In Moscow's Shadows 175: 'In a dangerous world, strike first' - Russian strategic culture
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Does Russia have a distinct and specific strategic culture that one can trace from the medieval era all the way to the present day? I would suggest that it does. Hello, I'm Mark Gagliotti, and welcome to my view of Russia in Moscow's shadows.

This podcast of varying length, frequency and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the Crisis Exercise Software Company, Conductor.

So today, rather than getting stuck in the weeds of what's happening today and what may happen tomorrow, I absolutely want to turn the telescope around and look very, very big picture and look at the overall evolution and above all continuities in Russian strategic culture.

Now, if you happen to be one of the students at the UK Defence Academy's Advanced Command and Staff course, which I gave an online lecture, some of this will be very familiar to you, but I think there's enough that won't be that I hope you'll still continue listening. And it will also inevitably draw on some of the work for my book, my recent book, Forged in War, A Military History of Russia from Its Beginnings to the Present.

Out now, yada yada. Anyway, just to start very, very briefly, and obviously one can talk for hours about the definitions, but what is strategic culture? Strategic culture is in effect that kind of deep-rooted set of principles

culturally embedded understandings about how the world, and particularly how security threats and opportunities work, what constitutes a threat, what are the kind of natural ways in which to respond. So it's not actually about the decisions of any particular government or leader. It's not about general national policy, which is a clearly articulated policy.

It is much more about what happens, you might say, in the hindbrain that helps shape those policies. In the sense that it's inevitable that someone who's raised within, for example, Switzerland, is going to just naturally have a different set of fundamental assumptions than someone in, say, South Korea.

And to a degree, this depends on some national culture and also the enduring circumstances, the kind of quite literally bedrock factors shaping a country's strategic situation, which, I mean, particularly in the case of Russia, what are we talking about? Its size, the length of its borders, etc.

Its Eurasian location, I mean, think about it. This is a country which not only has it known particularly natural borders, except rather unhelpfully to the north, it also finds itself at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. And that means that whichever is the rising or dominant military power of the age from either Europe or Asia,

Whether we're talking about the Mongols in the 14th century or Napoleon in the beginning of the 19th or Hitler in the 20th century, at some point they're going to want to go into and through Russia. So its location also provides it that sense that there are threats from every direction and it has to somehow cope with those threats.

And again, consider size and borders means that these are threats that could come from anywhere and could be very powerful ones. And yet Russia is in many ways an intrinsically poor country. Sure, one can point more recently to the riches of Siberia, the oil, the gas and such like. But this is really essentially a late 19th and above all 20th century sort of asset.

Before that, what is it that really determined the national economic base? It was agriculture. Because remember, again, if one looks at what happens, the Industrial Revolution in West of Europe was based upon a previous agrarian revolution. When you can grow that much more crops with the same amount of farm employment and the same amount of farm space...

Well, that surplus enables trade, it enables the rise of the cities and with it the industries that are associated and so forth. Russia, for reasons above all of geography, that's the quality of the soils, the nature of the soils, and also its climate. Remember, this is a country which has, most of the country has rather shorter growing seasons.

was never really able to use the techniques and tools of the agrarian revolution effectively. So agricultural productivity remained, all the way through to pretty much the 19th century, stuck at medieval levels. Now again, this is not a comment about Russians and Russia, it's just a comment about the enduring circumstances. So if you are a relatively impoverished country,

but you face a variety of potentially devastating security threats, how do you cope with that? Well, honestly the answer is you have to basically make sure that you extort that much more tax from your economic base because you're going to have to spend a larger proportion of your national wealth on defence. And, well, that is absolutely a requirement.

And don't just believe me. Why don't you believe Joseph Stalin? 1931, he pointed out, one feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans. She was beaten by the Turkish Beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry.

She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her because of her backwardness. Military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity.

Now that was 1931, the same year in which he said, we are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced nations. We must make good this distance in 10, or they will destroy us. And indeed, 10 years later, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. So the point is, though, that these fundamentals have led to, in my opinion, a strategic culture that's built around what I call the three A's.

