Kost Elisevich

The prefrontal area of the human brain provides it the capacity for judgment, insight, reason and planning. It requires extensive connections with association areas of the cerebral cortex distributed throughout the brain that interpret the information gathered by our senses in a manner that can be understood based upon past experience. These latter areas are largely what has given rise, over millennia, to the size of the human brain in its present form. What creates the nuance of human interaction, however, and what will variably orchestrate the ultimate responsiveness to situational events in our human affairs, is the connection the prefrontal area shares with the limbic network. This latter entity, of course, mediates memory and emotion and so reminds us of our relations with others, our pleasures and grievances and it informs our biases. This enterprise of circuitry underlies our intellect and creativity; some would say this is how and where the Divine enters our selves to provide the inspirations and aspirations that guide humanity. Likewise, it is the substrate upon which our actions have been governed by hatred, deceit, treachery and vengeance. It underlies how we conceive deception and guide others into committing atrocities by grotesquely misguided notions of superiority over those one considers less worthy and to rationalize criminal behavior through propaganda that dehumanizes our neighbor.

If one lives in a society in which the willful restriction of free enterprise over an extended period affords a centralized authority the ability to create different perceptions of reality, does the mind of both the deceiver and the deceived become altered in the process? Does the nature of how behavior is mediated in the central nervous system of some individuals actually change over time? The creation of false narratives, distortions of political reality, indoctrination of those susceptible to particular biases and the proliferation of such activity through social media serve the purpose of directing sentiment away from legitimate and honorable purpose. Rather it directs it toward achieving the goals of the very few who have created the distortions and who, in the end, finally show themselves to be not the leaders imagined. This is the matter of authoritarianism as it is rare, historically, and seemingly even more so in the present day, to see leadership of this sort guide a nation to an outcome judged to be worthwhile for the losses it incurred, the shame it has inherited and the guilt for which it must pay in the end.

This is the scene that has been unfolding for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. It is witness to familiar elements of what we have come to regard as the worst of humanity – indiscriminate destruction of cities, mass executions, kidnapping of children, displacement of millions of civilians, rape, forced prostitution and torture, highlighted recently by the savagery of beheading prisoners. The bare truth underlying this Russian invasion is that it is entirely unjustified. Accusations by Russia that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was advancing upon its border, threatening its security by recruiting nations into its fold, seem particularly specious when considering the perspective of those nations resting on that border. They had suffered too long a history of oppression under Russia’s influence within the sphere of authority of its Communist regime during the 20^th century. It took no coercion on the part of NATO to accept those nations into its domain for it was protection they sought. Each nation had their own security in mind and had no aspirations toward reliving the decades of repressive governance brought about by a poorly conceived system of centralized authority in Moscow. With the renewed menace of an authoritarian Russia demonstrated by its actions in Ukraine, both Sweden and Finland have followed suit with precisely the same notions of their own security.

The idea that Ukraine was now a nation under the influence of a Nazi regime led by a president of Jewish descent and inhabited by a growing Jewish population living peacefully alongside Ukrainians would seem like a script for a comedy were it not actually another tactic to recruit the sentiment of the Russian people to a different purpose. Illusions of Nazis upon Russia’s border serves as a reminder of its “Great Patriotic War” that was fought to free it from Nazi occupation during World War II (WWII) and so becomes a reflexive call-to-action, free of the burden of checking its veracity. Vladimir Putin has intermixed a revived notion of national imperialist entitlement with the deep-rooted spiritual sentiment of Russian Christian Orthodoxy, exhumed from decades of Soviet repression, to create a new combustible brand of Russian chauvinism. It becomes a simple matter now to gaslight the populace with improbable scenarios of menacing Nazis and to launch a military campaign to reaffirm Russia’s proper place in history.

The irony in all this centers upon Russia’s own vortex of right-wing extremism with its neo-Nazi and white supremacist activism that has been apparent for more than a decade and nurtured by Putin. The Wagner Group, a paramilitary mercenary organization, has been engaged in the service of Putin’s regime, undertaking missions within Africa, South and Central America, Syria and most visibly in Ukraine where they participated in the overtaking of Crimea in 2014. Both it and the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), already a designated terrorist organization, are provided training facilities within Russia and the means to conduct their activities through generous financing by entities closely tied to the regime.

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer and student of the impact that disinformation may have upon those susceptible to such messaging within Russia and elsewhere, has managed to conduct a campaign to convince the benighted among us that his actions are indeed justifiable. As it concerns Russia itself, the task is easier when public dissent is met with imprisonment, when the well-known state security apparatus silences any entity opposing the regime and when genuine journalism is eliminated, and only state-controlled news media are allowed to convey an artificial reality curated by the regime. For the global audience outside Russia, Putin engages in a narrative that distorts history much in the way he rewrites Russia’s past as conjoined with the origins of Ukraine, without mentioning Ukraine, of course. This then underlies his argument that Ukraine is not a separate entity at all but rather has always been simply a footnote in the historical development of Russia itself; the implication being that he is now taking back territory that has always been Russia.

