Vladimir the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), was nearly a contemporary of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the author of the famous political tract The Prince. Had there been an Internet back then, Ivan’s reign would no doubt have made it into Machiavelli’s long litany of wars, deceptions, treacheries and bestialities perpetrated by leaders of medieval Italian city-states.

Ivan reportedly killed his eldest son and presumed heir in a fit of pique. Legend has it that he had the eyes of the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square put out, so that he could never again create anything as beautiful. Those are the kinds of things that happen when there are no rules, no accountability, and no restraints on leaders’ personal power.

Deception, assassination and intimidation may be necessary skills for survival in a lawless and brutal medieval society. But are they good skills for governing a modern nation?

The English word “Terrible” is a poor translation of the Russian word “грозный” (“grozny”), which normally means “threatening” or “menacing.” But it remains a good description of those times. How could the architect of what may be Russia’s most admired edifice otherwise have been treated so?

Yet Ivan’s horrific examples of unbridled cruelty and arrogance pale in comparison with those of Vladimir Putin. The cruelty may not be quite the same: a “clean” assassination somehow seems less cruel than blinding an innocent and brilliant professional who needed his eyesight for his world-leading work. But this is the Twenty-First Century, some four centuries after the Western Enlightenment was supposed to have made big changes in human life. And Vladimir the Terrible makes up in volume whatever he may lack in bestiality.

Is there any doubt that he had Yevgeny Prigozhin—his one-time chef and personal butcher—assassinated, along with Prigozhin’s top retinue of mercenary loyalists? Does anyone believe that the airplane crash that did the trick was an accident? Does anyone believe that Putin’s speech praising Prigozhin as a good “businessman” was anything other than one of Putin’s ever-increasing and now-routine deceptions?

There are a thousand ways to down an aircraft if you have the means and access. You can plant a bomb, taint the fuel, or modify any one of a thousand parts to fail catastrophically at a particular time, on command. And all this is apart from means of attacking the plane from the ground or the air.

In this case the message is clear, unmistakable and consistent with past events: cross Putin, and you die. Cross him in even minor ways and you wind up poisoned or disfigured, like Litvinenko, the Skripals, Navalny or Yushchenko, shot down within sight of the Kremlin like Boris Nemtsov, the popular progressive Mayor of Moscow, dispatched routinely like some eighty recalcitrant journalists during Putin’s tenure, or jailed and exiled like the businessman and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. If Machiavelli were alive and writing today, he would have a field day with modern Russia.

In the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible was a tragedy mostly for Russia and its neighbors struggling with Russia for territory and power. In the twenty-first century, Vladimir the Terrible is a problem for the entire world, and not just because Russia has nuclear weapons.

Despite invidious comparisons, Vladimir the Terrible is in a class by himself. No other modern leader of a major power—let alone one that commands nukes—has left as long a line of wounded and dead human carcasses of his own people in his wake. No other single leader has presided over as many assassinations and attempts, let alone the most horrible war, with the most horrible atrocities against civilians, since the last century. Even Kim Jong Un has, so far (to outsiders’ knowledge), only killed a handful of powerful North Koreans to stay in power, and he has only threatened war (yet), never started one. China’s Xi is a saint in comparision: he sends his political enemies into forced labor, jails or exiles them; he doesn’t kill or maim them.

In comparison, Vladimir the Terrible is a walking vortex of bestiality, lies and cruelty, worthy of the sixteenth century, somehow living and ruling in the twenty-first. Worse yet, he commands world’s most deadly (or perhaps second-most-deadly) nuclear arsenal.

Two conclusions follow from these awful facts. First, his “example” must not be allowed to stand. If it does, others will follow, as surely as there is evil in Man, and as surely as power corrupts.

The Western Enlightenment is already tottering in Britain, the place of its birth. If the civilized world allows this bestiality to stand, it will risk a series of conflicts and atrocities that could vastly increase the likelihood of a nuclear Holocaust.

That’s why the War in Ukraine is America’s business, just as it is every other nation’s. The world can no more ignore it than it could hide from the runup to World War I or II. To put our heads in the sand of isolationism and “America First” would be to court the end of human civilization, or at least a long, new Dark Age.

The second conclusion is that, while Russians bear primary responsibility for changing this dismal picture, correcting it is not their task alone. Leaders, intelligence services, engineers, scientists and politicians from every nation should make it their business to help where they can. The reasons are simple: (1) they have vastly more resources and experience than do Russians, let alone Russians’ poor, shell-shocked and isolated expatriate community, and (2) they are not on the direct firing line and so can act with less fear and more calculation.

During the mid-nineties, I was in Moscow on a democracy-building project. That decade saw a wonderful window of openness and rule-building in Russia, which now goes by the lost names “glasnost’” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring). I was lucky enough then to catch a radio program—entirely a Russian production—about the death of Stalin. He lay on his bed, dying, in an enormous room befitting an emperor. His doctors, his chief aids, and various political actors attended him silently.

According to the narrator, all present in that huge room felt nothing but terror. As Stalin raised his hand, each feared that he would point to him or her, condemning them with his last breath to exile, the gulags or immediate execution, for reasons known only to him. Only when Stalin’s dying hand fell, he had breathed his last breath, and his doctor had pronounced him dead, did a feeling of relief and redemption pervade the room.

This was the monster that many Russians, according to polls, still revere as their “savior” in humanity’s most terrible conflict. And this is the man whom Vladimir Putin appears hell bent not just to emulate, but to outdo in cruelty and arbitrariness, in the twenty-first century.

While the last century saw some of our species’ greatest tragedies and worst atrocities, it also saw some of our greatest progress. Among them are the United Nations, the various Geneva Conventions and other agreements establishing rules of international relations, institutions and rules of international finance, and basic rules for warfare, treatment of children, and treatment of refugees. Nations like China, India and Saudi Arabia may complain that these developments constitute Western or US “hegemony,” but they have signed up to many. And the agreements have made life easier, or at least more predictable and humane, for much of the world.

This progress has been unsteady and sometimes, perhaps, unfair. But it’s a vast improvement over Machiavelli’s world, let alone with nuclear weapons and Internet persuaders.

Every civilized nation, especially including China, has an obligation to its citizens and to humanity to make sure that leaders like Vladimir the Terrible don’t drag our species away from the promising beginning of global rules and organization into a new Dark Age. The result could be partial or total species self-extinction, as accelerating global warming makes parts of our planet uninhabitable, and unwanted migration becomes a new pandemic. No leader today, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, presents as grave a threat of species-wide devolution as Vladimir Putin.

I am not privy to the deep secrets of our United States. But I cannot help but imagine that we have resources, means of gathering intelligence, and, yes, secret and stealthy weapons, that might be useful in this regard, and not just in helping Ukrainians recover their stolen territory. We and our allies should use them all—judiciously, carefully, and thoughtfully—to make sure that Vladimir the Terrible’s reign of terror is as short as possible, and that the end of his reign provokes no further catastrophe.

Reaching those goals will require all the vast collective experience of our nation and its allies, working in concert, along with Russian expatriates and any still-domestic Russians who wish to join. If we fail, a new Dark Age, or even partial or total species self-extinction, is possible, if not likely.

Machiavellian assassination, deception, treachery, cruelty and a complete lack of circumspection and accountability don’t mix with nuclear weapons, nor with modern mass means of disinformation. What is at stake is nothing less than the short-term future of our species in time of unprecedented runaway global warming and therefore unprecedented uncertainty and risk. If Kim, MBS, Xi, others (Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, Orban?), or our very own Demagogue take the wrong lessons, our still-young new century could be dark indeed.



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