John Frederick Bailyn is a Linguistics professor at Stony Brook, the state University of New York, and beyond research and teaching in Linguistics, he has worked since the 1980s to bring people together from different backgrounds, countries, faiths, classes, and nationalities, especially Russians and Americans. Professor Bailyn lives between New York and St. Petersburg, which he considers his second home. The recent events in Ukraine left him deeply shaken and disappointed.
In our search for the voices of reason with regards to the war in Ukraine, we interviewed the eminent American slavist, who speaks from his personal and professional experience about the proportions of this catastrophe and the implications for ordinary people in Ukraine and Russia.
"I have lived half my life in Russia since 1983, I studied in the pre-Gorbachev USSR, and I taught and gave lectures as recently as 2019, until Covid. Nothing had ever been like the last 10 days. The only possible analogy in the natural world is a once-in-a-century tsunami. No warning, absolute isolation in the blink of an eye. That changes so much in everyday life", says professor Bailyn.
BUKA: What are your thoughts and feelings about the Russian aggression against Ukraine?
I am appalled, shocked and sickened by it. I consider it a war crime of monstrous proportions. The brutal attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, the wanton destruction of cities and towns, the overt attempt at general annihilation, the use of banned weapons, the attack on nuclear facilities, are unjustified by any considerations of historical context, and this is from someone who took to the streets to protest both the US invasion of Iraq and the NATO bombing of Serbia.
The invasion will kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, displace millions, and entirely destroy most of the infrastructure and cultural heritage of an entirely sovereign country. There is indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, including innocent children. There is zero justification for such atrocities These actions are obviously violations of the Geneva Convention and are war crimes on a scale that the world has not seen since WW2. Even the best informed experts, and apparently even Putin's own generals and inner circle, did not think he would really go through with this – at least not the scale of the invasion, and the kinds of atrocities involved. Anyone with a shred of human decency, regardless of political views and affiliations, should stand against this insanity.
BUKA: What is your understanding of the background of this war?
Here I think we have to be incredibly careful and not to fall into inevitability – or conspiracy – narratives about what has happened. My father was a historian of the American Revolution and one of the things that he was known for was his ability to understand the chaos and complexity of events from the inside and crucially not to allow their history to be written from the point of view of the victors, or from the point of view of existing narratives taken from another time or another context. And this is what I think is happening here in both of the two opposing narratives about this conflict.
The most common narrative is that what we are seeing is a natural and inevitable result of the Russian system that developed under Vladimir Putin. The logic goes like this "Putin is authoritarian, Putin tolerates little or no dissent or political opposition, Putin will never give up power, Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire, and therefore it was inevitable that we would end up where we are today." End of discussion. Now, don't misunderstand me, I agree with most of the premises – he is certainly authoritarian – much more today than even two weeks ago – and tolerates essentially no opposition – nobody can seriously deny that. But the last step, the one about inevitability, seems to me misguided. We identify unacceptable authoritarianism, and we use it to explain everything as stemming from it But nothing is inevitable. The Putin system, whether run by him alone or a small inner circle – another question only to be answered much later by historians – undemocratic as it has been for a long time, still did not have to end up undertaking a barbaric invasion of Ukraine, unjustified by anything but the crazed paranoid extension of a deeply misguided worldview, coupled with highly centralized power and, frankly, some sort of apparent dementia or other psychological break. How this happened is as much a question for psychiatrists as historians.
By all accounts, his inner circle didn't know whether he was going to go through with it. The oligarchs didn't know. The army didn't know. The hackers didn't know. It looks like he himself did not know if he was going to go through with it until the very end. History will determine the degree to which that's true but it doesn't really matter now. He did it, apparently in an extremely dysfunctional and poorly-planned fashion, from a military point of view – which also speaks to some sort of mental dysfunction, one thing he always was in the past was meticulous, and highly rational, in his ruthless way, as Condoleeza Rice recently pointed out. This is entirely irrational – politically, economically, morally, historically.
