Rise of Russia's "Defensive Agressors"

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

What do Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and now Vladimir Putin have in common?

They are Russian leaders who invaded bordering states because they feared their own country would come under threat. I have called them “defensive aggressors.” I know this sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s their mindset.

Russia has been attacked numerous times by, among others, Mongol, Polish, Swedish, French, and German armies (in the last case, more than once). These aggressors often laid the country to waste – this was especially true of the Nazis in the Second World War.

Russia’s attitude has been shaped by this history. It often reacts to what it perceived as threats by going on the offensive. Call it a form of national paranoia, but it is not unfounded.

Following the 1945 victory over Hitler, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin established a buffer zone of Communist-run states in eastern Europe, under an alliance system known as the Warsaw Pact. Western nations meanwhile, had created NATO. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union reacted with force against any attempt by its satellite states to leave its orbit.

In 1956, a popular uprising in Hungary followed a speech by Khrushchev in Moscow in February in which he attacked Stalin’s tyranny. Encouraged by the new freedom of debate, a rising tide of unrest and discontent in Hungary, now a Communist-ruled nation, broke out into active fighting that Oct. 23.

The rebels won the first phase of the revolution, and Imre Nagy became premier, agreeing to establish a multiparty system. But on November 1, he declared Hungarian neutrality and announced Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact.

This triggered a response by Moscow three days later. Claiming NATO was behind the revolt, the Soviets invaded Hungary to stop the revolution, and Nagy was executed for treason.

Twelve years later came the “Prague Spring.” Changes in the leadership of Communist-run Czechoslovakia led to attenpts to “humanize” the application of communist doctrines. The economy had been slowing since the early 1960s, and the government responded with reforms to improve the economy.

In early 1968, Antonin Novotny was ousted as the head of the Communist Party, and he was replaced by Alexander Dubcek. The Dubcek government ended censorship in early 1968, and the acquisition of this freedom resulted in a public expression of broad-based support for reform and a public sphere in which government and party policies could be debated openly.

Soviet leaders were concerned over these developments in Czechoslovakia. Recalling the 1956 uprising in Hungary, they worried that if Czechoslovakia carried reforms too far, other satellite states in Eastern Europe might follow, leading to a widespread rebellion against Moscow’s leadership.

Warsaw Pact troops from the USSR, Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria invaded the country on August 20–21, 1968. The Soviets forced Dubcek from power and hard-line Communists resumed ruling the country.

I visited Czechoslovakia and Hungary, among other eastern European nations, in 1977 and I found the atmosphere in Czechoslovakia particularly depressing.

Afghanistan was invaded in 1979 to uphold a pro-Soviet regime. The country’s government had been ousted a year earlier and power was now shared by two Marxist-Leninist political groups.

Bitterly resented by the devoutly Muslim population, insurgencies arose by groups known collectively as the mujahideen. It prompted the Soviets to send in some 30,000 troops that Dec. 24.

The Afghan War quickly settled down into a stalemate, with more than 100,000 Soviet troops controlling little more than the cities. Mikhail Gorbachev, who assumed the leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985, oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet forces after the failed decade-long campaign, which some have called Moscow’s “Vietnam.” This folly was one of the reasons the Soviet Union would dissolve two years later.

So now we have another Russian war, this time against a country that was itself part of the USSR. Again, its desire to move out of what Russia considers its geographic space since 2014 has resulted in the war launched in 2022.

Russia’s history makes it a difficult nation to deal with and it’s why, as a colleague has remarked, for Moscow a neighbouring state is seen as either a vassal or an enemy.