The West Has to Believe that Democracy Will Prevail
12 min read
This year, the Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum was awarded the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize for her “indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy.” Applebaum is the author of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Gulag: A History; and other books about dictatorship and democracy. This article is adapted from the acceptance lecture that she delivered yesterday in Frankfurt.
When I began working on the history of the Soviet Union, in the 1990s, survivors and historians alike were free to speak as they wished. Many of them felt as if a new Russia could be constructed on top of the fundamental, historical truths that were emerging.
That possibility faded. I can even tell you the exact moment when it finally came to an end: the morning of February 20, 2014, when Russian troops illegally marched across the Crimean peninsula, which is part of Ukraine. That was the moment when the work of writing Russian history once again became dangerous. Because that was the moment when the past and present collided—when the past became, once again, a blueprint for the present.
No historian of tragedy ever wants to look up, turn on the television, and find that their work has come to life. When, in the 1990s, I was researching the history of the Gulag in the Soviet archives, I assumed that the story belonged to the distant past. When, a few years later, I wrote about the Soviet assault on Eastern Europe, I also thought that I was describing an era that had ended. And when I studied the history of the Ukrainian famine, the tragedy at the center of Stalin’s attempt to eradicate Ukraine as a nation, I did not imagine that this same kind of story could repeat itself in my lifetime.
But in 2014, old plans were taken out of the same Soviet archives, dusted off, and put to use once again.
The Russian soldiers who spread out across Crimea traveled in unmarked vehicles, wearing uniforms without insignia. They took over government buildings, removed the local leaders, barred them from their offices. For several days afterward, the world was confused. Were these “separatists” who were staging an uprising? Were they “pro-Russian” Ukrainians?
I was not confused. I knew that this was a Russian invasion of Crimea, because it looked exactly like the Soviet invasion of Poland 70 years earlier. In 1944, the invasion featured Soviet soldiers wearing Polish uniforms, a Soviet-backed Communist Party pretending to speak for all Poles, a manipulated referendum, and other acts of political fakery that were designed to confuse not only the people of Poland but also Poland’s allies in London and Washington.
After 2014, and then again after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, cruelly familiar patterns repeated themselves. Russian soldiers treated ordinary Ukrainians as enemies and spies. They used random violence to terrorize people. They imprisoned civilians for minor offenses—the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle, for example—or sometimes for no reason at all. They built torture chambers as well as filtration camps, which we could also call concentration camps. They transformed cultural institutions, schools, and universities to suit the nationalist, imperialist ideology of the new regime. They kidnapped children, took them to Russia, and changed their identities. They stripped Ukrainians of everything that made them human, that made them vital, that made them unique.
In different languages, at different times, this kind of assault has had different names. We used to talk about Sovietization. Now we speak of Russification. There is a German word too: Gleichschaltung. But whatever word you use, the process is the same. It means the imposition of arbitrary autocratic rule: a state without the rule of law, without guaranteed rights, without accountability, without checks and balances. It means the destruction of all stirrings or survivals or signs of the liberal democratic order. It means the construction of a totalitarian regime: In Mussolini’s famous words, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
In 2014, Russia was already on the way to becoming a totalitarian society, having launched two brutal wars in Chechnya, having murdered journalists and arrested critics. But after 2014, that process accelerated. The Russian experience of occupation in Ukraine paved the way for harsher politics inside Russia itself. In the years after the Crimean invasion, opposition was repressed further; independent institutions were completely banned.
This deep connection between autocracy and imperial wars of conquest has a logic to it. If you truly believe that you and your regime have the right to control all institutions, all information, all organizations—that you can strip people not just of rights but of identity, language, property, life—then of course you also believe that you have the right to inflict violence on whomever you please. Nor will you object to the human costs of such a war: If ordinary people have no rights, no power, no voice, then why should it matter whether they live or die?
Not that this connection is nothing new. Two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant—whose ideas inspired this prize—also described the link between despotism and war. More than two millennia ago, Aristotle wrote that a tyrant is inclined “to foment wars in order to preserve his own monopoly of power.” In the 20th century, Carl Von Ossietzky, the German journalist and activist, became a fierce opponent of war, not least because of what it was doing to the culture of his own country. As he wrote in 1932: “Nowhere is there as much belief in war as in Germany … nowhere are people more inclined to overlook its horrors and disregard its consequences, nowhere is soldiering celebrated more uncritically.”
