A Personal Witness
This reflection sits alongside my work on my Father’s memoir, which records a life shaped by total war, occupation, and the long moral aftershocks of the twentieth century. While his story belongs to an earlier catastrophe, the war in Ukraine has made it impossible to pretend that those histories are safely sealed in the past.
I write here not as a strategist or politician, but as a witness. I spent time in the Soviet Union, and what I saw then helps me understand what is unfolding now.
What I Saw in the Soviet System
During my time in the Soviet Union, two things struck me with lasting force.
First, an all‑consuming drive for material things. Born of deprivation and repression, people became obsessed with seizing whatever they could, by whatever means. Scarcity warped values until possessions became not merely desirable, but the only solid reality people felt they could rely on. In that environment, material things were not simply a measure of success; they became substitutes for meaning, autonomy, and even survival itself.
This is the crucial distinction from Western consumerism. The point is not that people were more greedy, predatory, or voracious, but that the material became ontological rather than aspirational. When every moral, spiritual, and civic reference point is denied or hollowed out, possession ceases to be a desire and becomes a proof of existence. Corruption networks flourished, black markets thrived, and survival often depended on exploiting others.
I am aware that some readers will respond: but this exists in the West too – rampant consumerism, shallow materialism, the same moral emptiness. The resemblance is superficial. What I witnessed was something more extreme and more deeply rooted.
Under Marxist‑Leninist ideology, the spiritual dimension of human life was not merely neglected but actively denied. Religion, conscience, and transcendent moral limits were treated as illusions or threats. When material conditions are proclaimed as the sole reality, then material acquisition becomes the only rational goal. Ends justify means. Scruples are luxuries.
I remember one small, chilling moment that fixed this truth in my mind. A Soviet official who constantly monitored us – we called him Tato Volodya, “Daddy Volodya” – wore a long black leather coat that reminded me, even then, of the Gestapo. The nickname was meant to sound familiar and caring, as though he were a guardian, a sort of paternal figure. The contrast could not have been starker: he was merely a functionary, a cog in a system devoted to control and surveillance. One day he deliberately fingered the coat and said to me, “You see this, Misha?” touching the leather, “THIS is what we believe in.” He said it with a knowing smirk – the same patronising expression I see today in Vladimir Putin. It sent a chill through me. A human being reduced himself to a coat. Yet that, unmistakably, was where value truly lay.
The great irony is that in the land that claimed to abolish alienation, human beings were more alienated than anywhere else – turned into objects of total control, stripped of inner life, and measured only by what could be possessed, displayed, or enforced.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, this moral vacuum did not heal – it widened. The ideology imploded, but nothing replaced it. What followed was not freedom tempered by law, but rampant lawlessness: the plundering of state assets, gangster capitalism, and the fusion of criminality with power. Out of that chaos emerged a hunger for order at any cost.
Putin’s authoritarianism did not arise in opposition to this culture, but as its heir. In many respects, Russia simply returned to form – rule by force, sanctified by material power, with human dignity once again expendable.
Second, a profound erosion of humanity. I witnessed men beaten half to death in public spaces, chased and humiliated like animals. Violence, intimidation, and ruthless self‑interest were normalised. Compassion, dignity, and restraint were stripped away by a system that rewarded brutality.
These experiences were not aberrations. They were systemic. They were the moral DNA of a political order that trained people to abandon dignity in order to survive.
Putin: Not an Anomaly, but a Product
Vladimir Putin emerged from this world. His worldview bears its unmistakable imprint:
- Material obsession: power defined by control of territory, resources, and wealth.
- Institutionalised corruption: networks of privilege and exploitation elevated into a governing system.
- Dehumanisation: politics conducted through intimidation, violence, and the denial of human worth.
When Margaret Thatcher said she “looked for the humanity” in him and found none, that absence was not accidental. It was the logical outcome of the system that shaped him.
Putin is not a historical aberration. He is continuity – the Soviet moral economy translated into a modern authoritarian state.
This continuity is institutional as well as moral. Russia today remains profoundly shaped by the FSB security services – the direct heirs of the KGB. Far from being marginalised after 1991, these organs exploited the chaos and failures of the post‑Soviet democratic experiment to reassert themselves behind the scenes. Formal political institutions survived, but real power increasingly migrated to opaque networks of surveillance, coercion, and control. Putin’s rise did not mark a break with this culture; it marked its consolidation. In this sense, Russia did not so much abandon its past as return to form.
Ukraine: The Fault Line
Putin’s war against Ukraine is not a sudden deviation or a reactive response to NATO. It is the culmination of decades of values forged in repression:
- the belief that borders can be redrawn by force;
- the conviction that material power outweighs human lives;
- the willingness to crush dignity and freedom in pursuit of dominance.
Ukraine stands at the fault line between two incompatible worlds: one in which people are expendable instruments of power, and another in which dignity, freedom, and self‑determination matter.
This is why Ukraine has become pivotal. Its struggle is not marginal or regional. It is civilisational.
Scepticism in a British Context
In Britain, scepticism about supporting Ukraine often presents itself as pragmatism or war‑weariness: talk of avoiding entanglement, conserving resources, or focusing on domestic priorities. These concerns are understandable in a country shaped by the memory of Iraq, Afghanistan, and imperial overreach.
But much of today’s scepticism also rests on familiar false narratives: that NATO “expanded aggressively,” or that the West seeks to “defeat Russia strategically.” These are not neutral analyses. They are the refined products of a propaganda tradition perfected in the Soviet era and inherited by modern Russia.
The aim is unchanged: to sow doubt, fracture alliances, and weaken resolve. Confusion becomes a weapon. Moral exhaustion becomes a strategy.
I recognise these techniques because I saw the system that produced them.
Why Support Matters
Supporting Ukraine is not charity. Nor is it about humiliating Russia. It is about recognising what is at stake:
It is a defence of humanity against a system that denies it.
It is a defence of freedom against a worldview that treats people as tools or prey.
It is a test of whether Europe has learned anything from its own history.
The echoes of the 1930s are unmistakable. Then, hesitation and appeasement emboldened aggression. Today, scepticism risks repeating the same mistake under new slogans.
This is no longer merely a matter of historical interpretation. Britain’s own intelligence leadership has issued stark warnings about the present danger. In her first public address, the head of MI6 described Russia under Putin as an aggressive and revisionist power posing an acute threat to European security – a threat likely to persist as long as the current system endures. Such assessments underline that the war in Ukraine is not distant from British interests. It is already shaping the security environment in which this country must live.
If Ukraine falls, the vice tightens around Europe. The moral lesson of “never again” is inverted into “again, but worse.”
Closing Reflection: Why This Matters Here
For a British audience, Ukraine may feel distant – another European crisis layered onto many others. But Britain’s own history should make the stakes intelligible. This country understands, perhaps better than most, the cost of confronting aggression too late rather than early.
I saw the roots of this system decades ago. Today, those roots have borne fruit in the destruction of Ukrainian cities and lives.
Putin’s war is not an accident of geopolitics. It is the logical extension of a culture shaped by material obsession, corruption, and the absence of compassion.
To support Ukraine is not to choose conflict; it is to choose self‑preservation. It is a stand against the return of a world in which humanity is expendable and power is the only truth.