The Russian People: Are They Complicit?

So, imagine it’s Germany in the early ’30s and you were amongst the Germans, knowing that Hitler was wrong about the Jews. Would you speak out? How about in the late ’30s, just as the war is breaking out? Or maybe during the ’40s where the gassing of prisoners was in full force?

As a kid, when I first learned about WWII, the Gestapo, and the extermination of the Jews, I wondered how does one do the right thing in a situation such as Germany, where you know what the people were doing was wrong but speaking out could cost you your life? How does one do the right thing and still protect oneself? I have read a lot of books to see if there was a way of comporting oneself and still live.

I’m sorry to say I don’t have an answer.

The Russians now face this dilemma, but they do have an extenuating factor that they don’t receive news from any other source than what the government provides. So, they don’t know the truth – I think. (Sometimes I think the Russians do know the truth but are just in denial because of what it would mean for their country.)

In the last few weeks, there have been polls indicating strengthening support behind Putin, moving from 69% to 83%.

Russians also appear to be rallying behind their president, raising the question of whether ordinary citizens are partly to blame for their regime—and perhaps even morally culpable.

If Putin’s regime and the Russian people are more intertwined than they initially appeared, a presumption of innocence becomes harder to sustain.

“Why the Russian People Go Along With Putin’s War”, The Atlantic, Shadi Hamid, April 23, 2022

Some Ukrainians say that the Russians only care about winning so if Russia wins this war, then the people will support Putin. The people will continue to support Russia only until they start losing – or the people learn about losing – and then the people will turn against Putin. Otherwise, the Russian people do not really care about the Ukrainians.

Some Ukrainians feel the Russians are now complicit in the war.

Then The Atlantic’s article, “Why the Russian People Go Along With Putin’s War”, came out this morning and did present the view that people stuck in an authoritarian regime cannot be held morally responsible because such a regime forces the people support atrocious regimes in order to survive. Read the article because the author presents his argument in a much better fashion than I can do here.

Germany had a democracy but voted in Hitler and supported him throughout all of those years. There may have been a few in the beginning that resisted and fought the Nazis (I think mainly the Communists – not a great choice) but the majority of the citizens chose and supported the Nazis. At the end of the war, the world saw the German people being just as complicit as the leadership.

Russia does not have the same option of choice – they’ve been living under Putin for at least 20 years and their freedoms probably have been degraded over that time. And of course, their access to alternative news have been constricted, and lately, shut down. In the beginning, there were some protests but that appears to be now gone.

But I think the argument that we cannot hold the Russian people as complicit or morally responsible will not hold as time goes on because we did have the protests early on (meaning some Russians knew the truth) and now, we have people ratting out on each other (meaning some are in support of Putin and willing to rat out others). As time goes on, the truth will seep through the walls that have sprung up, may be through familial communications or through VPNs or through some kind of hacking of the news. Eventually, they will see the atrocity being done in their name and then they will have to decide on how to choose. If they choose to ignore those facts seeping in, then they will be regarded as complicit.

Over time, it is really hard to maintain innocence in the face of such massive killing of citizens and razing of whole cities. The Germans tried to maintain such innocence by saying that they did not know of the mass extermination of prisoners, even though the stench of death was in the air. Nobody believed them when they denied knowledge of the cruelty and death.

The same will probably hold for the Russians. Already, the Ukrainians – the people most like the Russians since there are families in both countries – don’t believe in the innocence of the Russians.

Are there some innocent Russians? I think there are some who do not support Putin and his war but cannot say so without reprisals, possibly even their life. We just don’t know how many. In the end, we will probably hold Putin, the government, the elites, the media, the secret intelligence, and the military as responsible and then maybe give the people the benefit of some doubt.

Maybe. The longer the war goes on and the greater the brutalities show up, the more world will hold the Russian people complicit.