Sadly, his response to his army's own incompetence has been to double down, to raise the level of cruelty and destruction to an unspeakable level. His irrationality has also been increased by abject failure and increased isolation. He's like a wounded animal now, and will only continue to destroy, destroy, destroy this entirely fictional enemy that his imagination, together with all the accompanying nationalistic propaganda, has essentially created – now the Ukrainians are drug addicts and Nazis also, not just the seat of NATO expansion.
So, my explanation is not inevitability, but rather that Putin's mental state deteriorated, allowing his distorted historical mythology to take a sudden turn in the direction of a deranged, vindictive, animalistic narrative, and although the seeds of some of that were always there, that doesn't mean that it had to turn out like this. He is in an alternate reality now, and can no longer be considered a rational actor. It is entirely unclear what will happen now, but I agree with Gary Kasparov that it depends more on the people around Putin than on Putin himself. Sadly, terrifyingly, he appears to be a lost cause. We can argue later about whether he was always like that, but he surely is now. This is why occasionally changing one's president is always a good idea.
The opposite, supporting, narrative revolves around western-US-NATO culpability in hardening Putin's position and that of the elites and establishment. Personally, I remember clearly in the Yeltsin years, the early and mid-1990s, sharing the concern of a minority of academic and political voices that NATO's very continued existence and later expansion was detrimental to the stability of what we thought was a new world order after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise the Soviet union. The idea is that somehow Russians hand is being forced by the encroachment of American and western influence in the neighboring countries of the former Soviet Union. Any good authoritarian needs a viable enemy to position his country's problems against. Some of those concerns are viable, and I always took the side of Steven Cohen against the typical Russia-demonizing US establishment, because American exceptionalism involves some self-righteousness and because the US foreign wars in my adult lifetime – Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq – are to me all unjustifiable and some involved clear war crimes, like torture, indiscriminate bombings and so on. But that doesn't matter now. This is just competition to be worse than someone else. This narrative also invokes inevitability – that NATO expansion must lead to conflict that American exceptiоnalism and foreign wars must beget similar things from the other superpower. I don't buy it. The issue of Russia's security concerns is complex. If they presented them in good faith, seeking diplomatic solutions, things could have gone differently,
The Iraq war was also an abominable unjustified invasion by a superpower, and I condemned it at the time, and still do. NATO bombing of Serbia and US invasion-of Afghanistan were more ambiguous, but I was against both. And from what I know about Vietnam and Central America interference, those were also illegal actions under international law, that led to lots of death and suffering. and so on, but none of them justify this nightmare. And because there are kernels of truth in this, and because the transition from the Soviet system to a capitalist modern world was a bumpy road to say the least, it is easy to see how nationalistic othering of the West and its apparent march eastwards into Russia's direct sphere of influence, could be taken as a threat, or at least a humiliation. But it is essentially a whataboutism argument and those are belligerent and essentially irrational. It becomes a form of revenge, and revenge is something we should try to learn to get beyond. Whataboutism is the enemy of peace and unity.
BUKA: You have a lot of friends and colleagues in Russia, how is all this affecting Russian people?
A wide range of very strong reactions, from shock, to anger, to disbelief, to fear, to panic, to denial, to shame. Lots of people have lost their jobs – anything connected with any western entities which in the modern high tech urban world is pretty much everything, one way or another. The money people have has lost most of its value. Almost all western companies have pulled out, from Netflix, to Adidas, to Apple, to Levi's. These are global cultural commercial icons – highly popular from China to Venezuela, regardless of basic political system. Gone. Everything. Even more so in terms of business investments. We can debate whether that's the right move, but its effect on the Russian people is immediate and entirely out of the blue. I have lived half my life in Russia since 1983, I studied in the pre-Gorbachev USSR, and I taught and gave lectures as recently as 2019, until Covid. Nothing had ever been like the last 10 days. The only possible analogy in the natural world is a once-in-a-century tsunami. No warning, absolute isolation in the blink of an eye. That changes so much in everyday life, and people know it.