Three basic assumptions that are pretty much kind of bred in the bone. That doesn't mean that individuals cannot buck against them, but just simply represent the cultural backdrop to any thinking about where Russia is in the world and how it responds to potential threats and challenges. The first A is authoritarian centralism.

Now, as I said, this is an essentially relatively impoverished country that will often feel that it faces particular, more advanced or more powerful enemies. And therefore, it needs to maximise its tax gain. But of course, people don't like to be taxed, especially not if they're being taxed into starvation. And so they will resist. So therefore, coercion is needed to maintain stability.

that situation, to maximise the tax revenue. You basically need to ask people to think of themselves as in a position in which they either pay up and risk starvation or refuse and face a very real risk of murderous government retaliation.

Because this is the thing, in a country this size you cannot police every aspect of it. You can't have Cossacks sitting in every single village scattered across the whole wide wastes of the tundra. If you are in a position, and this actually applies generally to essentially penal policy, in other words what sort of punishments you level. If in a policing situation where you catch very few people who commit a particular crime,

then if you need to deter them you have to have a very very high sentence so it's a low probability but very high impact outcome whereas if you catch a large proportion of offenders deterrence can be maintained by actually having a relatively moderate punishment well likewise in this case if you know people are going to resist

And if much of the time it's going to be very hard for you to actually deal with them, you therefore need to use disproportionate violence in order to deter risings. So, you know, this helps explain why it's not just some kind of naturally nasty bit of Russian DNA, but why precisely it has a tendency to respond so violently, so severely to resistance against the state itself.

because this is in order to deter what you can't really otherwise police. It also, this authoritarian centralism sort of has baked into it cycles or maybe perhaps better pendulum swings of threat perception. You know broadly speaking if you look at Russia's history you have a point when the sense is that the greatest threat is from without. From the fact that the country is becoming economically backward

and therefore economic backwardness means military vulnerability. And so you need to modernize. But modernization, especially given that it's going to require probably extracting even more tax from the base in order to pay for it, is disruptive. It is socially disruptive, politically disruptive, economically disruptive, and will quite often lead to a backlash.

And so the pendulum swings. And instead people think, no, no, no, actually the biggest threat is actually from within. It is a domestic threat of unrest and revolution. And therefore instead of trying to modernise, which is disruptive, we should just try and hold things as they are and be conservative instead. And so what you tend to have is therefore an aborted modernisation that gets some of the way but not enough, followed by a period of increasing stagnation

until something new comes to shock the elites into believing that in fact they need to modernize. Classic example was the Crimean War of 1853-56, because up to that point Tsar Nicholas I, who had been fully aware of just how backward Russia risked becoming, and was also fully aware of not just the political problems relating to serfdom, which is in effect, let's face it, land slavery,

but also that serfdom was morally indefensible. And he had toyed with the idea of emancipating the serfs, abolishing this practice. He'd held various sort of secret commissions. But when it came down to it, he was fully aware that it would be massively disruptive.

and therefore he ultimately didn't dare take that chance. And going back to the last major conflict, which had been the war with Napoleon, there was this complacent sense of, well, look, we were able to break Napoleon, therefore surely we're not doing too badly. Well, of course, Napoleon was ultimately broken by Russia's geography and by the fact that, anyway, his empire was overstretched by that stage.

rather than just simply the prowess of Russian military technology. But nonetheless, that provided the excuse. So you have this period of conservatism and increasing stagnation. Then the Crimean War, in which the Russians find themselves facing inter alia the most advanced military powers of the age, the British and the French. And you have a situation where, in some ways, British rifles could outrange Russian artillery.

And more to the point, the power of the Royal Navy was able to impose a trade boycott onto Russian trade shipping in the Black Sea and the high north. Let's be honest, the Crimean War actually wasn't won on that peninsula, it was won on those cold seas to the north.

And in that context, suddenly Russia realised how far it had fallen behind and why that was dangerous. And Nicholas I, who dies during the Crimean War, his successor, Alexander II, embraces modernisation, embraces therefore the emancipation of the Serbs to try and kick-start the economy, and indeed generates in the process massive disruption, which actually leads to his own assassination, and again a swing of the pendulum back to conservatism.

