indeed they might be welcomed.

The open presence of Russian military, with military discipline and a clear chain of command, might be a welcome change for the local Russian-leaning population. Up to now, they reportedly have had to put up with a motley (and sometimes assassinated) collection of ad-hoc and self-appointed leaders, including organized criminals and under-cover Russian military. (One of these leaders, whose nom de guerre (Strelkov) derives from the Russian word “to shoot,” was apparently responsible for downing a civilian airliner in 2015. He seems since to have disappeared inside Russia.)

Russia now appears to have “relocated,” or to be in the process of relocating, a large number of Russian nationals from the separatist enclaves to Russia proper, perhaps as a pretext for a wider war. But to the extent the separatist enclaves have real, open military government, they probably will be safer, more stable, calmer and more pleasant places for those former residents, if any, who choose to return.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that Vladimir Grozny has gone to all this trouble and expense, and created all these savage and world-disturbing threats, simply to consolidate control over separatist enclaves that Russia already governed in all but name. In his latest personal diatribe against Ukraine, Putin left a distinct impression that making it a vassal state is high on his list of priorities and demands. Precisely how he would do that remains to be seen.

I leave it to our diplomatic and intelligence services to speculate on the precise limits, if any, on freedom of action that Putin himself perceives. I write this essay just to provide an historical perspective on how unique is Putin on the world stage and how serious and ultimately personal are his threats.

Vladimir Grozny is indeed a unique figure on the world stage today. There is nothing like him anywhere else, perhaps save Kim Jong Un. Even Xi Jinping must answer to China’s seven-member Plenum of the Central Committee. And ultimately China’s 90-million member Communist Party, organized in the image of China’s ancient Mandarin system, has some influence over how China is governed. Xi may have made himself Chairman for Life, in the image of Mao, and he may have cut the Plenum from nine to seven members the better to control it. But the Plenum and the Party still exist and might well rebel, for example, if Xi risked nuclear war, or even a big and unnecessary conventional war, with the West.

Unfortunately, there are no similar brakes on the supreme leader’s acts in Russia today. The Communist Party is gone with the wind. The “United Russia” Party, under which Putin ran for office most recently, is mostly a slogan and an advertising campaign. If it has any real political existence, let alone influence, such as do the two big American political parties, I have never seen it.

So Putin sits alone at the apex of Russian power. To understand just how alone, you need only review one of the shocking tapes of Putin’s most recent inauguration. If that doesn’t convince you that Putin sees himself as Russia’s most recent Tsar, nothing will. (See also, this recent expert analysis of Putin’s increasing personal isolation due to Covid precautions and his utter lack of peers and even serious confidants.)

A bit of Russian literary history is also worth noting. The Russian poet Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821-1877) wrote one of humankind’s greatest patriotic poems. Entitled simply Rus’ (Русь, the ancient and affectionate name for Russia), it recounts an unnamed war dreamed up by an unnamed Tsar. It’s key stanzas follow, with my own translation after each, valuing meaning over meter and sound:

Русь/Rus'

Битву кровавую
С сильной державою
Царь замышлял.
Хватит ли силушки?
Хватит ли золота? –
Думал-гадал.

A bloody battle
With a mighty empire
The Tsar dreamed up.
Would forces suffice?
Would the money last?
He thought and he speculated.

* * *

Русь не шелохнется,
Русь — как убитая!
А загорелась в ней
Искра сокрытая,

Rus’ won’t move
Rus’ lies as beaten!
But something in her strikes
A secret spark,

* * *

Рать подымается
Неисчислимая!
Сила в ней скажется
Несокрушимая!

The host arises
Numberless!
The might in her said
To be boundless!

This part of Nekrasov’s epic poem came out sometime between 1866 and 1877. These short excerpts don’t do it justice, but I hope they make the point here.

Within the limits of poetic license—at a time when Tsarist rule still prevailed—Nekrasov made clear that the war under discussion was the Tsar’s invention and enterprise, and his alone. The poet used Russian diminutives (which don’t come across in my translation) to suggest that the Tsar may have had too little else to occupy his time, such as his people’s happiness. But in the end the Russian people’s instinct for self-preservation arises, along with the “numberless host” of Russian soldiers, to save the day.

I thought of this poem while watching videos of Russian troops slogging dutifully through the snow in and near Ukraine. In their pace, stance and general demeanor, they reminded me of the American troops commanded recently to Europe to defend NATO and the EU. All are desultorily ready to fight an unnecessary war that they simply don’t understand. None will be fighting for home or family. You’d think that Putin or his advisors would have learned something from our own disasters in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

No one but Putin wants this war. Like the “bloody battle” that Nekrasov’s unnamed tsar dreamed up, it’s the invention and the project of one man: Vladimir Grozny.

And Putin even got his history mixed up. Russia didn’t create Ukraine, as he reportedly claimed, unless you think Ukraine’s creation began with the Soviet Union’s recognition of it as a separate administrative entity. On the contrary, Kievan Rus—one of Russia’s early city-states, centered on what is now Kyiv—was something like Russia’s mother country, as England is to us. Ukraine even has its own unique language, a Slavic language as similar to Russian as Spanish is to Portuguese or Italian, but with some uniquely Ukrainian Cyrillic letters.

Unfortunately, in its Soviet guise Russia treated its mother rather harshly. In the early thirties, Soviet Russia enforced collectivization of farming and commandeered the fruits of Ukraine’s breadbasket, thereby precipitating a massive multi-year famine called the Holodomor. That famine killed millions.

That, not some fictional affinity for Germany or Nazis, was why many Ukrainians fought with the Nazis during WWII. They wanted to avoid further famine by controlling their own land and farms. So they saw the Nazis as potential liberators, only to find that, in the end, the Nazis treated them as subhuman just the same as they did the Russians.

The dismal fate of wartime Ukrainians, caught thus between the two gigantic Soviet and Nazi war machines, was one of human history’s most tragic chapters. It was and is no excuse for recriminations, let alone an invasion.

For a man as intelligent as Putin, this “justification” for invading and occupying Ukraine, let alone annexing it, is shockingly inaccurate and specious. It’s a bit like trying to rationalize raping your mother.

The bottom line is that this war/invasion is a one-man enterprise, dreamed up by Vladimir Grozny and him alone. Before tens of thousands die in this demented enterprise, we should at least ask the question how far diplomatic immunity should extend.

A Russian friend once told me that Russians, or at least their medieval Mongol occupiers, invented diplomatic immunity. After a besieged city had assassinated their emissaries, the Mongols slaughtered everyone in the city and razed it to the ground. Eventually, the custom of respecting emissaries, and not killing them, caught on. Today it applies to leaders of all sorts, who naturally preserve the rule as a way to protect themselves personally.

But how far should diplomatic immunity extend? Should it immunize a leader who singlehandedly starts a real war in the twenty-first century, which might turn nuclear and extinguish our species? Is any one man’s life, even a leader’s, worth that much?

Since this war is an enterpise conceived by one lone man who rules by threat and menace, it seems that at least threatening to make Vladimir Grozny a personal target is worth a try. He appears to be the only leader on Earth with both the power and the recklessness to start a war that might extinguish our species. (Recent revelations made clear that even our own Demagogue, at the height of his self-assumed power, never threatened such a war.) So threatening to extinguish Vladimir Grozny personally might be something he could understand.

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