Wanting peace is not always a moral position

It is a privilege to find myself in the company of the past winners of this prize, especially the novelists, philosophers, and poets, all people who have a gift for imagining different worlds. 

I am, by contrast, a historian and a journalist, a person who seeks to explain and understand this world, a task that can often be less inspiring, less satisfying. So, I am especially grateful that you have included me in this distinguished group.

Let me also extend special thanks to Irina Scherbakova, an extraordinary person who began her career in the same way that I began mine: by interviewing survivors of the Soviet gulag. Except, of course, that she did it twenty years before me, at a time when the work of writing history in Russia was dangerous.

I had the good luck to begin my work on the history of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, an era when survivors and historians alike were free to speak as they wished, and when it felt – at least to some – as if a new Russia could be constructed on top of the fundamental, historical truths that Scherbakova and her colleagues revealed. 

That possibility quickly faded. I can even tell you the exact moment when it finally came to an end: the morning of 20 February 2014, when Russian troops illegally marched across the peninsula of Crimea. That was the moment when the work of writing Russian history once again became dangerous. Because that was the moment when the past and present collided, when the past became, once again, a blueprint for the present.

No historian of tragedy ever wants to find that their work has come to life

When I was researching the history of the Gulag in the Soviet archives in the 1990s, I assumed that this story belonged to the distant past.

When I wrote about the Soviet assault on Eastern Europe a few years later, I also thought that I was describing an era that had ended. And when I studied the history of the Ukrainian famine, the tragedy at the center of Stalin’s attempt to eradicate Ukraine as a nation, I did not imagine that this same kind of story would or could repeat itself in my lifetime. 

For those who’ve forgotten the invasion of Crimea, let me remind you what happened. The Russian soldiers who spread out across the peninsula traveled in unmarked vehicles, wearing uniforms without insignia. They took over government buildings, removed the local leaders, and barred them from their offices.

For several days afterward, the world was confused. Were these “separatists” who were staging an uprising? Were they “pro-Russian” Ukrainians? 

I was not confused. I knew that this was a Russian invasion of Crimea because it looked exactly like the Soviet invasion of Poland.

That invasion took place seventy years earlier, in 1944. It, too, featured Soviet soldiers wearing Polish uniforms, a Soviet-backed communist party pretending to speak for all Poles, a manipulated referendum, and a series of other acts of political fakery that were designed to confuse not only the people of Poland, but also Poland’s allies in London and Washington. 

And the invasion itself was only the beginning. After 2014, and then again after the full-scale invasion of February 2022, cruelly familiar patterns repeated themselves.

First in Crimea, then in Donetsk and Luhansk, then, during their occupations of Kharkiv, Kherson, Sumy, and Kyiv provinces, Russian soldiers treated ordinary Ukrainians as enemies and spies. They used random violence to terrorize people, at Bucha and elsewhere. 

They imprisoned civilians for minor offenses – the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle, for example – or sometimes for no reason at all. They built torture chambers, as well as filtration camps, which we could also call concentration camps.

They transformed cultural institutions, schools, and universities to suit the nationalist, imperialist ideology of the new regime. They kidnapped children, took them to Russia, and changed their identities, as the Nazis once did in Poland.

They stripped Ukrainians of everything that makes them human, that makes them vital, that makes them unique. 

In different languages, at different times, this kind of assault has had different names. We used to talk about Sovietization. Now we speak of Russification. There is a German word too: Gleichschaltung.

But whatever word you use, the process is the same. It means the imposition of arbitrary autocratic rule: a state without the rule of law, without guaranteed rights, without accountability, without checks and balances. It means the destruction of all stirrings, or survivals, or signs of the liberal democratic order. 

It means the construction of a regime, in Mussolini’s famous words, defined as totalitarian: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” 

In 2014, Russia was already on the way to becoming a totalitarian society, having launched two brutal wars in Chechnya, having murdered journalists and arrested critics. But after 2014, that process accelerated.

The Russian experience of occupation in Ukraine paved the way for harsher politics inside Russia itself. In the years after the Crimean invasion, opposition was repressed further, independent institutions were completely banned. Memorial, the unique historical and human rights group co-founded by Irina Scherbakova, was one of them. 

The deep connection between autocracy and imperial wars of conquest has a logic to it

Not that this connection is anything new. Two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant, in whose memory this prize lecture was created, also described the link between despotism and war. More than two millennia ago, Aristotle wrote that a tyrant is inclined “to foment wars in order to preserve his own monopoly of power.”

That same argument, and that same Aristotle quotation, featured in one of the pamphlets circulated in 1942, in this country, by the White Rose Society.

Also in the 20th century, Carl von Ossietzky, the German journalist and activist, became a fierce opponent of war, not least because of what it was doing to the culture of his own country. As he wrote in 1932:

“Nowhere is there as much belief in war as in Germany…nowhere are people more inclined to overlook its horrors and disregard its consequences, nowhere is soldiering celebrated more uncritically.” 

