“Crowdsourced ‘war’”: A Russian response
Last week, I posted this essay about the idea of a crowdsourced ‘war’: if you believe a reaction to the wrong of another nation is required, but you believe hot war would be catastrophic, then a bottom-up effort by people around the world to leverage the interdependence of modern life could be an alternative. Many are doing as much right now — AirBnb, many law firms, but not all, so therefore a Harvard Law student, FIFA, Visa/Mastercard, Shell, the S&P., liquor stores with Russian vodka—as well as, of course, many more.
I first travelled to the USSR (Ukraine and Russia) in 1982, then again in 1987, then Russia many times in the 1990s, then twice since 2016. Over the period, I have collected friends in Russia, many of whom I’ve connected with since this crisis. I feel empathy for them and what they’re going through. That empathy seemed inconsistent to at least one — let’s call him Alexey —with my call for a “crowdsourced ‘war’.”
Alexey wrote the following in response to my essay. With his permission, I’ve published it below in its entirety. I’ve responded to his essay here.
Dear Larry — sorry for the late reply — I’m in Moscow now and must deal with a few urgent things brought upon us by this totally unnecessary and terrible war. This war was started against my will and frankly speaking, against my expectations. An absolutely unreasonable disaster.
I probably belong to a cohort of “a growing and eager middle and upper-middle-class” (as you put it) against whom you suggest to wage “a crowdsourced war.” I have to say that we are an easy target. Contrary to your intuition, this cohort of the Russian society has been already steadily declining for the last 8 years (since the conflict in Ukraine actually started) and has been steadily losing its political clout within the country. The sanctions imposed by the Western economies against Russia back in 2014–2015 and later in 2016–2017 have already done their job — the Russian society became more polarized and unequal. It is difficult to say how many of us have left by now, but probably, if the recently imposed Western sanctions against the Russian economy would stay for a month or two, our social group will be already fully negated. So, your call for a corporate and social crusade against us to help the economic sanctions imposed by the Western governments is probably belated. These crowdsourced warriors from the West whom you want to put us in their crosshairs would probably see only our ghost. I don’t think that fighting with a ghost of the Russian middle class is worth the effort. But it is up to you, of course.
I find myself, as most of my friends and relatives here in Moscow and other Russian big cities, caught in a crossfire. On the one side, the Russian state shoots, but bullets are also coming from the West and hitting mainly my social stratum. But these are just my feelings. Maybe they are irrelevant, and you rightly say that sometimes people have to suffer for a good cause. Maybe. But I doubt that the cause is good and moral.
You say that “a crowdsourced war” is a new format of warfare best fitting the modern interconnected global society of the 21st century. I disagree. This type of war does not look novel to me. Yes, on the surface it is different from the many wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. Different in the sense that those wars were mainly fought by states and regular armies. With the Lieber Code issued by the US President Lincoln during the American Civil War and the Hague Conferences on international laws and customs of war initiated by the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, our civilization was slowly accepting the new conventions of warfare. It was a great humanitarian movement that tried to separate the lives of civilians of the countries involved in a military conflict from the war itself. Of course, it was never fully possible and in the most violent wars of the last century, civilians were severely hurt. But at least the conventional principles of warfare accepted by most countries directed us to more contained and regulated forms of violence. Neither religious wars of the Middle Ages nor tribal wars were regulated by these modern principles. Those were total wars involving society as a whole. “Crowdsourced war” looks to me like a more archaic, not modern form of warfare. You call for civilians of your nation to wage a war against the civilians of mine. It is exactly the kind of war our civilization was trying to get rid of at the Hague Conferences at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. And now you are kind of suggesting getting back to those nasty total wars of the past.
You can say — but maybe these means justify the ends. You say that “the target must be those whose anger weakens Putin.” How do you know that it is the middle class whose anger would weaken, not enhance Putin’s rule? Living here in Russia, I don’t see how he depends on the middle class. This group is already angry enough. Increasing the anger, in this case, would lead rather to apathy than action. I can see it now in the people surrounding me. Maybe before waging a war against the Russian middle class, it is important to analyze what are the foundations of the current political regime in Russia and whether the chosen target is a proper one. We have a saying in Russia (probably in English it is called the ‘streetlight effect’ but I’m not sure): “You should search for a thing where you lost it, not in the lighted up spots that are easy to reach.” The middle class in Russia, as you rightly mentioned, is probably the most integrated into the Western world of all social strata in Russia. It is easier to hurt those who are closer to you. Waging a war against the Russian middle class now looks to me like a convenient substitute to any thoughtful policy towards Russia in the West. Maybe it can help as phycological protection for the Western intellectuals and political activists that have been paying no serious attention to this part of the world for years. Could be. But it just won’t help to stop the actual war in Ukraine. I would say even worse — it will help Putin to enhance his rule as the West will help to eliminate with economic sanctions and social ostracism his most vocal opponents within the Russian society.
