On a trip to Paris recently, I visited Les Invalides, drawn there almost against my better judgment by the presence of Napoleon Bonaparte’s mortal remains. They sit inside a gigantic sarcophagus made from purple quartzite hewn from a Russian quarry and contrived to look like the red Porphyry marble used to entomb Roman emperors.
The effect is one of extraordinary reverence. The monument sits within an open circular crypt beneath the golden dome of the church. Bizarrely, the bones of a horse now hang above it, a skeleton of Marengo, Napoleon’s favourite mount, on which he can be seen in Jacques-Louis David’s painting, Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
That, in turn, deliberately evokes Alexander the Great on Bucephalus at the battle of Issus, a marble depiction of which can be seen in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum.
The message is unambiguous: here lies a “great man” of history, emulating another conqueror who also left an indelible mark on humanity. We are fascinated by such people, even though they are brutal, ruthless and despotic. They seem to weave a spell over the millions prepared to follow them, sometimes to destruction. But to what extent do individuals determine history?
In War and Peace, Tolstoy sought to debunk Thomas Carlyle’s theory that events are shaped by “great men” like Napoleon, seeing them instead as “involuntary instruments of history, performing work hidden from them but comprehensible to us”.
Once again, however, the invasion of Ukraine is being personalised as “Putin’s War” or the adventurism of “Mad Vlad”, thereby divorcing the event from its context by making it entirely a projection of one man’s derangement. The same has happened with the Second World War, which is invariably associated almost entirely with Hitler, and rarely with the German people.
Yet if such men are to pursue their own version of reality, others around them – including much of the general populace – must buy into the narrative.
These can be people who stand to benefit from keeping the individual in power, like the oligarchs who have enriched themselves during Putin’s reign. Or they can be ideological bedfellows like Hitler’s Nazi followers.
Putin has tapped into a strain of Russian nationalism that lies deep in the psyche and long predates him. So many are ready to believe that Russia is beleaguered by the West because that is a worldview they have always held.
They are also open to the justification given on state-controlled media that Russian troops are merely engaged in a humanitarian operation in eastern Ukraine to protect their ethnic brethren from fascist death squads and genocide. Putin said recently that without helping the insurgents in the Donbas there would be “another Srebrenica”. The fact this is preposterous is irrelevant if it is believed in Russia.
A similar story of victimhood was used by the Nazis to stoke resentment in 1930s Germany. They had plenty of material to work with, not least the perceived injustices of the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations imposed on Germany, together with its territorial losses.
The German high command had never been reconciled to the idea that they had lost the Great War and were willing to back a politician, even an Austrian corporal, who wanted to restore their country’s “rightful” place in the world. Hitler could not have staged a war without the Wehrmacht or suppressed dissent without the Gestapo and the rest of his state apparatus.
The so-called great men of history never act alone. Napoleon was followed by his Grande Armée into Russia and to miserable retreat because until then he had, by and large, been a winner, extending the boundaries of France, even egged on by “progressive” European thinkers – until he crowned himself emperor and turned into the demagogue they despised.
But he came to personify France; and even after his abdication in 1814 managed to rally the country and his troops for one last hurrah after escaping Elba – before meeting his doom at Waterloo.
German support for Hitler carried on until their country was virtually destroyed. It is astonishing, given the scale of the crimes committed. That the first concerted attempt to depose him did not take place until 1944, by which time total defeat was inevitable.
So it is with Putin, who has created a phony sense of national grievance, and an effective administration to underpin it, out of the kleptocratic mayhem of the post-Soviet years. The idea has suddenly taken root in the West that his days must be numbered because he has miscalculated badly and is leading his country inexorably towards disaster. But this is wishful thinking. We must beware projecting onto Russia a rational interpretation of events that is not necessarily shared by its people.
Indeed, the more they are hurt by economic sanctions and cannot get their money from the bank – or even use the Moscow metro – the more Putin can claim that the West really is out to get them, merely for trying to help fellow Russians being badly treated in a neighbouring country. Controlling the message is key.
It may be more difficult in an era of widely disseminated social media, but it can still be manipulated by fake news broadcast to a credulous population. Goebbels’s maxim – “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” – holds good, even in the age of Twitter and Telegram.
Clearly, Putin is no longer the pragmatic schemer we thought he was – a merciless but wily practitioner who understood the limits of his power and who many seasoned Kremlin-watchers assured us was just bluffing.
But does turning Russia into a pariah state now embolden him to do even worse things; or do the people around him realise he is a deranged egomaniac so frightened of getting ill that he sits at the end of the world’s longest tables to avoid contact with his advisers?
It took co-ordinated military action to bring Napoleon and Hitler to their knees, whereas the world is entrusting its combined economic power to do the same to Putin while avoiding direct confrontation.
It may work; but those who hope he will be toppled any time soon do not have history on their side.