So, you know, this authoritarian centralism is very much based around those kind of deep intractable challenges. How can we modernize without actually disrupting our entire system? So the second element, the second A, is aggressive defensiveness. Now, on the one hand, look, Russia can use its strategic depth, in other words, the fact that it's just so bloody big, in order to trade off land for time.

But on the other hand, the territory that it trades off tends to become absolutely devastated. And so there is always a reluctance, even if you do actually have to do that, as the Russians have done time and time again, whether it's against Napoleon or Hitler or whoever. So there is this sense that if actually territory really is your fundamental defensive edge, a little bit more territory isn't going to hurt.

And again, this ties in with the lack of natural boundaries. Catherine the Great, for example, famously said, I have no way to defend my borders but to expand them. And actually, if you look at Russian expansion, often it is, it's not that there was a specific policy that says, grab all the land we can, boys, but rather a sort of an accretional process, bit by bit,

you know, a carnate here in Central Asia or, you know, another bit of territory in the Caucasus region or whatever. You know, just that sense that, in fact, ultimately, with no natural borders, the natural pressure is to expand outwards and you can justify that on the principle that it gives you more strategic depth. But on the other hand, given that you're often going to be fighting enemies who are that much larger or more advanced than you,

Well, the key thing is, and in fact this is what Putin himself says that he learnt running with street gangs in his childhood, is if you're going to have to fight, you throw the first punch. Russia often felt it did not have the luxury of waiting for the other side to start a war that it knew was going to happen, and that therefore it needed to move more quickly. The classic example is World War I.

when the Russians really didn't want war, and they were trying to reassure the Germans in particular that war was not on the cards. But on the other hand, they were also painfully aware that if they waited for Germany to start mobilizing, Germany, obviously thanks to its more compact size, its greater efficiency, its density of railways, could mobilize much, much more quickly. And therefore, Germany would be able to punch Russia before it had its forces in place.

Therefore, there was this question, do you put your faith in the Germans, or do you start to mobilize just so that you're ready in case, having to try and reassure the Germans that you mean nothing offensive by it? This is what they did. The Germans frankly felt they couldn't trust the Russians, and hence World War I. So generally there is this notion that you...

are aggressively defensive and we see this with Putin and I say this I'm going to have to repeat it no doubt because people have a tendency otherwise to see red but you know this is not to defend in any way what Putin or indeed previous Russian rulers have done but many of the times that they have launched aggressive wars they have genuinely done so believing quite possibly wrongly but nonetheless believing that actually that was a necessity because precisely they were threatened from

without and that you know essentially the war was going to happen so you try and throw that first punch and the third a asymmetric assumptions you know you're often going to be fighting a more conventionally powerful enemy and therefore in part you're going to have to work out ways of responding which will often actually mean in effect trying to copy them

And this goes back to, I mean, if you go back to the early Rus era, for example, where the principalities were faced with a variety of...

rapid, nimble, ferocious nomadic horse nations, even before the Mongols, well what happened is the princes engaged their own, the so-called Chornye Klabuki, the black hoods, were horse nomads who were hired as mercenaries, precisely so that the Russians could try and take on the nomads at their own game, and indeed in due course they learnt it.

If you've ever looked at the Kremlin and thought, "Gosh, that looks quite a bit like the Castello Sforzesco in Milan," well, there's a good reason for that. Particularly, I'm talking about not just the red brick walls, but the so-called swallowtail battlements on the walls. Well, that's because most of the brick Kremlin was actually built by an Italian.

ridolfo fioravanti who had also done military construction work in in milan for the sforzas and the point is at that particular time the best military architects as well as you know just generally sort of military engineers were regarded as the italians and so the russians essentially just imported them peter the great's navy

