The Long History of Russian Brutality

What the fratricidal fury of the country's civil war a century ago can teach us about the invasion of Ukraine

- Adam Hochschild

It is impossible to watch Vladimir Putin's arrogant invasion of Ukraine without being appalled by its savagery. Dead men and women strewn on the streets of Bucha, hands bound behind their backs. Russian soldiers raping women, sometimes in front of husbands or children. Russians seizing loot of every size, from cellphones to giant John Deere wheat-harvesting combines. And, again and again, testimony about torture: beatings, electric shocks, near suffocation with plastic bags.

Yes, all wars are bloody, but they're not all fought like this. The First World War, for example, killed millions. Yet Captain Boris Sergievsky, a fighter pilot in the Imperial Russian Air Service stationed in western Ukraine, who as an émigré years later married my aunt, told me that if you fatally shot down a German aviator over Russian territory, you buried him with full military honors; you then dropped by parachute onto the German airfield his personal effects and a photograph of his funeral. That war, like this one, was over territory. But in today's war, even as Putin insists that the would-be conquerors and the invaded are "one people," the Russians almost seem to have an additional aim: to humiliate the Ukrainians, to dehumanize them, to see them suffer.

Most often, we find cruelty like this when human beings are divided by religion or ethnicity. Consider the Crusades, the Holocaust, the lynchings of thousands of Black Americans in the South, and, for that matter, the two recent Russian wars against the Muslim Chechens. But both Russians and Ukrainians are white, Slavic, and, if religious, usually Orthodox Christians. In eastern Ukraine, many victims of Russian atrocities are native Russian speakers-as is the country's president, Volodymyr Zelensky.