Was the war in Ukraine inevitable? What is Vladimir Putin trying to achieve? What does the conflict say about Ukraine as a democracy? Those are just a few of the questions Michael Berkman explores this week with Donna Bahry, professor emerita of political science at Penn State and an expert in  Soviet and post-Soviet politics and democratization.

Donna has studied Russia and the Soviet Union for decades and traveled to the country dozes of time from late Gorbachev era through 2018. She also talks about the challenges of doing scholarly work in the region and how that task will become even more difficult in the wake of the current crisis.

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Episode Transcript

Jenna Spinelle
Hello, and welcome to Democracy Works. I’m Jenna Spinelle and this week I am turning the interviewer over to my co host and Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Michael Berkman, who is going to be talking with Donna Bahry, Professor Emerita of Political Science here at Penn State and an expert on Russia and post Soviet politics. I will let Michael and Donna talk more about Donna’s expertise and how it applies to what we’re seeing play out with Russia and Ukraine today. So take it away, Michael.

Michael Berkman
Thank you, Jenna. And Donna, thank you for joining us on democracy works.

Donna Bahry
My pleasure, Michael

Michael Berkman
it’s good to see you. Donna, you’ve been studying and teaching about Russia. You studied there when it was still the Soviet Union. Is that right? Yes. And how many times would you say you visited Russia?

Donna Bahry
You know, I lost count. I went pretty much every year from the late Gorbachev era up until I think 2018. And so a lot of field experience.

Michael Berkman
So I think it would be most valuable for us to focus on Russia and Putin, rather than the specifics of what’s going on in Ukraine right now. I thought I’d start with something that’s been in the news quite a bit about this and to get your take on it. And so John Mearsheimer, who is a well known IR scholar in the realist camp, has argued that this was pretty much set in motion years ago, when the Cold War ended, and the West allowed some of the old Soviet Bloc countries into NATO. So as I interpret their analysis, and feel free to tell me I’m wrong, this isn’t so much Putin is war, as it is Russia’s that it’s an inevitable consequence of big power politics, and their assessment of their national self interest. So I guess my question to you to get started is, how inevitable Do you think this war was?

Donna Bahry
I don’t think it was inevitable. For one thing, Russia in the 1990s was far more democratic than it is now. For one thing, the Russian government did have objections to NATO in the 1990s, but was not nearly,  was obviously not ready to go to war, to go to conflict over it. So to say that this was inevitable strikes me — it’s an overstatement. That’s one. And the second is, even for countries that have not pushed to get into NATO, as in Moldova, the Russian government under Vladimir Putin has still put enormous pressure on the Moldovans, especially when there’s an administration that leans toward the EU. So NATO is obviously an issue for President Putin and the Russian administration. But even without NATO, the Russian government has been pressuring other countries in the post Soviet world.

Michael Berkman
So it’s not NATO. How do you look at it? Is it this idea that Putin talks about sometimes that well, they’re all Russians, and so they should be with Russia? And it’s kind of big Russia idea, or how do you see that?

Donna Bahry
I think for President Putin, and for much of his administration, the issue is sort of restoring Russia as a great power. Basically, Russia has had trouble developing its economy, and its losing population. There have been more deaths than live births in Russia.

Michael Berkman: Yeah, it’s getting quite old, isn’t it?

Donna Bahry: Yeah, exactly. Almost every year since independence. And so for somebody whose mindset focuses on classical geopolitics, more land, more territory and more population really counts for a lot. So Ukraine at the start had 44 million people. Who knows how many people are going to be left.

Michael Berkman
So John Bolton the other day, made the argument that Donald Trump was going to pull the United States out of NATO in his second term. And then, in Bolton’s view, Bolton being the former national security adviser for Donald Trump, that Russia was waiting for the second Trump term when they didn’t get the second Trump term. They decided the time to go in was now what do you think they went in now as opposed to say, five years ago or three years ago?