Well, that followed his grand embassy in which he went to a variety of European countries, but above all the Netherlands and Britain. Again, the paramount naval powers of the age, in order not just to learn technologies, but actually to hire people who could come and build his ships and captain his navy. And that's a principle, that last point about captaining the navy, I mean, that continued afterwards. In the 18th century, for example, John Paul Jones, the so-called father of the American navy,

for a brief period, was an admiral in Russia's Black Sea Fleet. And generally, this is not just about the Navy, but if you look at the Army, again, a wealth of foreigners brought in to bring in their own technologies, their own understandings of warfare, including, for whatever reason, a disproportionate number of Scots.

who actually sort of embedded themselves in almost the cultural life of the country. You think of the famous Lirmontov family, well, actually that roots back to a Scottish mercenary by the name of George Lirmont, who in due course russified his name as Yuri Lirmont. Later on, well, in the 20th century, they're not hiring foreigners necessarily,

But they are absolutely doing what they can to copy from them, whether we're talking about the espionage program that was behind the Russian nuclear program or all kinds of other sort of attempts at aping the West. For me, I mean, one of the most fascinating examples was the Yak-38 vertical takeoff fighter. Sorry, I'm going to go into military wonkery mode for a moment.

This was after the British Hawker Harrier had emerged as the world's first vertical takeoff and landing combat jet. A very advanced, impressive design that particularly used these rotating nozzles so that the blast of the engine could be focused downwards to lift the plane off the landing strip, aircraft carrier deck or whatever.

and then pivoted to then provide forward thrust. So this is how a plane could be both a vertical takeoff plane and yet a meaningful flyer in the air.

Now, the Russians, they liked the idea, but they were never actually able to really sort of copy the full sophistication of the design. So their Yak-38 was much more of a kind of a brute force method. It had two jets that were specifically to try and lift it off the ground and a further engine, further thruster, to actually move it in the air.

The trouble is this had a tendency to firstly make the plane flip. If one of the lift jets failed, then the plane would flip over, so much they actually had to have an emergency ejection seat that would just automatically kick the pilot out if one of the engines failed and it began to flip sideways. But also it just was massively underpowered. It couldn't really carry very much. It had no radar. It only had four hard points for weapons. When they tested it in Afghanistan,

where the conditions tended to be quite hot weather, which means much less density to the air, so it's a lot harder to fly, frankly, it could scarcely carry any kind of military ordnance at all. So although at first people said, oh my gosh, look, the Soviets are sophisticated enough to have their own vertical takeoff aircraft,

In practice, it was a particularly cheap and rubbishy copy. So, you know, in that case, the asymmetric assumptions is if you're going to be facing an enemy that is more conventionally powerful, you copy what you can, but you're always going to be playing catch up in that case. So instead, you have to shift the essence of the battle to where you're stronger. And here we very much had this notion of warfare as a battle of will as well as imagination.

sense that look russians may not have the best weapons russians may not have the best organization but ultimately russians are going to be that much more determined and will fight the fight in whatever way is needed to win even if that means you know horrific tactics even if that means horrific losses but the point is ultimately they will do whatever because they cannot play the game the way the enemy are expecting to play it

Now, I'm not going to go in detail as to how this evolves from Tsarist to early Russian, Soviet rather, to late Soviet times. I think it's worth noting, though, just a couple of quick points. Once I wanted to dwell on the very early Soviet times, the degree to which whatever the utopian ideals may have been originally behind Bolshevism, the degree to which the Bolshevik state was really shaped by the Civil War.

which is incredibly brutal, I mean not all civil wars are brutal but even by the standards of civil wars this was a very brutal struggle. It was one fought against a whole variety of different enemies. I mean we tend to think of this as oh reds versus whites. It was nothing like that. I mean there's a point where first of all the country pretty much fragmented. I mean for me my absolute favourite war

was the short-lived Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress Builders of Naisar, which declared independence in December 1917, and essentially comprised about 90 sailors at a naval base on an Estonian island.

who retained their notional independence for about two months, taxing the local Estonians, until the Germans chased them out of there. So you have fly-spec little semi-independent nations, all the way up to, yes, the large, powerful white generals, alliances and armies. But the point is, it thoroughly militarises Estonia.