There are so many examples, I don't know where it is useful to start, so I'll talk about what I know best – academia. Universities are forcing academics to cut ties with all foreign colleagues, when they were just last year still dispensing huge mega-grants for the creation of international research laboratories, and paying higher salaries to faculty with publications in ranked Western journals. Administrations are giving the security forces the names of students who participate in demonstrations and instituting "patriotism" courses. It feels more like the transition from the USA to Gilead in the handmaid's Tale than anything we know from actual 20th or 21st- century politics. Our western anti-Russian biases again seek continuity here, inevitability, but there really isn't any. This is a society that has been cut off from almost the entire globalized world, and their leadership has simultaneously gone mad. The only open debate is one of chicken and egg and I think it's a false debate. People should be debating how to get rid of this regime. I have never been for regime change, but nothing like this has happened in my experience. I don't see any other way to stop this war I don't have a proposal for it, no one does, and the outcome is unknown. Scary but true. But it does seem that old-style negotiation is hopeless. He will continue as long as he is in power. And so many people will die. I would be fine with almost any viable solution. Don't see any other than Putin, somehow, losing power – be it in a coup, or being struck by lightning.
Local people are totally aware that life as they knew it has changed forever. They might not get accurate news about the war, and many people accept the official line that what's happening is a basic humanitarian special operation, but they know perfectly well that something is very, very, very wrong. Nothing is left of the ties to the outside world that have always been there, predating even the end of the USSR, such as student exchange and academic cooperation. And the changes have taken place in about 7-10 days. I was just there in mid-January for three weeks! The place was thriving. New trans-national food courts, amazing restaurants and cafes, huge shopping centers, nice smartphones, unrestricted internet, flights all the time to every tourist destination in the world. I was at a massive technology store and bought all sorts of home office stuff – including some fancy Macbook adapters directly sold by Apple – once I couldn't even order on Amazon without a delay – and a nice Samsung computer monitor chosen from the same range you'd find at Best Buy – Samsung or LC or SONY or some local brands. dozens of options. Gone. Ikea – gone. Zara – gone.
Of course, I suspect it's not as changed as all this makes it sound. There are still concerts and cafes and people out and about. But so much of this is entirely new, and with the ruble crashing, it's going to get worse. And no, it won't cause a revolution. It will just suck. Life will be much harder and a bit more dangerous. And no one will be able to travel out of the country – which is fine, it's a big beautiful place all of its own – and other internationally-oriented people have just seen all their plans and activities and opportunities turned entirely upside down. So something must be wrong. And you can't miss it. The sports bans are something no one there has seen before. Flights to every city in the world from Moscow's three huge airports. Almost every single major international commercial company was there. Now, none are. They are now as culturally and economically isolated as North Korea where two weeks ago they were indistinguishable in what the shops and markets and online services as any other country. the internet was wide open. Not any more. The entire internet is set to be simply "shut down" this week. That's as crazy a change for people as if it were to happen in New York City. Cutting the global internet in Moscow? What kind of hallucination are we having? So, everyone can smell the coffee, and that's not political. It's just instinctive. They aren't analyzing it, they just know that the nose of the plane is headed straight down, economically, and in terms of repression, and they are looking at what it means for their future. Many people with any foreign ties, experience abroad, maybe some language skills, relative freedom of movement, have already fled or are planning to as soon as it works out, I know dozens of such cases – people who had full-time jobs, owned apartments, had lived their whole lives in St Petersburg, in on or two days packed a suitcase, said goodbye possibly forever to their family and friends, and got the first flight they could – to Dubai, to Istanbul, or to Yerevan, all that's left, to figure out the entire rest of their life after they got there. Unimaginable. But what about families with kids with elderly relatives without language skills or connections outside the country. Terrible. On the other hand, it's not immediately life and death like for the true victims in Ukraine. So many will simply adjust, that's what humans do, continue working and traveling and having birthday parties for their children. And they'll be fine. But life will never be the same.
