Recently, Henry Kissinger said

Recently, Henry Kissinger said that Ukraine should be wise to cede territory to the Kremlin, and that the West should stop seeking to inflict a humiliating defeat on Putin. Ideally, everything should return to the pre-war status quo. The Ukrainians liked the offer so much that they even added their grandfather to the "Peacemaker" list (no, seriously). What is interesting here, however, is this: the behavior of most other Western Leopold Cats who insist on senseless peace with the Kremlin can easily be explained by the fact that they have been corrupted by the Putin regime, while Kissinger seems to sincerely believe that from the perspective of "real politics" this is better. I think the point is that in his heyday Kissinger was used to dealing with the USSR, and now he is projecting his experience of interaction onto today's Russia, not noticing the difference.

In a good book, Violence and Social Orders, to which I often referred, the authors came up with a division into "natural states" and "open access orders". The first is, roughly speaking, a system in which different groups of the elite are endowed with different rights and use them to extract rent. The second is when more or less everyone has equal access to resources and the legal field (what we used to call "liberal democracies"). At the same time, "natural states" can differ in format: "fragile" ones are tied to the role of specific persons and personal agreements, "developed" ones already have impersonal institutions. The more institutions, the greater the stability of the system. The USSR in this classification was an unambiguously developed natural state. Moreover, the only one where "consolidated control over the means of violence" was achieved (usually in natural states these means are divided among the elites: the army for some, the police for others, etc.). I believe that is why in relations with the USSR it was necessary to take into account the long-term perspective. You can click the country of the Soviets painfully on the nose - it will not disappear anywhere, you still have to live with it. The change of a specific leader did not lead to the collapse of the Soviet system as such. At the same time, Soviet institutions restrained the system from completely insane decisions, forcing it to see a long-term perspective. Simply put, for all its ideological cannibalism, the USSR was not a rabid dog dependent on momentary whims. That is why the Kissingers could carry on a dialogue with the Soviets.

But today's Russia is a completely different matter. In the USSR there was a Politburo, where decisions were really discussed collectively. In the Russian Federation - amusing meetings of the Security Council, more like the Chosen Council under Ivan the Terrible. In the USSR there was "consolidated control over the means of violence" - in the Russian Federation there is a private army of Ramzan, a private army of Prigozhin and the National Guard at the mercy of Zolotov. In the USSR there was a kind of social lift (through the party) - only children, security guards, childhood friends and others in whom they see personal dependence and loyalty come to the elite of the Russian Federation. There were institutions in the USSR - in the Russian Federation everything rests on the power of a specific person of flesh and blood, everything is tied to personal agreements and personal loyalty. And everyone understands: if tomorrow this person finally dies of cancer, the house of cards will instantly crumble. That is, the Russian Federation now is just a "fragile" natural state with all the ensuing problems.

On the one hand, this means that it is pointless to negotiate with the Kremlin. The government in the Russian Federation is not mature in the sense that it is able to realize its long-term interests and observe these obligations. It simply depends on the whims of a particular person - today he promised, but tomorrow he changed his mind. At the same time, it is really easy to break such a system - these are not institutions that can rise from the ashes and restore themselves. Here it is just enough to defeat one single person, inflicting a humiliating defeat on him and putting in the situation "Akella missed".

Mihail Pojarsky 2022-05-28