Donna Bahry
Well, until recently, the Russian government had been using a combination of peaceful and coercive means to influence, to maintain influence in post Soviet countries, peaceful meaning, involvement in elections as in Ukraine, peaceful meaning subsidies –big subsidies on oil and gas and other products to post Soviet, some post Soviet countries, the friendly ones.  Peaceful meaning support for pro Russian political parties, support for Russian language, media and Russian language instruction. And coercive. We know now, right, about military means — war with Georgia in 2008; seizure of Crimea. War in East Ukraine.  So those have happened and the Russian government has managed to sort of keep Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO, for example, and out of the EU, with those limited military activities. The problem why now and Ukraine? Well, the peaceful mechanisms that the Russian government had been using have been dismantled or are being dismantled in the Zelensky era in particular. So in the last year, especially, the Ukrainian government, closed down three Russian television stations, Russian language television stations, arrested the head of the largest pro Russian party and actually seized his assets, an oligarch. IT has gone after — it’s become more serious about addressing corruption. A new language law came into effect in Ukraine, in fact, this year, giving preference, raising the status of the Ukrainian language over Russian. If we put all those together, it means the peaceful mechanisms that the Russian government had to influence high politics in Ukraine have been dismantled. So the alternative is coercion. And there’s one other part to this too, there’s been a water war between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea. After the seizure of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian side dammed up the biggest source of freshwater to Crimea. And Crimea has had a drought, so no water, bad for agriculture, bad for the tourist trade. The Russian government had been shipping in bottled water, obviously not enough to help with agriculture. And if you look at where Russian troops have gone in along the southern border of Ukraine, they created a landbridge, from Russian territory to Crimea, and they just blew up that dam. So they now get water to Crimea.

Michael Berkman
So when was the last time you were in Russia? 2018 2018. So three or four years ago, you were there. And so I’m curious, I thought it might be useful for our listeners to just know, a bit more about what Russia is like, and about what their governance and like and what their politics is like. And so let me let me start this way, when you were there, did you detect? And I think I know how you’re gonna answer this. But did you detect an active civil society, journalist, activist, artists, entrepreneurs, these all active and thriving, when you were last there, were they more active and thriving 10 years earlier, when you were there?

Donna Bahry
In 2018, there were civil society groups, but then we have to make a distinction. There are groups that are allowed and supported by the government, the ones that help with child welfare, or other social services, and youth groups, but very often, they’re sponsored by the government. So in that sense, active. Yes, but not necessarily independent, the way we think about independent civil society.  The independent groups, have pretty much been reduced over time, — the ones that were critical, shall we say, or that didn’t follow the particular line that the government wanted to follow. So the Russian government has, for example, over time, introduced increasingly stringent registration requirements for civil society groups that aren’t government sponsored: registration, reregistration, filling out more forms giving lists of members and their addresses and contact information. So independent civil society is pretty limited. Maybe the most effective was alexei navalny’s efforts to organize voters in elections. But we know what happened to Navalny.

Michael Berkman
Right. So just to be clear for everyone, he ended up in a hospital that right and then in prison, and I wasn’t he was poisoned with nuclear materials.

Donna Bahry: No, novichok.

Michael Berkman: Yep. And so why did Putin crackdown the way that he did? Was there a sense that there was too much political action Opposition to him developing is it? Is it something else going on?

Donna Bahry
Ah, so Putin came to power at the end of the 1990s. He was appointed, right, as an interim president by the outgoing Boris Yeltsin in 1999. And Putin has made clear pretty much since the earliest days in office, that he thought the 90s were a disaster. He thought Gorbachev was a disaster. Gorbachev’s efforts, experiments at democracy in the Soviet Union led to economic collapse and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And for Putin, that’s obviously a negative. Boris Yeltsin’s efforts at democracy in the 1990s led to further economic collapse and almost to the breakup of Russia. Several provinces in Russia declared sovereignty. One declared independence — that was Chechnya,– and Russia went into two wars to recapture Chechnya. So for Putin, Western liberal democracy really does equate to disaster. And almost since the earliest point of his entry into office, he set out to reassert control over the media, over the legislature, over political parties, over business. And so what we’ve seen over time is gradual, but nevertheless, persistent tightening of restrictions and controls.

Michael Berkman
And I’m curious about how you think of how absolute Putin’s power is, in the Soviet in in Russia? Are there? Are there sources of power, power that counter and can check him? Are there institutional checks on his power?

Donna Bahry
Not really, he’s been extremely adept, shall we say, at neutering those, neutralizing those. So elections are manipulated, and Putin’s party wins the majorities in the legislature, the courts are politicized, and basically under the control of the executive. So the key counterweights such as they might be would be the wealthiest businesses, the oligarchs so to speak, and the security services. And the oligarchs have been tamed, shall we say, ever since, again, the early days of Putin’s administration, so they depend on him. That leaves the security services, the police, the military, various police agencies, and so on. And that would be his, that’s the most central constituency. But whether they can act as a counter force, maybe only if this war goes so badly, and the sanctions bite so badly, that being able to pay them and support them, and being able to claim victory, turns out to be turns out to be a problem.