There's an incredible series of short statements from cultural figures across the spectrum of Russian life, and they should be read. The primary feeling they feel is shame, along with shock and anger. They are cultural figures who travel extensively so they know exactly what has happened. And they are appalled.
BUKA: There are reports about antiwar sentiment among Russians from all walks of life? Is this your impression as well?
Yes. Very much so. However, this is hotly debated right now. My personal impression is that there are many, many people who never objected to anything Putin did, who tacitly or overtly supported the Crimea annexation – "historical reunion" as they saw it – but who are deeply shocked and appalled by this. That is why the authorities have to cut off the flow of information – of course on some level they'd rather not, they know the consequences, but they have no choice. If the normal internet, radio, and newspaper sources remained, they'd lose public support very rapidly, even if they continued to brutally repress all demonstrations. They have to cut it off fast because it doesn't take long to go from patriotism to disgust and shame at what your government is doing if you have enough information, but it will happen more and more – the information is out there.
It's very hard to judge the extent of this, since it is not immediately visible because of fear of reprisals and lack of information. Hopeless optimists like me see the greatest significance in the stories of many people who are totally against this but were not against anything before – and I know lots of such cases – while others see deeper significance in those who still support their government and their President. A natural thing to do, under normal circumstances. But no one can deny that very few people would themselves have argued before all this exploded for a full invasion of Ukraine, not some tiny disputed pseudo-separatist enclaves, but an invasion, with massive Grozny-style attacks on Kharkiv and Kyiv. Why would such insanity ever even occur to anyone? There are tens of thousands of mixed Russian-Ukrainian families, long traditions of movement, small and large, between the countries, for vacations, for work, for families, and only a tiny fraction of Ukrainians with anything against their neighbors. They have close ties, lots of history and also a healthy disinterest – Ukraine like any other country, was involved in its own development, its own highly deep and complex culture, its civil institutions, and its political landscape. And then, for no sane reason, a nuclear-armed superpower masses its forces at their border, with official rhetoric grunting complaints about historical grievances, and without even informing its own soldiers what was happening, just launches an indiscriminate attack, mostly from artillery, against peaceful civilian populations. How can that not create extreme anti-war sentiment? If people know about it.
As for those without anti-war sentiment, the polls say it's generational, but I don't think it's generational for any direct reason other than the effects of lack of facility with technology. My daughter is eleven and she blows me away on app usage and social media awareness. If I had to depend on her apps knowledge to get any actual news, I would also be in the dark. And if you added to that hypothetical that the only newspaper or TV sources were like Fox News you get a lot of people who aren't anti-war, because they don't know there is a damn war. It's a criminal offense now to even call it a "war" or an "invasion", those words have been criminalized. The words 'war" and "invasion" are now criminal offenses. That's so far beyond anything people there have ever experienced – or most other places too. I still can't wrap my head around it.
BUKA: Also, there are reports about arrests and repression against the protesters? Do you have any knowledge of this?
Yes, it's quite brutal – beatings, indefinite detentions, rumors of torture, There's all sorts of documentation of it. DOXA, Avtozak Live, Protestnyj MGU, all on Telegram. Of course, repression of protests is not at all new – it was already common in previous circumstances, especially going back to the White Ribbon protests in 2012 on the heels of the Arab Spring, when the numbers were large in Moscow at least and there wasn't a lot of lower-level street repression. They later prosecuted many of the leaders there and gave them long prison sentences and the opposition movement started to be whittled away. But still, people came out like crazy most notably in January and February 2021 when Navalny returned from Germany and was imprisoned. Those were widespread protests and the crackdowns were brutal. Lots of beatings, and indefinite detentions, and short prison sentences. But now the stakes are much higher because they've institutionalized it with new laws that go way beyond anything before so people can now get long jail sentences for just minor dissent, and all independent press – of which there was a lot, despite foreign agent labels etc. -Famous outlets like Echo of Moscow, Novaya Gazeta, whose editor recently won the Nobel Peace prize, have either been shut down or declared themselves disbanded because the new laws that would lead to up to 15 years in jail. People have families. they're not going to risk it. The playing field has changed in this area too, but not as abruptly as with censorship, which was practically nonexistent. There was tons of state propaganda – bad enough – but there were plenty of other sources too. No longer.
