“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell, “1984”
When the 105-day war ended, almost 400,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed or wounded or were missing. The Kremlin reported minor losses. Vladimir Putin, a Stalin admirer, should have studied the actual past that Stalin falsified.
Stalin began the Winter War, a.k.a. the Russo-Finnish War, on Nov. 30, 1939, as his then-ally Adolf Hitler had begun World War II in Europe three months earlier: by staging a fraudulent border incident. Stalin, dictator of a nation of 170 million, expected to quickly subdue Finland, a nation of 3.5 million.
When Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, his troops were told to pack dress uniforms. There would be a victory parade a few days later in Kyiv. In “The Winter Warriors,” a just-published novel by Olivier Norek, Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s close aide, tells a Red Army colonel that Stalin wants to celebrate his next birthday on the steps of Finland’s Parliament, “in precisely 20 days.” A Soviet general had told Stalin 10 days should suffice.
The war ended on March 13, 1940. The Soviet Union settled for about 10 percent of Finland’s territory.
As the fifth year of Russia’s war to subdue Ukraine approaches, Putin has learned that the past is easier to control than the present. He has a grim future if the United States and Europe press their advantages.
A much-diminished Russia occupies just 20 percent of Ukrainian territory that Kyiv controlled four Februarys ago. Europe, which has not yet even completely weaned itself from Russian energy, is at least accustoming itself to the vocabulary of military seriousness.
In 2024, every Swedish household received a booklet stating: “From the year you turn 16 until the end of the year you turn 70, you are part of Sweden’s total defence and required to serve in the event of war or the threat of war.” Finland and Norway have long had military conscription. Other nations are preparing infrastructures for mobilization. Donald Trump has endorsed legislation that would provide crushing economic penalties for nations that buy Russian oil.
Last year, Putin would not — crippled by his Ukraine misadventure, he could not — try to rescue his client regime in Syria as it was being swept away. Iran’s regime, Putin’s most important ally other than China, is preoccupied with suppressing Iranians. Putin’s only sympathizer in the European Union, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, might now have firmer support among American authoritarians (“national conservatives”) than among Hungarians.
Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine (calling it a war can mean imprisonment) has lasted longer than Russia’s involvement in World War II. By now, Putin has surely defined success down: a negotiated armistice that provides Ukraine with security “guarantees” even more gossamer than those of the infamous 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
In it, Ukraine agreed to give up the almost 2,000 Soviet-era nuclear weapons (and ballistic missiles and strategic bombers) stationed on its soil. Russia gave “assurances” that it would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” and would “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Russia seized Crimea in 2014, and invaded Ukraine eight years later.
Choices by Ukraine’s friends can deliver condign punishment to Putin for his Ukrainian blunder. These friends can at last choose to fund Ukraine with the approximately $300 billion in frozen Russian assets. They can intensify interdiction of the shadow fleet of tankers getting Russian oil to foreign buyers. And they can deny Putin a veto over security guarantees for Ukraine, including permanent troop deployments there. Otherwise, any agreement will be a sizzling fuse.
In Norek’s novel, before Russia attacked, Molotov explained that negotiations with Finland “have never been anything but a long fuse.” And if Finland accepts Soviet demands, “We’ll only ask for more until we’ve taken the whole country.” Today’s Stalinist in the Kremlin is no sphinx.
Writing in Foreign Affairs (“Russia’s Descent Into Tyranny”), Nina Khrushcheva of the New School reports that in 2023, “1984,” George Orwell’s dystopian novel about a regime resting on mass surveillance and incessant propaganda, was, according to a Russian bookstore chain, its most stolen book.
In the first half of 2025, the most stolen item was the Russian constitution, which guarantees free speech and forbids censorship. Hence, a Russian joke: “We read Orwell for his reflection of reality, and the constitution as a beautiful utopia.” Negotiate accordingly.
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