DÉJÀ VU: THE TRAP OF HISTORY — Ramis Yunus

I recently reread the famous book The Nuremberg Diary by American psychologist Gustave Gilbert, written on the basis of his work with the major Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials. Once again, I stopped at one of Gilbert’s conversations with Hermann Göring, which took place in April 1946.

The conversation turned to war. Gilbert remarked that ordinary people were hardly grateful to their leaders for war and destruction. Göring replied with virtually no hesitation: “Of course, people do not want war. What normal peasant would want to risk his life if, at best, his reward would be returning home alive? But,” he continued, “leaders determine policy, and people can always be led along — whether it is a democracy, a parliament, a communist system, or a fascist dictatorship.”

Gilbert objected: “In a democracy, people have the opportunity to influence the authorities through elected representatives.”

Göring’s answer was even more cynical: “The voice of the people can be neutralized. All you have to do is tell people that they have been attacked, and label those who oppose the war as unpatriotic people who are putting the country at risk.”

Eight decades have passed, but sometimes history does not simply repeat itself — it returns almost word for word, and that is precisely why, when observing Russian propaganda in recent years, I increasingly find myself thinking of one word: déjà vu.

The same fear, the same image of a besieged fortress, the same talk of an external threat, the same attempt to portray aggression not as a choice of one’s own but as a forced response to the actions of an adversary, the same accusations against those who ask uncomfortable questions. And, finally, the same principle: first, society is told why war is necessary, and then society is convinced that continuing the war is necessary because too many people have already died and the cost of retreat is too high.

The most tragic aspect of the current situation is that this rhetoric comes from a state that itself suffered horrific human losses during World War II. The peoples of the Soviet Union paid tens of millions of lives for victory over Nazism. And today, it is once again possible to hear in Russia a logic in which war is presented as forced, while responsibility for it is systematically shifted onto anyone except those who made the decision to start it.

History really does know how to return in the most unexpected forms, but history also knows how to send the bill.

So let us look not at the statements of Kremlin propagandists, but at the bare facts: what has Russia gained as a result of the full-scale war against Ukraine, which began in February 2022?

Ukraine did not collapse.

Moreover, the country that Moscow expected to bring to its knees quickly has turned into a state with a combat-capable army, enormous battlefield experience, a developed military industry, and the ability to strike far beyond the front line.

Ukrainian society, which Russian propaganda had spent years portraying as artificially created and incapable of independent existence, demonstrated exactly the opposite. Ukraine has become more consolidated, its army has become significantly stronger, and its military-technological potential has increased by an order of magnitude.

And today Ukraine continues to hold an enormous front while simultaneously developing long-range strike capabilities and striking Russian military and energy infrastructure, while reports from recent weeks indicate continued Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil and military infrastructure.

Now let us look at NATO.

For years, Moscow claimed that one of the main motives behind its policy was preventing further expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance. And what happened after February 2022?

Finland joined NATO on April 4, 2023, Sweden on March 7, 2024, and NATO expanded to 32 member states.

In other words, Russia started the war, explaining it as necessary to combat NATO expansion, and achieved the exact opposite result. This is not a political assessment; it is a geopolitical fact.

Russia wanted to push NATO away from its borders — and got NATO even closer. Russia wanted to weaken Ukraine — and got a much stronger Ukraine. Russia wanted to divide the West — and got a much more serious consolidation of European security policy.

Russia wanted to strengthen its influence in Europe — and, to a significant extent, itself accelerated Europe’s move away from dependence on Russia. And finally, Russia wanted to demonstrate its military power to the world — but got a war of attrition that has now continued into its fifth year.

Isn’t that déjà vu?

But the most interesting developments are now taking place inside Russia itself.

While the war continued far from most Russian cities, it could be sold to society as television footage. However, the longer the war continues, the harder it becomes to conceal its cost.

Ukrainian strikes are gradually bringing the war onto Russian territory. In Moscow and other regions, people are already facing not only reports of drones but also the very tangible consequences of the war.

Today, all the world’s media are filled with reports and videos of long queues at Russian gas stations, restrictions on gasoline sales, and fuel shortages. In some places, the queues have reached a kilometer in length. Russian authorities have been forced to restrict fuel exports and even begin importing petroleum products — a situation that just a few years ago would have seemed absurd for one of the world’s largest oil and gas exporters.

This is where the war begins to transform from a television image into everyday reality, and that is an entirely different story.

According to estimates by Western sources, Russia’s total military losses — killed and wounded — have exceeded one million, but even setting aside disputes over the exact figure, the scale of the human losses is already obvious and incomparable with Soviet losses in Afghanistan.

For a historical comparison, it is enough to recall the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Ten years of war in Afghanistan — from 1979 to 1989 — resulted in about 15,000 Soviet servicemen killed, and the scale of Russia’s current losses is now simply incomparable with Afghanistan.

And this is where a question inevitably arises that sooner or later any state waging a prolonged war will ask itself: what is the price of victory — and does such a victory even exist?

Because war has one unpleasant feature: its cost does not grow linearly. First, the state pays with money, then with weapons, then with human lives, then with the future, and eventually comes the moment when war begins consuming not only the state’s resources but also its internal stability.