BUKA: You have dedicated your life to building bridges between the two nations with a history of Cold War, and now this… You must be so disappointed…
Devastated. But so much more worried about the murder of innocent civilians. That is what I am concerned about, along with repression in Russia. But yes, there is deep grief inside – I have lost my second home entirely. I might be able to see my apartment again, and I hope the people I love, but it will never be the same.
Many bad things have happened in my lifetime, but this is entirely different scale. At least for man-made tragedies, as opposed to natural disasters such as the Indonesian Tsunami or covid. They are tragedies of massive scale, but in some sense were not avoidable. This involves deliberate acts of murder and destruction without justification that did not have to happen.
BUKA: There is obviously war propaganda on both sides, do you agree?
I suppose there is in any war. And I can't judge the extent of the Ukrainian propaganda. I don't like the idea that they ban Russian news sources. In this, I agree, oddly, with Elon Musk, when he apologized for being an all-out freedom of speech supporter. I think the Ukrainians should listen to this – If they don't let the Russian news stations play, it would only discredit them.
But it is a totally false equivalency. It is totally clear that Ukraine has a free press, free internet access, lively political debate. elections – like Zelensky's – that aren't predetermined. And I don't think they have the money to bankroll massive government-trained troll factories, but who knows? If they're good at it, we wouldn't know. But that's not the point – the point is the availability of free access to information. And there is absolutely no similarity at all. And it just became even more stark of a difference.
BUKA: What is the prevailing sentiment in the US regarding the American engagement in the conflict?
Public opinion, which as you know is always split almost in half in this country, is remarkably unified here. Almost everyone is on Ukraine's side. I just compared MSNBC to FOX NEWS reports on this, and until he got to the part of attacking Joe Biden's oil import policies, Sean Hannity – Trump confident and totally right-wing FOX news prime time anchor – was showing exactly the same horrific clips of innocent Ukrainian civilians being killed as were being shown on MSNBC and CNN. That almost never happens!
People aren't sure what to do – no one sane will propose simply joining a hot war against a nuclear power with an unstable leader – but the vast majority are with Ukraine, and rightly so. as is most of the rest of the world. There just isn't a lot to debate here. It's murderous, immoral, and entirely unjustified. I think most people would agree with that, Unity on this is remarkable. But I actually think that's just because this is so far over the line of any kind of normalcy, across a wide range of political views, that any other sentiment would be surprising.
BUKA: What do you think about the canceling of Russian artists, sportsmen and others?
This one is very very tricky. Basically, I am against it. I think that it's counterproductive and dangerous, and feeds a demonization narrative that we had plenty of before. And those things lead to future wars. Canceling Olympic athletes for doping, if they truly failed the drug tests, is one thing, and in a war situation, possibly canceling some artists who speak out strongly in favor of the invasion – such as world-famous Mariinsky theater conductor Valery Gergiev, just removed from the Munich opera – or sanctioning the athlete who wore the military Z symbol at the podium. In those cases, possibly, but only if the criteria are clear. But more broadly, absolutely not – it just becomes a target of anger, revenge, displaced punishment for the actions of the government against cultural figures who are just as appalled as the rest of us are.
But overreach in these things is already happening – the state of NY says all its entities, including the University I teach at, must not make direct payments to Russian entities. That's ok, given that it follows from existing US sanctions, as a state entity, they have to implement something like that to be in line with sanctions. But the State University administration would like to take it much further, pushing for cutting all ties with one's Russian colleagues and their institutions, some of which have developed over decades, and involve tightly connected research. That's overreach. and it is going to be a problem.