Since the invasion of Crimea in 2014, this same process of militarization, this same celebration of combat, has gripped Russia too. Russian schools now train small children to be soldiers.

Russian television encourages Russians to hate Ukrainians, to consider them subhuman. The Russian economy has been militarized: Some 40% of the national budget will now be spent on weapons.

To obtain missiles and ammunition, Russia now does deals with Iran and North Korea, two of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet. The constant talk of war in Ukraine has also normalized the idea of war in Russia, making other wars more likely. Russian leaders now speak casually of using nuclear weapons against their other neighbors and regularly threaten to invade them. 

As in Von Ossietzky’s Germany, criticism of the war is not merely discouraged in Russia. It is illegal. My friend Vladimir Kara-Murza made the brave decision in 2022 to return to Russia and speak out against the invasion from there. Why? Because he wanted the history books to record that someone opposed the war. He paid a very high price. He was arrested. His health deteriorated. He was often kept in isolation.

When he and others who had been unjustly imprisoned were finally released, in exchange for a group of Russian spies and criminals, including a murderer taken from a German prison, his captors hinted that he should be careful because, in the future, he might be poisoned. He had reason to believe them, since Russian secret policemen had already poisoned him twice.

But he was not entirely alone. Since 2018, more than 116,000 Russians have faced criminal or administrative punishment for speaking their minds. Thousands of them have been punished specifically for objecting to the war in Ukraine.

Their heroic battle is mostly carried out in silence. Because the regime has imposed total control over information in Russia, their voices cannot be heard.

But what about us? What about all of us here, gathered in this historic church, a place so closely connected to German democracy, to the German liberal tradition?

What about the rest of Europe – what should we do?

Our voices are not restrained or restricted. We are not jailed or poisoned for speaking our minds. How should we react to the revival of a form of government we thought had disappeared from this continent forever?

The occupation and destruction of eastern Ukraine is happening just a day’s drive by car from here, or a two-hour flight – or it would be a two-hour flight if the airports were open. Almost the same distance as London. 

In the early, emotional days of the war, many did join the chorus of support.

In 2022, as in 2014, Europeans again turned on their televisions to see scenes of a kind they knew only from history books. Women and children huddled at train stations, tanks rolling across fields, bombed-out cities. In that moment, many things suddenly felt clear.

Words quickly became actions. More than fifty countries joined a coalition to aid Ukraine, militarily and economically, an alliance built at unprecedented speed. I witnessed myself, in Kyiv, Odesa, and Kherson, the effect of food aid, military aid, and European support. It felt miraculous. But as the war continues, doubt has crept in, which is not surprising.

Since 2014, faith in democratic institutions and alliances has declined dramatically

Maybe our indifference to the invasion of Crimea played a larger role in this decline than we usually think. The decision to accelerate economic cooperation with Russia in the wake of the invasion certainly created both moral and financial corruption, as well as cynicism. That cynicism was then amplified by a Russian disinformation campaign, which we dismissed or ignored. 

Now, faced with the greatest challenge to our values and our interests in our time, the democratic world is starting to wobble. Many wish the fighting would somehow, magically, stop. Others want to change the subject to the Middle East, another horrific, tragic conflict, but one where we Europeans have far less influence, and almost no ability to shape events. A Hobbesian world makes many claims upon our resources of solidarity.

A deeper engagement with one tragedy does not denote indifference to other tragedies. We must do what we can where our actions will make a difference. 

Slowly, another group is gaining traction too, especially here in Germany. These are the people who do not support or condemn, but rather affect to stand above the argument – either believing or pretending to believe that it is a moral argument – and declare, “I want peace.” Some even call for peace by referring solemnly to the “lessons of German history.” 

As I am here today accepting a peace prize, this seems the right moment to point out that “I want peace” is not always a moral argument. This is also the right moment to say that the lesson of German history is not that Germans should be pacifists. 

On the contrary, we have known for nearly a century that a demand for pacifism in the face of an aggressive, advancing dictatorship can simply represent the appeasement and acceptance of that dictatorship. 

I am hardly the first person to point this out. In 1938, Thomas Mann, then already in exile, horrified by the situation in Germany and the complacency of the liberal democracies, denounced the “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.”

In 1942, after the Second World War had started, George Orwell condemned his compatriots who called upon Britain to stop fighting.

“Pacifism,” he wrote, “is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other.” 

In 1983, in this same church, Manes Sperber, the recipient of that year’s Peace Prize, also argued against the false morality of his era’s pacifists, who at that time wanted to disarm Germany and Europe in the face of the Soviet threat:

“Anyone,” he declared, “who believes and wants to make others believe that a Europe without weapons, neutral and capitulating, can ensure peace for the foreseeable future is mistaken and is misleading others.” 

I think we can use some of these words once again. Many of those in Germany and in Europe who now call for pacifism in the face of the Russian onslaught are indeed “objectively pro-Russian,” to use Orwell’s phrase.