In another remarkable feat of gaslighting designed now to discredit the West, Putin returned to the history of the origins of WWII to redirect attention away from Russia’s collaboration with Nazi Germany in 1939 and their coordinated assault upon Poland that actually launched the war. Rather, as Putin would have us believe, it was the West, specifically France and Britain, that forced Russia into the alliance that was finalized in the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. For Putin, it had all to do with the decision of Britain and France to avoid allying with Stalin’s Russia to create a coalition against Germany. In truth, their hesitation had more to do with Stalin’s prior stated intentions of undermining the capitalist governments of Europe and identifying adverse elements in his own regime to destroy those who would seek to stop the spread of communism. In Stalin’s words, “We will mercilessly exterminate anyone who in deeds or thoughts threatens the unity of the socialist state.” Putin did not elaborate much on the nature of Russia’s “nonaggression pact” signed with Germany, specifically, as to why it necessitated Russia’s invasion of Poland from the east; why it felt compelled to undertake the massacre of 22,000 Polish military officers, government officials, politicians, academics and clergy in the Katyn forest; why it occupied the Baltic states; and why it chose to attack Finland. The latter fiasco brought about the expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations, a precedent that the United Nations (UN) might take into account for Russia’s current betrayal of the UN Charter by its invasion of Ukraine. In the end, it was not that Britain and France had left Russia in the cold, but rather it was Stalin’s own conviction that it would be best for Russia and for the Communist cause if the capitalist nations of Europe exhausted one another in war while Russia remained protected by its nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. It would be easier for Stalin then to advance Soviet Communism into the void that would be created by such a war and to overtake the continent at lesser expense.

Putin went on to accuse Poland itself for encouraging the West to not align with Soviet Russia, despite there being sufficient reason for the West to take the stance that it did. He chastised the decision of Polish leaders of the time for fleeing the country, leaving their people behind to suffer the consequences of the combined Nazi-Russian invasion. As it turned out, the Polish government remained intact for if it had fallen into the hands of invading Russian forces, it might have suffered the same fate as that of their countrymen in the Katyn forest. When the Nazis finally turned on the USSR in 1941, Stalin himself fled the invasion by escaping to his private dacha and remained there for over a week after ordering his forces to stand their ground, and leaving his people with the realization that his diplomacy had failed without any assurances of a plan of action. A simple reading of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”should have provided Stalin with sufficient warning that his nonaggression pact would not last, even as he paid no attention to other leaders who were warning him of the same threat. Much of Russia’s tragedy in their war with Nazi Germany stemmed from its unpreparedness, lack of adequate military leadership and appalling military tactics. In the first 10 days of the Nazi invasion, 400,000 Russian troops lay dead with the same number captured. By the end of the war, Russia had incurred 6.75 million military and 7.2 million civilian deaths while Ukraine, as part of the Soviet Union, suffered 1.65 million military and 5.2 million civilian deaths. Another 14 million Soviet troops were left wounded.

Russia has laid claim to having won WWII with its undertaking the campaign that began with the capture of Stalingrad followed by the retaking of its territory which had been overrun by Germany. Much of the latter was attributable to Stalin’s gross incompetence as a leader, already manifest well before the war with the imposition of his Great Terror (1936-1938), as it came to be known. In his paranoia of perceived threats within his own regime, 22,705 military officers were killed or otherwise made to disappear; among them, 80 of the 101 military’s top leadership were shot. Another 11,000 or so were dismissed, leaving the Soviet Union in the charge of junior officers for the most part. Although little is made in Russia of the launching of the June 1940 North Africa and July 1943 Italian campaigns followed by the June 1944 Normandy invasion by Allied forces as possible contributors to the victory in Europe, most historians would also acknowledge the major impact of the latter events in ending the conflict.

Most revealing in Putin’s critique of the West as it pertains to WWII is his lack of acknowledgment of the 11.3 billion USD support given to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease Act of the United States. This sum translates to approximately 180 billion USD in present-day currency. The effort provided considerable amounts of war materiel and general goods to sustain the Soviet Union in its war effort. Included in this were 13,000 tanks, 14,000 airplanes and 400,000 jeeps and trucks. The reverse situation was, ironically, in effect in 1939 with Russia’s initial collaboration with Nazi Germany in which it acted as its largest supplier of food, raw materials and oil in addition to providing access for international goods which were otherwise unavailable to Germany because of restricted shipping lanes.

Yet Putin continues the rhetorical “Nazi narrative” in his most recent May 9 speech marking the end of Russia’s “Great Patriotic War” using it to advance the idea that, once again, Russia must battle similar Nazi threats in Ukraine and conflating this with NATO’s advance on its borders. Of course, Germany’s participation in the NATO alliance somehow now embellishes the notion that present circumstances are reenacting the situation that played out more than 80 years previously. This loosely configured logic, articulated in quick verse that glosses over considerable inconsistencies, seems enough to activate a misguided patriotic fervor fueled now by hatred. Mix this with an embedded sense of Russian entitlement and the stage is set to perpetuate the necessary support for war.

But will this continue to be the case for younger, more informed generations of Russians which are ostensibly more inclined to think through the proposed narrative and arrive at a different conclusion. In 2022, the first year of Russia’s war in Ukraine, an estimated million Russians, mostly youth, fled their country realizing they would not have opportunity to return. As the once designated “special military operation” becomes the “war” that everyone else already tacitly accepts that it is, will the “Nazi narrative” finally outlive its usefulness as it is simply too ridiculous to sustain. Will the better nature of the younger Man determined by those complicated neural networks within the human mind allow a resetting of its balance sheet to see a better end to this unnecessary horror?

Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2023. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.