And the fewer results on the battlefield correspond to the initial expectations, the more the authorities have to compensate for this through propaganda — and here Hermann Göring returns to the picture once again.

If reality does not match the promises, society must be told why the authorities are not to blame, but the enemy is. If the war becomes more expensive, people must be told about the necessity of new sacrifices. If doubts emerge, those who doubt must be declared traitors. If the question “Why are we fighting?” arises, the answer must be: “Because we were attacked.”

This is how a vicious circle gradually emerges. Propaganda justifies the war and demands new sacrifices. New sacrifices require intensified propaganda, while intensified propaganda requires new enemies; at the same time, pressure on society grows, and the less the war delivers the desired result, the stronger the repression, censorship, and tightening of the screws become.

But every screw has a limit, and if it is tightened indefinitely, eventually the thread will strip. And this is where the history of the Soviet Union becomes particularly instructive.

In 1979, Moscow made one of its biggest strategic mistakes — it sent troops into Afghanistan.

The Kremlin probably expected a limited operation that would quickly stabilize the situation and strengthen Soviet influence. But things turned out differently.

Afghanistan became a protracted war that was a source of constant tension with the West. Economic and political costs accumulated, while the confrontation over Afghanistan gradually became one element of much broader pressure on the Soviet Union.

The United States and its allies used the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan to increase pressure on Moscow, support the mujahideen, expand sanctions and technological pressure, and further restrict the USSR’s capabilities.

It was no longer simply an Afghan war; it was a strategic trap into which the Soviet Union had fallen.

In 1989, Soviet troops left Afghanistan, and two years later the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

Of course, it would be too simplistic to claim that the USSR collapsed solely because of Afghanistan, as the Soviet Union had an entire complex of internal economic, political, and national contradictions. But Afghanistan became one of the factors that accelerated the process of exhaustion of the Soviet system.

That is precisely why the current situation evokes such an alarming sense of déjà vu.

Today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, but it has itself officially enshrined continuity with the USSR in its Constitution, and this is where an almost historical irony emerges.

If a state lays claim to the historical legacy of the Soviet Union, perhaps it should study not only the USSR’s victories but also its mistakes more carefully. Because empires most often do not perish when they encounter an external enemy.

They begin to disintegrate when their own ambitions force them to make decisions whose cost gradually exceeds the capabilities of the system itself.

Today, Moscow is once again faced with a very unpleasant dilemma: continuing the war is costly, stopping it along the current front line is politically extremely difficult, while retreating would mean acknowledging that the initial objectives have not been achieved, and continuing would mean increasing the cost.

And so the trap closes.

The war is already difficult to win, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to end. This is the most dangerous stage of any war, because the state begins fighting not so much to achieve its original objective as to justify everything it has already paid.

And then a terrible logic emerges: so many people have died that we cannot stop. But it is precisely this logic that turns past losses into future ones. This is how states become hostages to their own decisions.

Russia is now trying to find a way out of a trap that it largely created itself, but the longer the war continues, the less room for maneuver there is.

Ukraine continues to resist, the West is adapting, Europe is changing its strategy, NATO is strengthening, and Ukraine’s long-range capabilities are growing.

At the same time, the Russian economy is increasingly being put on a war footing, repression inside the country is intensifying, and the cost of the war is rising — all of this is happening simultaneously.

Of course, one can explain to Russian society indefinitely that everything is going according to plan, but there is one problem that no propaganda can overcome.

It is the reality in which the average Russian citizen lives today: a queue at a gas station, a son killed in the war, a closed enterprise, rising prices, mobilization, a drone strike, new taxes, new restrictions, new death notices — and eventually the number of such facts becomes stronger than any television image.

History does not repeat itself literally; it repeats mechanisms. And today we are seeing two historical reflections simultaneously — the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.

From the former, Russia seems to be borrowing the language of justification for war: a besieged fortress, an external enemy, forced self-defense, and accusations of treason against dissenters.

From the latter, it is borrowing the model of a protracted imperial conflict that gradually turns into a war of attrition, leads to confrontation with the West, and begins to deplete the resources of the system itself.

That is why today’s Russian déjà vu looks particularly alarming.

History has given Moscow two warnings: the first ended with Nuremberg, and the second with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the question arises: why do the current inhabitants of the Kremlin so stubbornly believe that they will manage to avoid what their predecessors failed to avoid?

Perhaps because empires almost always overestimate their strength at the beginning of a war and underestimate the cost of getting out of it.

But history has another characteristic: it does not ask whether those in power believe in it; it simply sends the bill.

And perhaps the main question today is no longer whether Russia will be able to continue this war. The question is different: how much longer is Russia prepared to pay for a war that is taking it ever farther away from the goals for which, as the Kremlin claims, it started the war?

Because the most dangerous trap for a state is not a war it loses, but a war it can no longer win yet still cannot admit it has lost.

And perhaps this is precisely why the most frightening aspect of today’s Russian déjà vu is not that history is repeating itself, but that, with the experience of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union before its eyes, Moscow is still following the same path.

As George Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Ramis Yunus

Professor of Political Science

Khazar International University