Sergey Radchenko is Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. A Cold War historian, he has written extensively on Russia and the Soviet Union. His latest book To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power was published in 2024. You may follow him on X @DrRadchenko.

“We were being shown our place. I can tell you unambiguously. Everything was so polite but in principle, we were always shown our place.” This was how Russian President Vladimir Putin answered a question from BBC’s Steve Rosenberg as to whether Russia felt more secure after invading Ukraine. It was a strange answer. Putin could have brought up some version of his well-known complaint about NATO’s enlargement. He could have invoked the prospect of Ukraine’s membership in NATO, or of NATO bases in Ukraine. If he did, he would have made at least one professor of international relations, the esteemed John Mearsheimer, very happy, for he would have shown that his decision to invade Ukraine was driven primarily by security concerns.

 

What he did instead was float a different argument. It had to do with Russia’s role in the world. It was not getting what it deserved. Its greatness was not appropriately recognized by the arrogant West. It was being “shown its place” among second-tier powers, and so it had to strike back and reclaim its greatness by waging war. There was something strangely illuminating about these spiteful comments. It was as if Putin briefly opened the veil of propagandistic obfuscation to reveal the real sources of his foreign policy conduct. Here he was, a man of resentment, pouting in public about how he was mistreated by the West. They will pay! Oh, they will pay!

“The idea of Russia as anti-West contains a kernel of a different idea: of Russia as the alternative West, the West as it was before it was allegedly hijacked by the liberals” / Source: kremlin.ru/Mikhail Tereshenko/Tass

When did Vladimir Putin become a man of resentment? It could well be that he always was that man. “His soul squints,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887): “his mind loves dark corners, secret passages and hidden doors, everything covert appeals to him as his world, his security, his comfort; he is a past master of silence, of not forgetting, of patience, of assuming a mode of self-deprecation and humility for a while.” What Nietzsche describes here is man of hidden resentment, someone who behaves with outward politeness while secretly sharpening his knife. Many observers regard Putin’s Munich Security Conference speech on February 10th, 2007, as the moment when his hidden resentments broke through to the surface.

 

Indeed, a re-reading of his speech reveals that many of the grievances that support Putin’s anti-Western narrative today were already discernable then. These were: the so called “double standards,” i.e. the notion that the West judged Russia by standards that it failed to apply to itself; anger at being effectively bypassed in the decision-making on key global issues; resentment at being “taught,” in particular in relation to democratic governance and human rights; and the idea of broken promises, that is, his well-known complaint (whether or not well-grounded is another matter) that NATO had promised not to enlarge eastwards and then did nonetheless.

 

All of these grievances are in turn traceable to something that happened before 2007, for example: Putin’s opposition to the Iraq war, which Russia was helpless to prevent; his complaints about Western criticism of Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya, and the democratic backsliding exemplified by the crackdown on the independent media and the murder of journalists like Anna Politkovskaya; his resentment at being pressured by the George W. Bush Administration over his dealings with Iran, and his concerns over the proposed placement of anti-ballistic missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.

 

But how does one go from specific grievances on a range of issues that could be negotiated to one’s advantage or even disadvantage, and towards a broader resentment about being denied one’s place in the world? Making this connection in 2007 would have taken a leap of imagination, though it is worth noting that Munich Security Conference Chairman Horst Teltschik reacted to Putin’s speech by invoking, in retrospect prophetically, the prospect of a “second cold war.”

 

One question historians will find themselves asking in the future is whether addressing Putin’s complaints and insecurities at this early stage would have somehow averted the slide into confrontation. If, for instance, Russia’s views were taken into account on questions like the invasion of Iraq, or if the Eastern Europeans were left in the lurch instead of being admitted to NATO, or if the “collective West” did not criticize Russia’s authoritarian backsliding or made common cause with the Russian dissidents—would any of this have helped reassure Putin and kept Russia on a neither-here-nor-there path of soft authoritarianism, and in broad cooperation with the West on key foreign policy issues?