Michael Berkman
And how far can this dissent that we’re seeing in Russia go? I think many observers seem to be surprised by how large the protests are, and right, how brave the protesters are. And I mean, I guess I’m curious, a couple of things. Yeah. Like, how far can it go? Can it make a difference? And is this a generational kind of thing in Russia, as well, that the protesters are from a younger generation and the older generation? Or am I imposing, you know, a framework? That doesn’t make sense there?

Donna Bahry
No, I think it’s, these are good questions. And undoubtedly, the younger people are more disposed to turn out to protest. I guess the question is, well, two things: how far the government is willing to go to quell these protests. And often in the past, the government has arrested people, mistreated them somewhat, but then released them or given them suspended sentences. So to the extent that that happens, that’s kind of a slap on the wrist. If the government steps up its detention and mistreatment, the  protests, I think would, would diminish somewhat. The other part of this is the ability of protesters to connect across cities, across regions, into a mass national movement. And with that issue, the Russian government has actually been very successful, very lucky in preventing that kind of national organization of a protest movement, as we’ve seen in some of the other post Soviet countries.

Michael Berkman
So is that is that a strategy of shutting down social media as a tool of collective action? Is that mostly how they go about that?

Donna Bahry
Yes, partly that, partly, again, picking up people releasing them with some mistreatment, to persuade them not to be involved. The government’s gone further, in some cases where parents have young children, the parents have been threatened with the state taking their children if they continue to protest. So this is a government sort of collective punishment that figures into this too, as in, you will  get punished —and not only will you get punished for protesting, but your family members might also run into problems too.

Michael Berkman: Oh, really?

Donna Bahry: That’s. That’s an old Soviet strategy.

Michael Berkman
Yeah. So Soviets are masters at misinformation disinformation. Yeah. And so what is the propaganda story that’s being told to Russians, by Russia?

Donna Bahry
Ah, that the Ukrainian government has been victimizing the Russian speakers, what few ethnic Russians there are still in Ukraine, victimizing ethnic Russians and Ukrainians whose predominant language is Russian, that the Ukrainian government is —  the favorite terms are ”fascist, Nazi,”– whatever. So the Russian government is going in to “de-Nazify”  And take down this, “obviously fascist government.”

Michael Berkman
Where does that come from? So is his Nazi simply just a really nasty slur? If you’re in Russia? I mean, which is understandable? Or is there something more to this accusation that the Ukrainians are Nazis, I just don’t really understand it. Other than a way of saying, here’s a really bad word that you because we all know, we don’t like Nazis. I hear that. Where’s it come from?

Donna Bahry
Well, remember that the Soviet Union had the most casualties of any country in WWII.

Michael Berkman
and it was in Ukraine, wasn’t it? Where there were a large number of those?

Donna Bahry
A lot? Definitely. And the Soviets played that up. There were movies about the war and about Soviet heroism, and indeed, there were heroes, fighting against the Germans. But President Putin is  — that emphasis on showing war movies and talking about the war, that kind of went away in the 1990s, under Boris Yeltsin, but it’s come back in the Putin administration. So World War Two, revival of World War Two, and both the victimization and also the Soviet triumph, really figure pretty prominently in the media in in the government’s messaging. And so fascism and Nazi are still pretty salient, or they’re made salient by the government-sponsored media. Where does it come from? From the other side? How relevant is it in Ukraine? Well, there are some extreme right groups, some of whom are organized and fought against the secessionists in the east, eastern provinces in Ukraine, but is Zelensky a Nazi? No.

Michael Berkman
So when you think about Ukraine as a democracy, and I’m, I’m not outside your area of expertise here, right, you know, a lot about Ukraine and Eastern Europe or, more broadly, how do you think of Ukraine as a democracy? Was it, was it really moving? Well, towards consolidating as a democracy i It’s young and had a lot of corruption. How would you assess where it was?

Donna Bahry
Somewhere in the middle of the road between Soviet Union and Soviet politics, the political system, and what we might think of as a consolidated democracy, definitely not consolidated. For a number of reasons, corruption, being one of the biggest ones —  repeated episodes of corruption. But having said that, the governments in the last few years seem to have made more efforts to provide more effective public administration and to address corruption. The government in the last two to three years has made more progress also in reducing the levers of influence that the Kremlin and the Russian government had in Ukrainian high politics. And so Ukraine has made halting progress, but I wouldn’t call it consolidated democracy at this point.

Michael Berkman
Yeah. So where did you What did you think its main problems were going to be? I mean, now it’s got real problems. But what did you think it’s problems we’re going to be in terms of moving closer and closer to being a western style democracy?