Their arguments, if followed to their logical conclusion, mean that we should acquiesce to the military conquest of Ukraine, to the cultural destruction of Ukraine, to the construction of concentration camps in Ukraine, to the kidnapping of children in Ukraine. It means we should accept Gleichschaltung. 

We are nearly three years into this war – what would it have meant to plead for peace in early 1942? Those whom we praise now as the German resistance – did they just want peace? Or were they trying to achieve something more important? 

The magic of the phrase “never again” has blinded us to reality before. In the weeks before the invasion in February 2022, Germany, like many other European nations, found war so impossible to imagine that the German government refused to supply Ukraine with weapons.

And yet here is the irony: had Germany and the rest of NATO supplied Ukraine with those weapons well in advance, maybe we could have deterred the invasion. Maybe it would never have happened. Perhaps this too was, in Thomas Mann’s words again, “a form of pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.” 

But let me repeat again: Mann loathed the war, as well as the regime that promoted it. Orwell hated militarism. Sperber and his family were themselves refugees from war. Yet it was because they hated war with such passion, and because they understood the link between war and dictatorship, that they argued in favor of defending the liberal societies they treasured. 

In 1937, Mann called for “a militant humanism, conscious of its vitality and inspired by the knowledge that fanatics without shame or doubt must not be allowed to exploit and lay waste the principles of freedom, patience, skepticism.”

Orwell wrote that “to survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.” 

As for Sperber, he declared in 1983 that “we old Europeans, who abhor war, unfortunately have to become dangerous ourselves in order to keep the peace.”  

I am quoting all of these old words and speeches in order to convince you that the challenges we are facing are not as new as they seem. We have been here before, which is why the words of our liberal democratic predecessors speak to us.

European liberal societies have been confronted by aggressive dictatorships before. We have fought against them before. We can do so again. And this time, Germany is one of the liberal societies that can lead the fight.

To prevent the Russians from spreading their autocratic political system further, we must help the Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine.

The impact will be felt on our continent and around the world. Not just in Ukraine but in Ukraine’s neighbors, in Georgia, in Moldova, in Belarus. And not just in Russia, but among Russia’s allies: in China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea. 

The challenge is not only military. This is also a battle against hopelessness, against pessimism, and even against the creeping appeal of autocratic rule, which is also sometimes disguised beneath the false language of “peace.”

The idea that autocracy is safe and stable, that democracies cause war, that autocracies protect some form of traditional values, while democracies are degenerate – this language is also coming from Russia and the broader autocratic world, as well as from those inside our own societies who are prepared to accept as inevitable the blood and destruction inflicted by the Russian state.

Those who accept the erasure of other people’s democracies are less likely to fight against the erasure of their own democracy. Complacency, like a virus, moves quickly across borders.

The temptation of pessimism is real. In the face of what feels like an endless war and an onslaught of propaganda, it is easier just to accept the idea of decline. But let’s remember what’s at stake, what the Ukrainians are fighting for – and it is they, not us, who are doing the actual fighting.

They are fighting for a society, like ours, where independent courts protect people from arbitrary violence; where the rights to thought, speech, and assembly are guaranteed; where citizens are free to engage in public life, and not frightened of the consequences; where security is guaranteed by a broad alliance of democracies and prosperity is anchored by the European Union. 

Autocrats like the Russian president hate all these principles because they threaten their power. Independent judges can hold rulers to account. A free press can expose high-level corruption. A political system that empowers citizens allows them to change their leaders. International organizations can enforce the rule of law.

That is why the propagandists of autocratic regimes will do what they can to undermine the language of liberalism and the institutions that guard our freedoms, to mock them and to belittle them, inside their own countries and in ours as well. 

I understand that for Germans, it is a new experience to be asked for help, to be called upon to provide weapons to be used against an aggressive military power. But this is the true lesson of German history: not that Germans should never fight, but that Germans have a special responsibility to stand up and take risks for freedom.

All of us in the democratic world, not just Germans, have been trained to be critical and skeptical of our own leaders and of our own societies, so it can feel awkward when we are asked to defend our most fundamental principles. But please hear me: don’t let skepticism decline into nihilism. We, in the rest of the democratic world, need you. 

In the face of an ugly, aggressive dictatorship on our continent, our principles, our ideals, and the alliances we have built around them are our most powerful weapons. Against the resurgence of authoritarianism, we in the democratic world are natural comrades.

And so we must now affirm – and act upon – our shared belief that the future can be better, that the war can be won, and that dictatorship can be defeated once again; our shared belief that freedom is possible, and that true peace is possible, on this continent and around the world. 

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, historian, and journalist of the American-Polish descent, renowned for her expertise in the Eastern European history and critical analyses of authoritarian regimes. Applebaum’s notable works include Gulag: A History, Iron Curtain, and Red Famine, which delve into totalitarianism and its impacts.

Editor’s note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press’ editorial team may or may not share them.

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