the whole notion of the Russian state. It seems to validate all of those three A's. In other words, authoritarian centralism, essentially the Bolshevik state becomes one single militarized force, which is being held together by the extraordinary commission, the Cheka, the early Bolshevik political police, and the use of massive and often indiscriminate brutality and violence.

aggressive defense that sense that in fact you know we are a pariah state we will only survive if we can actually push world revolution which was Trotsky's initial notion then gets sublimated into a sense that in fact its best way of fighting against its enemies is precisely by undermining them

We have things like, in modern terms, we would call a sort of a hybrid war operation against Estonia in 1924, in which they try to foment a local uprising as an excuse to inject their own troops. It doesn't work. But still there is that notion of, essentially, subversion as a war-fighting weapon when you know the enemy want to kill you and therefore you have to try and break them apart first.

So also aggressive defense. And finally, asymmetric assumptions. Absolutely. There was no question that the capitalist world was vastly more powerful. So you have to use whatever covert and subversive instruments are at your disposal.

So, you know, that's one point. Then, you know, obviously, if you go through Soviet times, things are different because of nuclear age. Everything gets sublimated into other areas because you can't really contemplate direct warfighting with the other superpower, the other alliance.

1990s period of chaos and and then we come to putin and i think with putin what's really important is precisely that you have this traditional strategic culture and those three a's all very very clearly reaffirmed so let's have a break and then let me bring this up to the present day just the usual mid-episode reminder that you're listening to the in moscow shadows podcast

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Now as usual let me use the start of the second half just for a couple of public service announcements. The first one is specifically to patrons. The first of the patrons only question and answer sessions, which is the general one, I'm hoping to have that done by the end of this this week, in other words by coming Friday, so keep an eye on your emails for that.

And the second is that the crisis simulation company Conductor that sponsors this podcast, thanks very much guys, is holding an online exercise next month that I'm consulting on. It's open if people want to join in and I'll put a link to the relevant page in the program notes.

And it will be at 1500 GMT, so 3 in the afternoon UK time, on the 11th of December. And let me just read you the blurb so you get a sense of what it's about.

Europe stands on the brink of change. After years of conflict, the scars of war in Ukraine weigh heavily on the continent. Obviously this is set slightly in the future. Behind closed doors, high-stakes negotiations aim for a fragile ceasefire, while the UK faces pressure to take a stronger stance against Russia. Amidst this tension, Tide Logistics is set to unveil its revolutionary ammonia-fuelled ship, NH3, at South Dock Port.

This innovation could secure the UK's leadership in green energy or lead to a major crisis if things go wrong. Well, considering that the headline of the exercise is Russian sabotage, I think you can assume that things will not go smoothly. Anyway, if you're interested in taking part in this, as I would stress, online live crisis exercise, do just sign up. So, to return to Russian strategic culture.

And particularly sort of how this has been operationalized in the Putin era, because it is absolutely clear the extent to which Putin is very, very much a product of this strategic culture and his kind of goal of making Russia great again.

of return to a sort of a status that he feels is Russia's birthright. I mean, this is something that he's felt a long time, that Russia is a great power. Back in 1999, so in other words before his presidency, he said, "Russia has been a great power for centuries and remains so. It has always had and still has legitimate zones of interest."

We should not drop our guard in this respect. Neither should we allow our opinion to be ignored. And just that little quote, for me, encapsulates Putin's notion, his vision of geopolitics, which is, as I've said in the past, a very 19th century one, that a great power has a sphere of influence and that has to assert that, that it has a voice in all global issues.

And to be blunt, it has a pass on getting to break the rules of the international system. That's very much, I think, Putin's quite kind of colonial era mindset that there are countries that give orders and countries that take orders. And Russia has to be an order giver.

But nonetheless, I mean, if one thinks of the challenges he's faced, it's clear that those three A's are still very much at the heart of his notion. Authoritarian centralism, you know, this so-called power vertical, this idea that there has to be the absolute control of the center. You know, it's not just a political necessity, but a strategic one.