Donna Bahry
Well, for one thing, it had, it has an economic elite, we typically call them oligarchs, who had amassed massive wealth and who played an outsized role in politics, to the point of being able to neutralize political reforms that we would consider necessary for consolidating democracy, particularly anti corruption and the rule of law. And in many cases, the, the oligarchs, well, controlling a big business or several big businesses, industrial factories, media, controlling whole regions, meant that oligarchs could also control who would get elected to the legislature, and also could weigh in on appointments into the executive branch and even the judicial branch. So containing the oligarchs, the power of the oligarchs, has turned out to be a big issue. And governments since 2014, have made some progress on that. There have been a couple whose assets have been frozen, and whose political power has been limited. So definitely rule of law, anti corruption. And the other part is finding and neutralizing the Russian levers of influence.

Michael Berkman
Influence within Ukraine? Yes, yeah. And so we’ve heard a lot about Kiev as a cosmopolitan Western sort of city. And the fact that Ukraine was moving closer and closer to the west, at least culturally, then, was that part of the problem for Putin? Or? I know, before you were saying, really just wanted the land to want the people? And do you include in that, that? Well, he also just didn’t like having such a western style government or a country that he saw as becoming ever more Western, right on his border?

Donna Bahry
Yes, and in fact, so Ukraine’s economic ties, its trade has shifted from oriented east to more oriented to the west. So there’s an economic component for Putin to consider. And we can talk a little bit about that more in a minute. And it’s not just a culturally more Western, it’s definitely more connected to the EU and more western style democracy. I mentioned earlier that President Putin and the administration equate democracy with disaster. That applies to neighboring post Soviet countries, as well as to Russia. For example, President Putin was very active in supporting a pro Russian presidential candidate in Ukraine in 2004. His candidate ultimately lost — that was Yanukovych. But the point was that Ukraine at that point, had a pro democracy uprising, where people took to the streets against the rigging of an election.  For Putin, that was a disaster. And so, yeah, and there have been other pro democracy uprisings. Putin, in many cases, has advised the leaders in those cases, the leaders who are more pro Russian and more authoritarian, just to use force to put down protests. So why be so concerned? Well, partly, it’s diffusion, you know, a democratically oriented Ukraine is not welcome. For Russia with its, with a porous border, and people who speak Russian who could go back and forth.

Michael Berkman
Let’s return to the economic question for a minute. So, so Ukraine would like to and they’ve been vocal about this, or we’re about getting closer to the EU may be joining you. Right. And is Putin offering an alternative? Yes. What is the alternative? I’ve heard this, but I can’t remember the name of it. Eurasian Economic Union raising economic union. Yeah. Okay, what is that?

Donna Bahry
It’s an economic union. It has — Putin has touted it as sort of parallel to the EU. It’s an economic union that’s supposed to integrate post Soviet countries based on shared historical ties and shared culture. So the plan is that they will, they’re going to have obviously, tariff free barrier free trade eventually. So the argument goes, they should all be using the same currency, and there should be a lot tighter economic integration. The problem with it is twofold. One is only four other countries have actually signed on as members, and they account for about 28 million people. So it’s not a very big market. And for Russia —  Russia, like the Soviet Union, has had difficulty developing products that are competitive in global markets, trouble diversifying its economy away from exporting oil, gas, diamonds, wheat, agricultural products. So the Eurasian Economic Union offers basically a captive market. Ukraine, with 44 million people would be a huge asset. But Ukraine has not indicated any interest in joining.

Michael Berkman
Right. And if they did join the EU, of course, that would then put pressure on the Ukrainian government to evermore Western artists wouldn’t because you have to have certain kinds of policies to be within the EU. Right? Yeah, right.

Donna Bahry
35 chapters of regulations.

Michael Berkman
Yeah. They’re nothing if if not heavy on bureaucrats in the EU, too. We’ve also heard that that kind of the counter to the realist School of hyper rationality is that Putin is irrational, and maybe somewhat insane, or that COVID isolation has really gotten to him. And one of our colleagues had a column in the Washington Post today talking about how, yeah, not a whole lot of leaders really are crazy like that. But you never know. And what are your thoughts? Is Putin acting like Putin always did to you? Are you seeing something different that would concern you in intelligence or intelligence professionals?

Donna Bahry
Well, I have colleagues who’ve advised President Putin on social policy, domestic social policy in Russia, Russian academics who have advised on various kinds of social issues. And their assessments again and again, are that President Putin is very astute, quick, quick to get to the point. Their meetings are very well organized. They say he asks, he’s well prepared when he has the meetings. So that’s the domestic side, on the foreign policy side, going back some years, there have been a lot of President Putin’s speeches and his writings that are a lot more,  that focus a lot more on victimization, on mistreatment, on discrimination, that seem more emotional. So you know, the foreign policy side seems to bring out this rhetoric. But, um, rhetoric is one thing and rationality is something different.