 

The question can never be answered, but counterfactuals are useful in general, if for no other reason that they highlight choice. We are where we are because certain choices were made, and they may have been good choices, or bad. By investigating the roots of Putin’s resentment, we can at least see that these roots go deeply, that this resentment is not something that Putin suddenly made up when he answered Steve Rosenberg’s question about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by citing his dissatisfaction with his position in the world.

 

Meanwhile, the August 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia proved an opportunity to demonstrate that Russia could bite and not just bark. It was then that Putin presented what Nietzsche would have called “a claim on cruelty and a right to draw upon it.” Would it be too far-fetched to connect Putin’s litany of complaints at Munich to his separate frustration with the policies of then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili? The connection may have worked like this. Unhappy about being shown “his place” by the “arrogant” West, Putin was keen to show Saakashvili his place, and thus address his broader resentment at what he perceived as a humiliating treatment by inflicting a humiliating treatment of his own on a weaker neighbor.

 

There was something clearly pathological in such bullying, but Putin has been characteristically unable to perceive the world through the eyes of Russia’s victims. Georgia, as a perceived proxy of the West, was victimized precisely because Putin was unable to confront the West. Though as for that, he barely received a slap on the wrist for his aggressive moves in Georgia, which probably confirmed in his mind that the United States was, after all, a paper tiger. It would never dare to confront Russia.

 

“One can say that the USA have succumbed to the mania of greatness. They probably think that they have so many dollars that they can do anything. We don’t have dollars, of course. But we are more capable than they are of delivering a crushing blow.” This wasn’t Putin speaking at one of his lengthy press-conferences. This was Nikita Khrushchev complaining of his “humiliation” by the United States in May 1960, shortly after the Soviets downed an American U-2 plane sent over Soviet territory on a mission of aerial reconnaissance. The pilot, Gary Powers, was captured alive, and later presented to the world as evidence of American perfidy.

 

Khrushchev’s method of coping with his humiliation was to rattle nuclear missiles. He often spoke of the Soviet ability to destroy its adversaries, although when push came to shove, he would back down the moment tensions escalated beyond a certain threshold, for example in Berlin in 1961 and in Cuba in 1962.

 

Once Putin was asked whether he could imagine himself in Khrushchev’s place. No, he answered, he couldn’t. “Under no circumstances.” And yet he too has rattled missiles to intimidate the West. Putin’s resentment about being denied the place in the world he clearly feels Russia deserves goes hand-in-hand with nuclear blackmail, which is meant as a reminder of why Russia deserves this place to begin with: because, just as in 1960, “we are more capable than they are of delivering a crushing blow.”

 

At the very least, Putin understands that Russia’s nuclear deterrent makes it effectively immune to external aggression. This means that his complaints about Russia’s security interests being somehow jeopardized by a resurgent NATO are at least in part disingenuous. What hurts about this resurgence is not so much its military dimension as the humiliation of containment, but the very idea of being on the wrong side of a new dividing line in Europe.

 

In 1912, German philosopher Max Scheler authored a lengthy essay on the subject of ressentiment (like Nietzsche, he preferred the French term, as if the Germans had no recourse but to borrow foreign words when talking about such an “alien concept” as resentment). Scheler made the following argument: “We have a tendency,” he wrote, “to overcome any strong tension between desire and impotence by depreciating or denying the positive value of the desired object.”

 

As an example, he drew on Aesop’s fable about the fox that saw grapes on a vine. The fox jumped up and down but failed to reach the grapes. Scurrying away in frustration, it uttered: the grapes were probably sour anyway.

 

That encounter between the fox and the grapevine is how one should perhaps describe Russia’s encounter with the West in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Here it was: glittering, prosperous, so desirable, and yet so beyond reach. For being accepted in the West meant taking that inferior place that Russia was being shown to by its arrogant then-partners and patiently learning how to be a normal country. Neither Yeltsin nor (especially) Putin were willing to accept this.

