Putin doesn’t just want a return to the 20th century. He already resides there, and that is where anyone looking for what could happen next should turn – specifically to 1938, when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who fancied himself a brilliant negotiator and an expert in all things, brokered an agreement that gave Adolf Hitler Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia. In exchange, the rest of Europe would, ostensibly, be safe from German aggression. A year after the resulting Munich Agreement was signed, of course, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II officially began.
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When Trump, fuming, threatened Zelensky with the potential for World War III, he may have been drawing a more accurate historical parallel than he realised.
What happens if Russia unleashes its aggression against Europe, unchecked or even aided by the US? The exact contours of the looming catastrophe are impossible to predict. It will not look like the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century. But just as certainly, it will not look like the world in which we have been living and in which the populations of most of the world’s wealthy countries have felt safe.
I am reminded of reading about the lives of exiles in Paris in the 1930s. German Jews and communists, who had run for their lives, watched as the world reshuffled itself. Political parties that used to be anti-fascist flipped overnight, assuming positions that ranged from appeasement to a full embrace. French and British leaders looked away as Hitler tested his strength outside Germany. As anti-fascism was marginalised, antisemitism became mainstream. Hitler’s victims were blamed for their own misfortune.
Most days now, I touch base with Russian or Belarusian friends in exile who are experiencing a terrifying sort of deja vu. We are perhaps more shocked than our American friends are by the speed with which the very rich and powerful, such as The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, have become enablers of Trumpism, and how the air itself seems to change until suddenly, it’s Zelensky, with his clear-eyed vision and firm principles, who seems like an anomaly.
We’ve seen it all before, and that is one of the reasons we are shocked. We’ve seen how it ends. Another is that we didn’t expect to see this happen in the US. We thought that our countries were particularly vulnerable to political warping because of their decades-long histories of totalitarianism. “It was nice to know that there was one country where the people in charge were, if not likable, then at least sane,” is how young Russian exile Ksenia Mironova put it. More than that, it was nice to think that the society was sane.
Exiled, but de-funded by Trump: Russian journalist Ksenia Mironova.Credit: Getty Images for FLC
A 26-year-old journalist who was forced to flee Russia in the middle of the night three years ago, her fiance in a prison colony serving a 22-year sentence for high treason, who passed through six countries before finding shelter in New York in a film program, Mironova used to think it was just her bad luck to be born in Russia. Now, increasingly, it looks like this world was an unlucky place to be born into. At the start of her spring semester, Mironova received an email informing her that her funding had been cut off as a result of one of Trump’s executive orders.
Where should she go? Returning to Russia is not an option. If Trump sides with Putin, the US won’t be, either.
“And even Mars is going to be colonised by [Elon] Musk,” Mironova said.
M. Gessen is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and the author of 11 books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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