The dead and the living dead
Perhaps the ultimate irony of war is that the soldiers who lose it don’t know they’ve lost it. They die before the ultimate outcome is known. In this category in the Ukraine war are — as of this writing — 46,600 Russian soldiers and 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Stack up the losses: it’s not going well for Russia.
“It’s?” Such is the ultimate loss in war: its dehumanization. Cruel as many of these Russian soldiers were, and indifferent to property, looting at will, surely many of those 46,600 Russian soldiers did not want to be in the fight and did not deem it worth the ultimate sacrifice. Enemies though these Russian soldiers were, their loss signals the sheer waste in this war, the sheer evil of its instigator, the sheer indifference of its prosecutors, the sheer cost: the payment of life for nothing in return. Not freedom. Not dignity.
The first unnoticed cost of this war may be the dead, but then there are the living dead, even less noticed.
These are Russians who have fled their country, who must now master the arts of exile, and it takes a long time, usually generations, to master these arts. As many as 300,000 Russians are recently domiciled in Georgia, Latvia, Turkey and Israel. They don’t have the language or the culture, all the more frustrating because it was the brightest who fled — those who saw the coming repression, the criminalization of dissent; those who had the foresight and wits and money to leave. They are now “greeners.” Their adjustment to this status is perhaps all the more difficult because they comprised Russia’s technology elite.
The next unnoticed cost of this war is within Russia itself. Many of the most able and most intelligent have left. Now, what’s left? Ask the question differently: How can Putin prosecute this war with so apparently little opposition, or even understanding that it was unprovoked? The answer is that those who opposed and understand the war have left the country. So what’s left? A hollowed out Russia. A population that once again, as under communism, is intellectually imprisoned. By turns ignorant, fearful, crushed — at least in part.
And the other part? Still another unnoticed cost of this war: split families. Like siblings, some on the Union side and some on the Rebel side of the American Civil War, Russia’s war in Ukraine has split families and thus, in part, split the country. Add to that split the profound hatred of what Russia has become by the Russians who left it for exile. They will form what Jewish exiles from Russia in the US at beginning of the 20th century called landsmanshaftn, intimate associations that were cultural, linguistic and economic bubbles. Inside them, the exiles felt at home. That was just it: It was a small home within the much larger alien world. Ultimately, however, as the generations passed, the Russian Jewish exiles of more than a century ago rose and succeeded in a way that left Russia far, far behind, stuck in totalitarianism and poverty.
This is what Putin has done to his country. This is perhaps the least noticed but the most farreaching cost of his war.
Even if the war ended tomorrow, it is not clear that the exiles would want to return to Russia, even if they could. We tend to think of this war in geopolitical terms — NATO, gas and oil, territory, weapons, the UN, European security —but the human cost of the living dead will exceed in some sense the dead, the wasted soldiers’ lives.
We too are the living dead. We tend to mistakenly think that the only victims of totalitarian countries are their own citizens. We are all the victims, at the very least economically. Look at the supply chain issues originating in China, caused in part by its utterly frightening imprisonment of much of its population under a “no COVID” strategy. A Russia that is reverting to totalitarianism is already threatening the economic welfare of Europe. Any country whom Putin deems his enemy and believes he can hurt will be next.
Imperialist Russia managed to create and sustain a great literary tradition. Now, with a great portion of Russia’s intelligentsia having fled, the best of Russia will likely emerge outside of Russia. Leaving the worst for the country itself — as we say, the least noticed cost of the war.
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