 

If Russia were to join the West, it would have to join as an equal. But equal to whom? Surely not the little sad countries of Eastern Europe that hurried into the breach the moment the wall came down. Russia wasn’t like that. It had to walk through majestically like it did at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, or as it did in Yalta in 1945—as a victor, and not as a victim, as a rule-setter, and not as a supplicant.

 

“For you with longing she has looked and waited / Replete with ardent love and ardent hate.” This was how Alexander Blok described Russia’s love-hate relationship with the West in 1918 in his infamously racist poem The Scythians. Blok presented the West with a stark choice: embrace Russia, or Russia will turn to Asia, or at least stand aside as the Asian hordes overrun old Europe. This kind of thinking was and remains a part of Russia’s intellectual tradition. Its heirs include Russia’s “Eurasianist” philosopher Alexander Dugin, the imperialist writer Alexander Prokhanov, and perhaps Putin himself.

 

It used to be a sign of bad knowledge of Russia’s political landscape to draw parallels between unhealthy fantasies of Russia’s red-brown intellectuals, and the supposedly rational, calculating, cynical Russian officialdom. Such dismissive commentary can no longer be sustained. It may well be that Putin really believes in his own messianic role as the prophet of a new world order that will come both at the West’s expense but also, in the final account, for the West’s benefit. Indeed, the idea of Russia as anti-West contains within it a kernel of a different idea: of Russia as the alternative West, the West as it was before it was allegedly hijacked by the liberals.

 

Putin’s embrace of so-called conservative values as part of his political identity dates back to the murky period between Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and his return to presidency in 2012. The reason for this transformation was evidently the erosion of his democratic mandate. This was a threatening development, especially after the upheaval in the Middle East, where economic problems, corruption, and authoritarianism fed into public dissatisfaction and ultimately street action that toppled several long-serving dictators and threatened several more. The scenes of Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi being dragged through the streets in October 2011 would have reminded Putin that although nuclear weapons made Russia externally secure, no such guarantees existed internally if Western ideas were allowed to penetrate Russian society.

 

Massive protests in Bolotnaya Square in 2011-2012 triggered a real apprehension in the Kremlin, turning Putin’s humiliation at being “taught” democracy by the West into a concrete fear that democratic action would bring an end to his increasingly autocratic rule. It wasn’t just about resentment now. It was about his political survival.

 

Putin pushed back by building up a security state while promoting the idea of Russia as a bulwark of conservative values. Those who chose to stand against these values were hounded as Western-paid traitors and provocateurs, and were harassed, threatened, exiled, or sometimes physically eliminated. As Russia became more aggressive externally, Putin thus tightened the screws on dissent. Opposing the regime in the Kremlin was no longer just a crime; it became a moral transgression against one’s embattled Motherland. The greatest surprise has been to see just how easily the Russians embraced Putin’s fears and his resentments as their own.

 

It is this combination of fears and resentments that drove Putin’s response to the events in Ukraine in 2013-2014. The toppling of President Viktor Yanukovych, whom Putin did not particularly like, but who nevertheless had a reputation of a pro-Russian leader, reminded one of Qaddafi’s sad fate, only this time much closer to home. But there was also humiliation—of Russia and of Putin personally, as Yanukovych’s backer. Putin’s shocking annexation of Crimea in March 2014 demonstrated that he was now acting on his resentment in a most brutal manner. What is interesting in retrospect is the West’s mild reaction to this blatant territorial annexation.

 

Should it be surprising that this reaction (confined, as it was, to general statements of regret and certain limited sanctions) was so toothless? It was a reaction that, in some ways, merely followed logically from Cold War thinking about Russia as a country that should not be effectively countered in its own sphere of influence. Such thinking underpinned the West’s non-action in 1956, when the Soviets invaded Hungary, and in 1968, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This means that then U.S. President Barack Obama implicitly regarded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine as Putin’s sphere of influence. Ironically, in March 2014, the same Obama described Russia as merely a “regional power.” Yet he was unwilling to challenge Putin in Ukraine.