In my particular field, theoretical linguistics, two of the best Russian syntacticians in the world are both based at Moscow state institutions where I have visited, lectured, and interacted. I am a much better linguist than I would be without those interactions. I have worked with their students and colleagues, and there have been hundreds of brilliant Russian linguistics and Cultural Studies students in the summer program I co-directed in St Petersburg for 17 years, until covid. Many went on to western PhD programs and are now leading the next generation. Without these folk, Linguistics as a field will suffer if they are cut off, and it seems almost inevitable they will be. Without interaction, they will still do well, it's a big country with strong academic institutions and traditions. But they run the risk of becoming so politicized that anything but the natural sciences will be essentially marginalized. Isolation is not conducive to freedom of expression, creative dialogue, and inevitably their own status on the field they are traditionally strong in will start to decline. And if as individuals they are in an economic crater, cultural and scientific spheres will start to suffer as people try to survive. Slavic studies itself is more complicated, because of its problematic historical focus on Russia at the expense of other Slavic cultures. I have objected to that bias for as long as I can remember, and now we will finally see that change, but possibly for the wrong reasons.
Of course, I am not a disinterested party in this – I know Russian artists and sportsmen really well, some personally, and many culturally, it's my second home after all, so I follow them, naturally. I know some of the country's leading artists, and I know how appalled they are. Should we be canceling them? I don't think so. I am also a huge sports fan. One of my passions is soccer, football, which I played from age 6 to well into my 50s. And coached. and followed – having traveled to the last 4 world cups – Germany, South, Africa, Brazil and most recently Russia. The 2018 World Cup in Russia was a fantastic international event. I attended 11 matches in 7 cities over an incredible month. I was in Sochi at one of the World Cup's greatest matches – a quarter-final where Croatia beat Russia on penalty shots that saw both teams score in overtime, after which Russian and Croatian fans sang songs together and toasted each other on the Black sea boardwalks. I saw Iranians and Egyptians and Nigerians and Russians arm in arm roaming together around small thousand-year-old Volga towns. There was no significant abusive behavior by police, a snapshot of what many thought was the more open and international Russia of the near future. And we are talking about 2018, a very short time ago. The seeds of healthy international cultural cooperation are stil there and we should encourage them. That's the best preventive medicine for future misunderstandings.
What we should do is support academics, cultural figures, athletes who are against these atrocities, which I think is most of them. If they come out in support of the invasion, I could see temporarily barring them from competing or performing. But just because they hold a Russian passport, why should they be banned? I don't recall being prevented from traveling during the Iraq war, including to countries like Russia that were strongly against our invasion of Iraq. They didn't take it out on me and I don't think we can conflate individuals with their government as long as we have a system of nation-states. There is a tacit contract between individuals and their governments – support in exchange for basic services, disaster relief, education, health etc. and we prefer democracy because we feel it provides some recourse if the authorities break the contract.
BUKA: Do you have a message that you would like to convey to our readers?
A couple:
Nothing matters more than the lived experiences of people who are actually inside this nightmare. Ukrainians fleeing or surviving in cities under siege, Russians under severe repression. Their stories are what matter – analysis can come later. Anyone without lived experience, with very few exceptions, does not understand the full situation. Be very skeptical about pundits and analysis without lived experience. Anyone who tells you they know how this ends doesn't know what they are talking about. Anyone who tells you they know exactly how and why we got here, is also probably oversimplifying things, or buying into existing narratives. Try to avoid predetermining what you think about something when listening to or reading about lived experiences. Fight against whataboutism!
Many Russians are appalled and ashamed and cannot believe this is happening. Many of the ones who aren't may genuinely not know what is happening. – propaganda and censorship work. Unfortunately. We shouldn't conflate a people with the actions of its government. Blaming or canceling Russian citizens because of this, if they are not overt supporters, is essentially blaming other victims of the Russian government.