I have already more or less accepted the fact that the Russian middle class will be severely hurt by the Western sanctions and the Russian state’s actions at the same time. I guess nobody in the West is expected to care much about us. But your idea of the crowdsourced war is dangerous for Western societies as well. It is not only the Russian middle class at stake, in my opinion. What you are calling for is a good excuse to release old demons of Western civilization. I mean, old-school hate and xenophobia.
You say: “The people of a pariah nation must feel the judgment not of foreign politicians, but of the world, generally. They must feel the million tiny ways in which their life has been made more difficult, because of the single and certain wrong that they will come to recognize their president to have done.”
I must tell you that being Russian, I have already experienced these “million tiny ways” of xenophobia even before the war in Ukraine happened. Russophobia is quite widespread in the West. Probably only Antisemitism can beat it by the degree of proliferation. But after the Holocaust, Antisemitism became a real taboo. Russophobia is still relatively acceptable in Western societies (and Hollywood exploits it a lot). My words could be counterintuitive for you, but you know, with this kind of thing it is important just to trust the feelings of those who experience hate. I would not dare to question the fact that a Jewish person or a person of color experiences this type of attitude. I ask you to trust my words on this matter as well. Many Russians would agree with me that we have been feeling those “million tiny ways” that Russophobia expresses itself in the West for many years by now. In this sense, I would just ask you to be cautious by waging your “crowdsourced war” under a political pretext. It will turn into something very nasty — just primitive xenophobia. Probably, it has turned already.
It perplexes me how you frame the passage I cited above. It reminds me of something very archaic. Essentially, you call for a collective responsibility for a single wrongdoing done by one man. And this responsibility should be attributed to the whole nation. I would prefer not to use this analogy in other circumstances, but it is just a bit of an obsession for me now. I can imagine that back in the Middle Ages, some European scholars could write something like this: “They must feel the million tiny ways in which their life has been made more difficult, because of the single and certain wrong that they will come to recognize their high priests Annas and Caiaphas to have done.” In this context ‘they’ would be a reference to the Jews, of course, who were until recently blamed in the West for the acts of their leaders committed against Christ. I don’t see how the message of this sentence would be much different from what you are blaming the Russians for. I don’t consider myself or my relatives, friends, or colleagues in Moscow to be responsible for the acts of war conducted by Putin. I never voted for him and used lawful means available to me to direct my country to peaceful development. My personal responsibility for this war is much, much less than the responsibility of the Western leaders like Biden, or Trump, or Obama, or Merkel, or Scholtz. They had real power and influence over the development of things in Ukraine and Russia and have been doing very little for the last 8 years to prevent this terrible conflict and negotiate peace in our troubled lands. I cannot say that they wanted or provoked this war. Of course, it is Putin’s unilateral decision to attack. But the effort of those with real power and influence to settle the conflict peacefully for the last 8 years or even more was clearly not enough. But they had direct contact with Putin and were in close communication with him for all these years. The Russian middle class was not.
I don’t want to turn this comment into a discussion about the genesis of this conflict, but it surprises me that you totally exclude any possible responsibility of the Western leaders for this war. In any conflict of this size and magnitude, there is more than one responsible actor. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, but Stalin also shares the blame for that war. Bush attacked Iraq, but Hussein did share responsibility for this disaster as well. Clinton attacked Serbia, but Milosevic also contributed to the start of that war. The conflict in Ukraine is not just a classic war between two sovereign nations — it is more complex than that. It is probably the largest but not the only major conflict in the chain reaction of wars on the remnants of the Soviet Union. Just last year, Azerbaijan and Armenia had a full-scale war with thousands of dead and injured. In January this year, Kazakhstan was balancing on the brink of a major tribal war between different regional clans. These kinds of conflicts are repetitive in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Moldova still hasn’t fully settled its conflict with Transnistria, Russia fought with Chechnya, Georgia with Abkhazia and Ossetia, and with Russia too, and so on.
Conflicts of this type are not easy to settle — they have a complex nature combining elements of both inter- and intra-state wars. It is a great tragedy that Russians and Ukrainians could not find a way to live in peace. For me personally, as for many people on both sides, it is not a typical war between homeland and another country like the war against Iraq or Serbia was for Americans, for instance. Many of us belong to both countries. I have colleagues working with me in Moscow with Ukrainian passports or born and raised in Ukraine. They don’t consider it as an alien land — both countries are homeland for them. My grandmother was born in Mariupol and raised in Dnepropetrovsk where before the Second World War, her father had built a major enterprise that became an important part of the Ukrainian industrial base today. I don’t see this terrible war as you and your colleagues probably saw the war in Iraq or Serbia started by the US. Russians and Ukrainians have a million tiny ways connecting us to each other and this makes this tragedy especially painful for us and very difficult to solve. For the last 8 years, our nations more than ever have needed wise and knowledgeable advice and facilitation from the Western leaders but instead received mainly arrogant and cold lecturing about abstract principles of international law and democracy. I don’t know why you don’t call for a ‘crowdsourced war’ against those who really could and should but didn’t prevent this war.
