Putin has Used Unresolved Traumas of Russian People to Build a Dictatorship and Launch a War, Grozovsky and Postnov Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 31 – Russians suffer from a surfeit of traumas inflicted over centuries and largely unresolved, Russian observers Boris Grozovsky and Viktor Postnov say. What is especially disturbing, they say, is that Putin has used these unresolved traumas to build a personalistic dictatorship and launch his war against Ukraine.

             The Kremlin leader has been able to do so, they write, because he has suspended the process of resolving older traumas while inflicting new ones, thereby “destroying the ability of individuals to ensure minimal security and internal integration while producing instead feelings of fear and hopelessness” (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/01/31/travmirovannaya-natsiya-a185946).

            That pushes off even further into the future the time when Russians will be able to recover from the “sickness” that the experience of trauma inflicts not only on those who have passed through it but also on their children and their children’s children who suffer traumas as a result of what their parents and grandparents relate to them.

            One thing that sets Russia apart, Grozovsky and Postnov argue, is that it has suffered so many traumas that overcoming them appears to most Russians as something impossible – unlike the East Europeans who also suffered traumas but who have concluded that they must and can address them.

            And that has another unfortunate consequence, the two write. Russians traumatized by their own past and convinced that they cannot overcome the traumas they have suffered both directly and indirectly are more disposed to accept authoritarian rule with its new traumas than are those societies which have addressed this issue.

            Indeed, the two authors continues, “in the mass consciousness” of Russians, the conviction has been formed that an individual is not the master of his own fate. Instead, his life depends on the arbitrary decisions of the nobleman, the bureaucrat and the tsar,” an attitude that “has given rise to passivity, a sense of hopelessness,” and a willingness to servilely adapt.

And they conclude that as a result, “there is a strong demand in society for ‘a strong leader,’ ‘a benevolent tsar,’ who will restore the vertical power structure, establish order, and govern justly from above. And the elites in this situation always think that ‘the people are not ready.’”

Indeed, Grozovsky and Postnov say, the nature of the problem has not changed as much as many are inclined to think: “The rhetorical strategies used to justify serfdom in the first half of the 19th century are remarkably similar to the arguments of Russian reformers in the 1990s, who convinced themselves and their supporters that reforms must necessarily be ‘unpopular.’”

            Until the traumas the Russian people have suffered are faced openly and honestly and until the society begins to cure itself, there is little chance that the traumas and the impact they have on Russian life will ever be overcome however much many want that to happen without the kind of efforts it will require.