Since the invasion of Crimea in 2014, this same militarization has gripped Russia too. Russian schools now train small children to be soldiers. Russian television encourages Russians to hate Ukrainians, to consider them subhuman. The Russian economy has been militarized: Some 40 percent of the national budget will now be spent on weapons. To obtain missiles and ammunition, Russia now makes deals with Iran and North Korea, two of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet. The constant talk of war in Ukraine also normalized the idea of war in Russia, making other wars more likely. Russian leaders now speak casually of using nuclear weapons against their other neighbors and regularly threaten to invade them.
As in Von Ossietzky’s Germany, criticism of the war is not merely discouraged in Russia. It is illegal. My friend Vladimir Kara-Murza made the brave decision in 2022 to return to Russia and to speak out against the invasion from there. Why? Because he wanted the history books to record that someone opposed the war. He paid a very high price. He was arrested. His health deteriorated. He was often kept in isolation. When he and others who had been unjustly imprisoned were finally released, in exchange for a group of Russian spies and criminals including a murderer taken from a German prison, his captors hinted that he should be careful, because in the future he might be poisoned. He had reason to believe them: Russian secret policemen had already poisoned him twice.
Kara-Murza was not alone. Since 2018, more than 116,000 Russians have faced criminal or administrative punishment for speaking their mind. Thousands of them have been punished specifically for objecting to the war in Ukraine. Their heroic battle is mostly carried out in silence. Because the regime has imposed total control on information in Russia, their voices cannot be heard.
But what about us in the rest of the democratic world? Our voices are not restrained or restricted. We are not jailed or poisoned for speaking our mind. How should we react to the revival of a form of government that we thought had disappeared from Europe forever? In the early, emotional days of the war in Ukraine, many did join the chorus of support. In 2022, as in 2014, Europeans again turned on their televisions to see scenes of a kind they knew only from history books: women and children huddled at train stations, tanks rolling across fields, bombed-out cities. In that moment, many things suddenly felt clear. Words quickly became actions. More than 50 countries joined a coalition to aid Ukraine, militarily and economically, an alliance built at unprecedented speed. In Kyiv, Odesa, and Kherson, I witnessed the effect of food aid, military aid, and other European support. It felt miraculous.
But as the war has continued, doubt has crept in. Since 2014, faith in democratic institutions and alliances has declined dramatically, in both Europe and America. Maybe our indifference to the invasion of Crimea played a larger role in this decline than we usually think. The decision to accelerate economic cooperation with Russia after the invasion certainly created both moral and financial corruption as well as cynicism. That cynicism was then amplified by a Russian disinformation campaign that we dismissed or ignored.
Now, faced with the greatest challenge to our values and our interests in our time, the democratic world is starting to wobble. Many wish the fighting in Ukraine would somehow, magically, stop. Others want to change the subject to the Middle East—another horrific, tragic conflict, but one where Europeans have almost no ability to shape events. A Hobbesian world makes many claims upon our resources of solidarity. A deeper engagement with one tragedy does not denote indifference to other tragedies. We must do what we can where our actions will make a difference.
Slowly, another group is gaining traction, too, especially in Germany. These are the people who do not support or condemn Vladimir Putin’s aggression but rather pretend to stand above the argument and declare “I want peace.” Some even call for peace by referring solemnly to the lessons of German history. But “I want peace” is not always a moral argument. This is also the right moment to say that the lesson of German history is not that Germans should be pacifists. On the contrary, we have known for nearly a century that a demand for pacifism in the face of an aggressive, advancing dictatorship can simply represent the appeasement and acceptance of that dictatorship.
In 1938, the German writer Thomas Mann, then already in exile, horrified by the situation in his country and by the complacency of the liberal democracies, denounced the “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.” During World War II, George Orwell condemned his compatriots who called upon Britain to stop fighting. “Pacifism,” he wrote, “is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”
In 1983, Manés Sperber, the recipient of that year’s German Peace Prize, also argued against the false morality of his era’s pacifists, who at that time wanted to disarm Germany and Europe in the face of the Soviet threat: “Anyone,” he declared, “who believes and wants to make others believe that a Europe without weapons, neutral and capitulating, can ensure peace for the foreseeable future is mistaken and is misleading others.”