Michael Berkman
But it also seems like a bit of a miscalculation about the Ukrainians who were, who had been known to be pretty good fighters in their time, right. I mean, this is, these are seasoned military people. So when you see some of them on TV, these people have been, didn’t they notice?

Donna Bahry
Ah, well think back to 2014. How easy it was to seize Crimea. Almost no violence, and  starting the secessionist movement—insurgency —  war in eastern Ukraine. And, you know, the central government in Kiev was not in any position to really offer much, substantial resistance. So based on that experience, it really does look like miscalculation. You’re right.

Michael Berkman
Did they? Did they underestimate Zelensky? Did they not realize who they were? Yeah. Why do you think that is? Did they not take him seriously enough? Because of his background? Or I mean, what do you

Donna Bahry
Here again, this is this is speculation. Zelensky, early on, agreed, promised that he would negotiate and he did. He met with President Putin a couple of times. They agreed on prisoner swaps, prisoner exchanges. And it may be that the impression got created in the Kremlin that Zelensky could be, could be either maneuvered or just lacked sufficient support, whatever the whatever the calculation, obviously Zelensky has turned out to be much, much tougher than they anticipated.

Michael Berkman
So when you look forward, you know, look, look into the future, but not to next week, but just looking forward. I’m just what do you what do you see? I mean, it seems to me like Russia could be there for 15 years trying to get out of this situation. Now, is that kind of your sense of what we’re looking at or

Donna Bahry
Again, it’s hard, hard to tell. The previous experience with this level of force in Chechnya, for example, and in Syria is ruthlessness, willingness to really destroy as much as possible in order just to raise the flag over, over rubble, essentially.  in the Chechen case, the Russian side flattened the capital city Grozny, but then provided funds to rebuild it. And so, you know, one possible line of direction for this might be flattening much of Ukraine and then rebuilding. But that requires the massive amounts of revenue that the Russian government had been pulling in from its oil and gas sales and its natural resources. And that looks pretty chancy right now. If the Russian government manages to defeat the Ukrainian government, well, there’s another possibility, and that is that Russia takes most of central and eastern and southern Ukraine, and leaves the West.

Michael Berkman
So President Biden the other day refer to the conflict in Ukraine as battle between democracy and authoritarianism. Zelensky has made some of the same argument. Do they see it that way? within Russia?

Donna Bahry
Yes, they do. I think they do. And again, to go back to the loss of the Soviet Union, the near loss of territory of Russia. And to go back to the fact that pro democracy, protests and demonstrations, so called color revolutions, pretty much up-ended, toppled, leaders who were friendlier to Russia, in Ukraine in 2004, Ukraine in 2014. So democracy for President Putin and the Russian administration is, first of all chaos. And second, it’s turned out to be anti Russian.  And when these protests have broken out, President Putin’s response, in several cases, has been to encourage the leaders, incumbent leaders, just to use force. So peaceful protest, or non-peaceful protest, it doesn’t matter. He advises using force to put the to put people down. That’s not democracy.

Michael Berkman
And I let me end this way. You and I both remember, when the Soviet Union fell, and people that were scholars of the Soviet Union had to reboot. In the post cold war era, scholars come up behind you studying Russia, they’re gonna have to reboot to I mean, is this going to lead to any kind of change? And how people think about Russia? How they think about studying Russia, that type of? Yes,

Donna Bahry
Yeah, unfortunately, I think, I think that’s true. For one thing, the sanctions and counter sanctions mean that what limited access, Western scholars had to data,  information, collaboration before, all that’s diminishing pretty, pretty dramatically, pretty rapidly. And so just access to find out what’s going on, you know, people will be able to rely on maybe content analysis of official media. But that’s pretty limited. And so it’s going to be harder for the upcoming generations to really get a handle on, on the internal politics and in society.

Michael Berkman
So Donna, thank you very much for joining us today on democracy works. Congratulations. So you just retired, yet Penn State since 2003, my colleague during all that time, including a stint as department head, before that you were at many other prestigious universities around the country. Thank you for all you did for the Department of Political Science and for Penn State.

Donna Bahry

Thank you.

Jenna Spinelle
Donna Bahry is professor emerita of political science at Penn State and an expert on Soviet and post Soviet politics and democratization. Today’s interview was conducted by Michael Berkman, Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, and my co host here on democracy works for the entire team. I’m going to Spinelli thanks for listening.