It is our belief that the Cold War architecture would be a much closer match to the current geopolitical reality than World War II. That being said, the vastly popular World War II parallels nudge us toward taking a closer look at this assessment.
Back in the early 1990s, Alexander Yanov, a prominent Soviet-born American historian, compared Russia with the defeated post-World War I Germany, with the public’s scorn for both the winners and its ‘treacherous’ government. The German society was witnessing their country’s economic collapse while yearning for an ‘iron-fisted’ leadership and the revival of the days of glory. The historian wrote:
After studying the emergence and rise of Russian fascism for almost a quarter of a century, I am seeing the exact same ticking time bomb that detonated in Weimar Republic Germany. But the West is, too, approaching this bomb the exact same way it did some 70 years ago <…> Instead of creating a framework for Russia’s democratic transformation in a new setting, it acts as a helpless bystander as it beholds the progression of yet another Weimar experiment1.
1 — Yanov, Alexander. After Yeltsin. “Weimar Russia”, Moscow: KRUK Publishing Company, 1995, pp. 15-16.
Back in the day, Alexander Yanov’s book faced a fair share of backlash both in Russia and in Western countries. But little did they know how prophetic his analysis would soon turn out to be.
But Yanov’s comparative argument can now even be extended. “Weimar Russia” lasted for almost same length of time Weimar Republic Germany did in the early 20th century, between 1992 and 2003 (2005), after which Putin set out to renationalize the Russian economy, abolished regional elections, and began eyeing a territorial expansion.
The 2008 Russo–Georgian War was not countered by the West, just as was the case with Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in the mid1930s. The annexation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas citing the locals’ “desire to rejoin Russia” was eerily reminiscent of the Anschluss and the occupation of the Sudetenland. Moreover, the Western allies’ negotiations with Vladimir Putin were similar to the Munich Agreement of 1938. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine bears troubling similarities to the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland. Initially, the West offered Volodymyr Zelensky the exact same thing Western leaders suggested Władisław Raczkiewicz and Władisław Sikorski do in 1939: “consider leading the government-in-exile.” The current stage of the hostilities evokes the image of the Phoney War where the war was declared but never actually waged against the aggressor as Europe was waiting for a deus ex machina resolution.
These similarities certainly are worth listing. Worse, speaking of Russia’s domestic policy and rapidly deteriorating public sentiment, they are appallingly grim.
But for all that, we contend that the indisputable similarities are outweighed by the following significant differences:
- Russia is a nuclear-weapon state.
- The Russian Armed Forces are weak enough and ill-equipped to launch a greater invasion in years to come.
- Once the Ukraine war is over, the Russian public and elites alike are much more likely to adopt a non-interventionist stance popular with the Soviet people at the end of World War II rather the one shared by the Germans in 1940 as they thought their global domination was almost a done deal.
- The West has not declared a new “Phoney War” against Russia.