We can use some of these words once again. Many of those in Germany, and in Europe, who now call for pacifism in the face of the Russian onslaught are indeed “objectively pro-Russian,” to borrow Orwell’s phrase. Their arguments, if followed to the logical conclusion, mean that we should acquiesce to the military conquest of Ukraine, to the cultural destruction of Ukraine, to the construction of concentration camps in Ukraine, to the kidnapping of children in Ukraine. We are nearly three years into this war. What would it have meant to plead for peace in Nazi-dominated Europe in early 1942?
Let me say it more clearly: Those who advocate pacifism, and those who would surrender not just territory but people and principles to Russia, have learned nothing at all from the history of the 20th century.
The magic of the phrase never again has blinded us to reality before. In the weeks before the invasion in February 2022, Germany, like many other European nations, found war so impossible to imagine that the German government refused to supply Ukraine with weapons. And yet here is the irony: Had Germany, and the rest of NATO, supplied Ukraine with those weapons well in advance, maybe we could have deterred the invasion. Maybe it would never have happened. Perhaps the West’s failure was, in Thomas Mann’s words again, “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.“
But let me repeat again: Mann loathed the war, as well as the regime that promoted it. Orwell hated militarism. Sperber and his family were themselves refugees from war. Yet it was because they hated war with such passion, and because they understood the link between war and dictatorship, that they argued in favor of defending the liberal societies they treasured.
We have been here before, which is why the words of our liberal democratic predecessors speak to us. European liberal societies have been confronted by aggressive dictatorships before. We have fought against them before. We can do so again. And this time, Germany is one of the liberal societies that can lead the fight.
To prevent the Russians from spreading their autocratic political system further, we must help the Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine. If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat once brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it. The impact will be felt on our continent and around the world—not just in Ukraine but in Ukraine’s neighbors, in Georgia, in Moldova, in Belarus. And not just in Russia but among Russia’s allies: China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea.
The challenge is not only military. This is also a battle against hopelessness, against pessimism, and even against the creeping appeal of autocratic rule, which is also sometimes disguised beneath the false language of “peace.” The idea that autocracy is safe and stable, that democracies cause war; that autocracies protect some form of traditional values while democracies are degenerate—this language is also coming from Russia and the broader autocratic world, as well as from those inside our own societies who are prepared to accept as inevitable the blood and destruction inflicted by the Russian state. Those who accept the erasure of other people’s democracies are less likely to fight against the erasure of their own democracy. Complacency, like a virus, moves quickly across borders.
The temptation of pessimism is real. In the face of what feels like an endless war and an onslaught of propaganda, it is easier just to accept the idea of decline. But let’s remember what’s at stake, what the Ukrainians are fighting for: a society, like ours, where independent courts protect people from arbitrary violence; where the rights to thought, speech, and assembly are guaranteed; where citizens are free to engage in public life and are not frightened of the consequences; where security is guaranteed by a broad alliance of democracies and prosperity is anchored by the European Union.
Autocrats like the Russian president hate all of these principles because they threaten their power. Independent judges can hold rulers to account. A free press can expose high-level corruption. A political system that empowers citizens allows them to change their leaders. International organizations can enforce the rule of law. That is why the propagandists of autocratic regimes will do what they can to undermine the language of liberalism and the institutions that guard our freedoms, to mock them and to belittle them, inside their own countries and in ours as well.
Supporters of Ukraine are now asking Germany to provide weapons to be used against Russia, an aggressive military power. The true lesson of German history is not that Germans should never fight but that Germans have a special responsibility to stand up and take risks for freedom. All of us in the democratic world, not just Germans, have been trained to be critical and skeptical of our own leaders and of our own societies, so it can feel awkward when we are asked to defend our most fundamental principles. But we can’t let skepticism decline into nihilism.
In the face of an ugly, aggressive dictatorship in Europe, we in the democratic world are natural comrades. Our principles and ideals, and the alliances we have built around them, are our most powerful weapons. We must act upon our shared beliefs—that the future can be better; the war can be won; that authoritarianism can be defeated once again; that freedom is possible; and that true peace is possible, on this continent and around the world.
