Kimmage
inexplicably did in Georgia in 2008 and then more ambitiously again
in Ukraine in 2014. Russia was not just intransigent. Its intransigence
was entirely unanticipated in Washington in 2014.
the united states was also operating under a bad analogy. When the
Nazi evil empire fell, West Germany exited the forest of its authoritarian
history and, by atoning for Hitler’s evils, it guaranteed the integrity of
German democracy. The German precedent furnished an appealing—
even optimistic—course of action for the United States. If the Soviet
Union was evil, the story went, it deserved to collapse. It deserved to be
replaced by another political system and to be integrated into another
international order. And, if the United States was good, it could gen-
erously offer to Russia its political system and its idea of international
order, once the Soviet Union had finally vanished.
For a while, in the 1990s, it seemed like the familiar script
was playing out. Russia acquired a president, it adopted elements of
U.S.–style campaigning (Boris Yeltsin famously did a version of the
twist on the campaign trail), and capitalism was seemingly the only
option. The Russian economy would be subjected to shock therapy as a
path to creating a democratic culture. The citizen could vote, the citizen
could start a business, and in the public sphere, the citizen could take
an honest look at the Soviet past. With knowledge of the crimes and
of the evils in the Soviet story, responsibility would surely come. The
freedom to know, Germany had already proven, is the freedom to atone.
But the Soviets were not the Nazis. The Soviet Union lost the
Cold War by ceasing to exist, but it lost nothing on the battlefield, and
post-Soviet Russia was never occupied or reeducated by the United
States. The Soviet Union had also existed for far longer than Nazi