And, frankly, the securitization of all aspects of society and economy. Again, this is not Stalinism, this is not North Korea, but instead it is a conscription state, if you want to call it that, or a mobilization state. In other words, that any aspect of society, doesn't matter if we're talking about a company or an organized crime gang,

can and will be required to do what the state needs of it, because the state's needs must be absolutely preeminent. Secondly, aggressive defensiveness. Now again, I really need to stress, this is not in any way excuse the ghastly war he has unleashed on Ukraine, or indeed his previous various campaigns.

But nonetheless, it is clear that in his own mind, he regards this as being necessary to defend Russia. Whether we're talking about the Second Chechen War, again fought with extreme brutality, but with that sense of we cannot let the Chechens dictate the terms of their relationship or the Federation may break apart. I happen to think he was wrong on all of those terms, but nonetheless, that was one of his key reasons for the Chechen War, as well as consolidating his own political position.

Georgia, likewise, it wasn't really so much just about Georgia itself. It was also punishing Georgia as an example to the other states of what the Russians still call the near abroad. In other words, the post-Soviet area, with, I would say, the exception of the Baltic states. But, you know, to demonstrate to them all that you don't mess with the bear.

The seizure of Crimea in 2014. Again, that sense of, my gosh, we risk losing an absolutely strategic base in territory. We cannot allow that to happen, and we cannot wait for that to become a crisis, so we seize it now. So this constant sense of pre-emption, military pre-emption as well as political pre-emption.

That, you know, if you think you're going to be facing an enemy, you throw the first punch. And in many ways, his disruptive campaigns against Europe, which, again, predate February 2022, reflect this. That sense of, look, Europe is already going to be a threat. The West is a threat. Therefore, we should be acting now. And finally, the asymmetric assumptions. That understanding that, you know, the West is ultimately more powerful as an alliance,

And therefore, sure, just as your military are trying to counter Western strengths with things like information operations, electronic warfare and the like, you meanwhile with your political war campaigns are seeking to counter the West's strengths in terms of its unity. Because after all, that is what really makes the West so powerful. It is precisely that it is an alliance.

So, you know, I mean, frankly, when it comes down to it, this is all an expression of what I think is best summed up by Alexander Vladimirov in 2007. Now, who's Vladimirov? He was a general. I think he was a major general, if my memory serves, who then moved into the presidential administration structure. So in some ways, he was speaking both from the military as well as a civilian national security establishment's perspective. And he said,

Let me just stop for a moment and just dig into that.

First of all, that modern wars are waged on the level of consciousness and ideas. Well, to a degree, but I think really what he was getting at was the notion of it's about will. You do not break an enemy by breaking their armies. That's something for the video games. No, you break an enemy by breaking their will to resist, their will to continue fighting.

And if the best way of doing that is by shattering their military capabilities, fine. But it could just as easily be by undermining their political leadership, by dividing the public and so forth. Modern humanity exists in a state of permanent war. I mean, my heavens, that's a very bleak assessment. But unfortunately, it's a difficult one on one level to actually resist. I mean, this is at the heart of

of what I wrote in my book "The Weaponization of Everything" which was certainly not intended to be a bleak book but nonetheless it represents a certain perception of the world as one in which nations are only ever in the most temporary and tenuous of positive relations and essentially they're all in a state of competition and eternally oscillating between phases of actual armed struggle and constant preparation for it

Well, that's an area that actually I think is wrong in the sense of when it comes to Russia at least. I mean, obviously, yes, it is constantly preparing for the possibility of war. War fighting has been at the absolute center of the evolution of the Russian state. Again, as I have to say, as I explore in my book, Forged in War. But more to the point, I think the oscillation is precisely between this kind of domestic and external perceptions of threat.

And at present, clearly Putin believes that the real threat to himself and to Russia comes from without. It's from Ukraine, it's from the West. But at other times, actually, even while Putin has been clear that he doesn't actually trust the West, he has focused on the domestic challenge. So I think we have seen this pendulum swing even within the span of Putinism. How does Ukraine fit into this?