 

Putin and Obama had a strange relationship. The Russian President despised his American counterpart, and deeply resented Obama’s references to American “exceptionalism.” In September 2013, Putin authored the now famous op-ed in The New York Times, complaining how “it is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

 

True, American exceptionalism as an idea predated and postdated Obama, but there was something deeply annoying about Obama specifically. Was it, perhaps, his all-too-frequent propensity to assume the teacher’s role in telling Putin how he should run his country? The adoption of the Magnitsky Act of 2012—named after Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky who died in custody in 2009 after working to expose state corruption—was exactly the kind of measure that had very little practical impact on the prevalence of corrupt practices in Russia, but did a great deal to humiliate the Kremlin.

 

The Magnitsky Act did not originate with the Administration but instead with the U.S. Senate, where legislators like late Senator John McCain (R) worked with Russian dissidents to devise ways of punishing the Kremlin’s transgressions. Ironically, the passage of the Magnitsky Act finally made it possible to repeal the ridiculously outdated Jackson-Vanik legislation, which was originally imposed as a punishment for the Soviet failure to permit free Jewish emigration, and which the Soviet leaders resented because it put the United States in a position to teach the Soviets what they could or could not do at home. “Why did they do it,” Putin raved in 2013, on account of the Magnitsky Act. “This was just to inflate themselves [like a puffer fish]: look, we are the toughest guys here. Why? This is imperialistic behavior in the international sphere. Who will like it?”

 

A few months later, Obama let it slip in a press conference that he regarded Putin as a “bored kid in the back of a classroom.” Putin was reportedly “infuriated.” Yet, the same Obama—who was so eager to teach a classroom of bored children—proved remarkably indecisive in defending U.S. credibility by drawing a “red line” in Syria and letting Bashar al-Assad ignore it with impunity when the latter used chemical weapons against his own people. That unfortunate combination of arrogance and weakness was not lost on Putin, who watched and made careful notes.

 

Would a different, tougher, policy have put Putin back in his place? Crimea showed that the United States had no appetite for toughness. This was itself a consequence of more than a decade of disastrous wars in the Middle East that drained America’s resources and eroded its self-confidence. Putin sensed that “leading from behind” was Obama’s way of saying that he did not know where America should go, or whom or where it should lead. Then came the 2016 election campaign, and the remarkable election of Donald J. Trump, whose somewhat chaotic presidency alerted Putin to the possibility that America was too divided and too preoccupied with itself to push back against his schemes. It was likely then that Putin’s long-simmering resentment gradually gave way to a temptation to deliver a decisive strike by invading and occupying Ukraine. What defeated his plans was his own hubris, and a fateful underestimation of Ukrainian capabilities.

 

In Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, one Charles Marlow travels up an African river, visiting trading stations on the way. He wants to meet Kurtz, a reputedly successful administrator running a station deep in the jungle. When Marlow finally gets there, he discovers a man who had succumbed to temptations of absolute power. He is worshipped like a god and protected like one by the dutiful tribesmen, over whom he rules with benevolent despotism. But as he lies there on his deathbed, Kurtz has only this to say to Marlow: “The horror! The horror!”

 

Re-reading Heart of Darkness, I thought of Putin, and his journey from Borin Yeltsin’s upstart successor, who seemed to have wanted nothing more than to modernize Russia, to this resentful, insecure wreck of a leader, surrounded by sycophantic yes-men and worshipped by untold millions of Russians as their kind Tsar who had delivered them from the dangerous clutches of the arrogant West. What is he thinking in his old age? Does he think that his great struggle of 25 years that has turned Russia into a larger, softer version of North Korea, has served his original purpose? Or was this just an unfortunate outcome of a modernization effort gone astray?

 

Then, on December 19th, 2024, during his annual “direct line” with the Russian public and the media, I heard Vladimir Putin-Kurtz make a strange admission. “You know,” he said, smirking, “when everything is calm, even-paced, stable, we are bored. Stagnation. We want movement. Then, when movement begins, everything is flying… So we get scared. “The horror. The horror.” Ok, “The horror.” But not “horror-horror-horror.””

 

And that’s how I knew: horror-horror-horror still lies ahead.

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