You say that Russians “must feel the judgment not of foreign politicians, but of the world, generally.” You suggest that this judgment would be crowdsourced. Crowds are powerful, yes, but do they have any moral integrity or reason? I doubt this. We’ve seen it with cancel culture. More importantly, sanctions imposed by the governments, however questionable they are under public international law, have at least minimal legal underpinnings. State orders imposing sanctions face the system of checks and balances within the Western states. The state sanctions are under a certain level of procedural control and can be lifted once everything goes back to normal. The crowdsourced war does not have this kind of legal underpinning, it is governed only by lynch law. No one would control how exactly Google, Apple, or FMCG companies are going to impose their boycotts and sanctions. No one will apply a proportionality test to make sure they do not turn sanctions into primitive hate or victim-blaming. Is it at all ethical to appeal to those who are repeatedly accused of unethical treatment of workers around the world, dissemination of fake news, and total disregard of privacy? These global corporations turn a blind eye on so many gross violations of human rights, wars, and conflicts around the world, they trade with crooks and pollute the Earth, but in this particular conflict, you expect them to become a source of moral judgment.
Once you unleash the energy of the crowdsourced war against the Russians, it would be difficult to stop. Mobs are getting crazy as they smell blood. I already hear from my friends living in Europe that their Russian kids are bullied in schools and even kindergartens only because they are Russian. I doubt that 6-year-old Russian kids living in Europe share any responsibility for Putin’s actions. All international sports associations have banned Russian athletes, international publishers refuse to accept Russian manuscripts, NGOs suspend the membership of Russian experts and activists, universities expel Russian scholars, and so on and so forth. I don’t know what we should expect next. Probably we would be asked to put yellow stars on our social media profiles and wear them in the public areas in the West. All goes in this direction.
From this point, a further question arises. Does the crowd you suggest mobilizing really want to stop the war? As for corporations, they might have their own business interests including weakening the Russian competitors. As for private individuals — they may easily absorb the hate and aggression they are asked to express and go on with this anti-Russian attitude for long after the war. Even during the Cold War when the US and the USSR were in a real fight with each other, the cultural, academic, athletic, and other humanitarian channels were kept working and stayed open for both sides. Soviet athletes, artists, and scientists were participating in the networks and organizations their Russian successors are expelled now under totally xenophobic pretexts. I doubt that the Cold War could end peacefully as it did if the West would be waging a crowdsourced total war against the Soviet middle class.
I don’t also agree with you that crowdsourced wars would be a good alternative for the modern world. You present this instrument as a neutral tool targeting aggressors when the governments cannot do anything. But I doubt that this instrument is independent of the governments. We didn’t see this level of social mobilization in the West in other wars when the aggressor was a Western country or a NATO ally. For many years already, the Saudis have been fighting a sovereign state of Yemen relying on full support and military supply from the US. I never heard about any crowdsourced wars neither against Saudi Arabia nor against the US. The US and Turkey are still fighting with a sovereign state of Syria with both Turkish and American boots on the ground. Serbia was bombed for 78 days by the NATO forces, and so on, and so forth. Even Ukraine was using heavy weapons to fight with the Russian-backed separatists in Donbas for 8 years — cities were bombed, civilians were dying en mass, but the Western activists were mainly silent. To me, the crowdsourced war looks like just another extension of conventional war-making it even worse. The danger of this instrument is that it turns a relatively regulated and contained military conflict into a total war with corporate and social crusades against the civilians of the enemy country.
I also disagree with you that Russia is a pariah nation and the whole world is against it. The West doesn’t equal the whole world. China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and a few other countries stay neutral. They neither impose sanctions nor mobilize crusades against the Russians. Maybe because they really want peace and understand that you cannot stop one war by waging another? I don’t know. But it is clear to me that if we want a real alternative form of resolving conflicts in the 21st century we don’t need more kinds of war (even innovative ones) but we need more kinds of peace.
We have a saying in Russia: “A bad peace is better than a good war”. Putin has broken his promise not to start this war. It would have consequences for him in Russia. I’m sure about this. He knows that the people of Russia cannot stand any aggressive wars — it is part of our cultural DNA — so, he tries to prevent people from even using this word. The communications authority is shutting down media that call this ‘special operation’ in Ukraine a war. According to the newly passed draconian law with a sentence of up to 15 years of imprisonment, any public expression about this war would be soon illegal (it forbids any forms of ‘fake news’ about this ‘special operation’ but these days anything could be called fake).
So, I don’t know how potent the Russian society is now to oppose the war. But what is clear is that the West, by waging a total war against the Russians, is essentially leaving us to deal with this alone.