Well, I mean, again, I think the three A's all apply, but particularly through a filter of what I consider to be what happens when you have a struggle between authoritarianism and technocracy. The authoritarianism that Putin represents, you know, who after all believes that, you know, he doesn't want to have to make all the decisions.

He's lazy enough not to. But on the other hand, he feels that those decisions that he wants to make, he must make them himself absolutely and they must be obeyed.

to how that contrasts and clashes with the technocracy that is at the heart of so much of the Russian state. People who are just doing their jobs within ministries, within other agencies, who may well actually know how to do their jobs, but who don't necessarily have the political power to overrule the dictates of the centre.

So, this has very much been manifest in the war in Ukraine. First of all, authoritarian centralism. This is clearly a war that Putin himself decided upon. No one was pressing him. There was no mass outcry saying, "Why are you waiting? Why aren't you teaching the Ukrainians a lesson?" Not at all. Instead, insofar as there is, and clearly there are, quarters of support for this war on the part of the public,

But that had to be manufactured by a massive, toxic propaganda campaign. So, you know, this is essentially Putin's war. And it's also Putin's war in actually how it was waged, that ridiculous notion that they could just simply march in and the Ukrainians would, to a large extent, permit and accept the imposition of a new regime and such like. There must have been generals who knew perfectly well this was a recipe for disaster.

but they had no means or they just simply didn't dare to try and actually convey to Putin that was the case. And this is, frankly for me, one of the main sins on the conscience of, not so much, though to a degree, then-Defence Minister Shoigu, but above all, Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov. I mean, his job is precisely to be at once a foreman and a shop steward. He is the man who essentially keeps the generals in line for the boss,

but he's also meant to be the man who actually conveys the general's perspectives to said boss. He did the one, he absolutely failed to do the other.

So, you know, we've seen authoritarian centralism throughout this war. Putin's own determinations, his decision to keep Gerasimov in place despite his manifest failures and unpopularity, the fragmentation of the command structure, which is a representation of the fragmentation of politics and the court around Putin, but also very clearly the aggressive defensiveness. This sense that

Ukraine needs to be dealt with now because otherwise it is going to be used against us. Whether it's an example of a successful democracy, I don't really think, or more to the point as a sort of advanced base of NATO nestling in the bosom of Mother Russia. These ridiculous, exaggerated, and in many ways manufactured notions of Ukraine as a threat

nonetheless seem to have, I think, been genuinely held by Putin and the more extreme people around him. Hello, Nikolai Platonovich. And therefore were used to justify why Russia needs to strike, precisely because it cannot wait for this to be manifest. Putin talked about missiles in the Kharkiv region could reach Moscow in, I can't remember how many minutes,

Well, that's the whole point. You cannot wait until those missiles are there. You must take the region first. Asymmetric assumptions. Again, the sense of, well, how can you struggle against a more powerful enemy?

Well, the very notion that the revolution of dignity in 2014 was not actually a natural organic expression of Ukrainian will, but was instead an example of hybrid war. It was engineered by the CIA, by MI6, in order to steal Ukraine. Already there's that sense of

These Westerners, they have these amazing capabilities to destabilize countries, bring down regimes they don't like. The very sense that the EU agreement with Ukraine back in 2013, which was really about trade connectivities and so forth, and yes, which the Russians realized belatedly to their dismay, essentially locked Ukraine away from the Eurasian Economic Union.

But again, instead of seeing that as just, frankly, a. the inevitable result of closer trade links between Ukraine and the EU, and also something that, frankly, people hadn't really thought through properly. No, of course, it was actually all part of a cunning plan to steal Ukraine, that even the European Union was involved in Gibridnaya Voina.

But also the asymmetric assumption the other way, that in fact Ukraine itself could be, for want of a better word, crimeared, that it could be destabilized and then essentially the Russians could just march in and take it with scarcely a shot being fired. So again, we have this view that on the one hand the West is much more powerful, that

that the West is dangerous and aggressive, that the West is trying to steal Ukraine as a prelude to trying to break up the Russian Federation. And remember, pretty much since the Balotnaya protests of 2011-2012, Putin had been thinking that the West was coming after him. He's marred against the fact of, well, okay, but in those circumstances, what is it that we Russians have that is our particular unique selling point, shall we say?

and that is will and the capacity to be that much more imaginatively sneaky and to basically launch something that can preempt those powerful, dangerous, hostile Westerners. So there's actually, I would suggest, been a striking continuity in Russian strategic culture despite apparently some huge changes in politics through the Tsarist era,

then through the Soviet era and now in the post-Soviet era. There's a reason why one sees Tsarist, modern Russian and Soviet flags clustered together. There are things that do unite these otherwise antithetical nations. And in particular, a constant and extreme sense of vulnerability. Now again, this is not necessarily intended to make you feel sympathetic for the Putins of this world. But nonetheless, one cannot get away from the fact that

that from Tsarist through Soviet to modern times, whoever is ruling this country has felt vulnerable, has felt that they are under constant threat, that the threat comes from every direction, that it is a threat which is, if it is allowed to manifest fully, is going to be existential, and therefore this lends itself to pre-emptive aggression.

in its own terms, and I will stress that, in its own terms, seems to make sense. And that's really the essence of what I want to be talking about, that we have to understand this strategic culture, not necessarily in order to excuse or anything like that, but simply to understand the assumptions which underlie so often Russian decision-making. We have to see things through their own eyes, even if it's actually to resist them more effectively.

A few final points. First of all, strategic culture is not predestination.

Remember, Mikhail Gorbachev was every bit as imbued in this strategic culture as Leonid Brezhnev, for example, but took very, very different conclusions and policy decisions. You know, it's not that just simply we assume that every Russian leader is going to be a Putin any more than we can necessarily guarantee that, alas, they're going to be a Gorbachev.

Secondly, strategic culture does change over time. Now the thing is, in the main it changes in a frankly tectonic kind of way. The way that over years, decades and centuries rivers will cut valleys through hillsides and then meander across the plain and tectonic pressure will take the plain and push it into hills and then mountains and no one can really see that happening.

So on the whole, strategic culture changes slowly, but it can change quickly. It can change quickly under strong stressors. If, for example, the Bolsheviks hadn't been embroiled in the civil war, that might have been a moment in which strategic culture changed. Likewise, there are every reasons why, in fact, nuclear capacity should mean an end to this constant existential fear.

that Russia's rulers face because frankly no one is now going to be able to say take Moscow unless they're willing to run the very real risk of their own capital city exploding in a thermonuclear fireball. But in part it's because of the continued internal concerns in part for a variety of other reasons I won't go into right now but nonetheless this existential fear has remained

And frankly, a future leader may well actually be able to push it in those other directions. So, yes, absolutely. Let us appreciate that Russia has a particular and frankly problematic strategic culture, which is, just as in its regular political culture, there is a strong undercurrent of constant resentful sense of being the underdog, the outsider,

Well, likewise in strategic culture that constant sense of vulnerability which lends itself to a pricklish willingness to actually start the fight to try and ensure that the fight is on its own terms. So yes, that is there, but actually how it manifests and who it's directed towards will change over time. You know, it may be that in fact the next Russian leader, whoever that may be, is much more concerned about the domestic risk

or it may be that they will see the greater threat coming from, say, China rather than from the West, or whatever. There will be all kinds of differences in, shall we say, the contexts in which the strategic culture is applied, and there is always the scope for strategic culture to change. But for here and for now, unfortunately, Putin is clearly embodying much of the most problematic aspects of the strategic culture.

And we, and above all Ukraine, are very much experiencing quite what that means. Well, that's the end of another episode of the In Moscow Shadow podcast. Just as a reminder, beyond this, you can follow my blog, also called In Moscow Shadows. Follow me on Twitter, at Mark Gagliotti, or Facebook, Mark Gagliotti on Russia.

This podcast is made possible by generous and enlightened patrons, and you too can be one. Just go along to my Patreon page, that's patreon.com slash inmoscoshadows, and decide which tier you want to join, getting access to exclusive materials and other perks. However, whether or not you contribute, thank you very much indeed for listening. Until next time, keep well.