Are the Russian people to blame?

Not according to Gérard Depardieu, French actor and Russian citizen. “The Russian people are not responsible for the crazy, unacceptable excesses of their leaders like Vladimir Putin,” he said.

Old Gérard received his Russian passport in 2013, from Putin personally. The two men hugged and kissed (no tongues, I believe), with Depardieu describing Putin’s fiefdom as a “great democracy.”

When the great democracy pounced on Ukrainian territory in 2014, the nouveau Russian Gérard saw nothing wrong with that. Then again, even as a young man, Depardieu was regarded even by his fellow actors as daft, which is no mean achievement considering the overall intellectual standard of that profession. And that was before a steady diet of five bottles of wine a day made heavy inroads on his meagre mental faculties.

Yet he has clearly retained an ability to find out what the current mots justes are and to regurgitate them to a wide audience. On second thoughts, even more accomplished men than him repeat the same lazy platitude ad infinitum: “The Russian people are just lovely. Shame about Putin though.”

However, it’s not Putin who’s aiming bombs and shells at residential areas. It’s Russian people, serving as pilots or artillery men.

It’s not Putin who’s laughingly shooting civilians, just for the hell of it. It’s Russian people, dressed as soldiers.

It’s not Putin who’s raping Ukrainian women. It’s Russian people, forming raping gangs in the communal spirit of which their nation is so proud.

It’s not Putin who’s looting people’s houses, and, as numerous phone intercepts show, even taking orders from home: “Vania, see if you can score a tape recorder [fur coat, some nice jewellery, camera].”

The grandfathers of these soldiers didn’t have the luxury of non-stop communications with their families. When they looted their way through Eastern Europe and then Germany, they had to rely on their own tastes. Now their descendants can steal to order.

It’s not even Putin who ordered them to murder, maraud and rape – it’s possible no one did. And if some such orders were issued, they came from NCOs, lieutenants, captains – Russian people.

Neither have Putin’s propagandists told them it was fine to murder civilians, then boobytrap their corpses and leave them to rot by the roadside. We’ll come to those infernal propagandists later. But suffice it to say now that none of them is a match for their Stalin equivalent, Ilya Ehrenburg.

When Russian troops were moving into Germany, that future darling of the Soviet intelligentsia was publishing one incendiary article after another, explicitly giving Red Army soldiers a licence to kill, rape and rob civilians.

Since the nation had only been infected with the communist syphilis 14 years before the war started, young Russians still had some decency left, enough to need a ringing endorsement of satanic behaviour from a figure of authority. Today’s lot have been exposed to the same contagion (in different variants) for over a century, so they don’t need anyone’s permission.

The Nuremberg Trials, a travesty of justice though they were in many respects, established a useful legal principle: it’s not only someone who gives a criminal order who commits a crime, but also someone who obeys it.

The same should go for the culpability of both the producers of criminal propaganda and the willing consumers of it. And here we have to go beyond those thousands of Russians who cut a swathe through the Ukraine, murdering, raping and looting. Here we have to talk about the Russian people in general, mutatis mutandis.

This tagged-on disclaimer covers those thousands of heroic Russians who protest against the war, bravely facing police truncheons, torture and possible prison terms. Then there are perhaps a million or two who don’t have the courage to come out, but who do have the mind and moral sense to detest Putin’s regime and everything it represents.

Yet these – and believe me, I hate to be writing this – are only the kind of exceptions that prove the rule. For throughout its history, but especially over the past century, the Russian nation has been not just willing but eager to delegate its mind and moral sense to the Leader, whatever title he holds.

That has wasted the advantage of being fully human – a thinking moral agent endowed with free will. It also precludes any possibility of creating, or even adopting, a true civilisation, as distinct from a loose, herd-like association of dehumanised, brutalised people all too ready both to submit to violence and to mete it out.

As the first Russian philosopher, Chaadayev, wrote almost 200 hundred years ago, “We [the Russians] belong to those who are not an integral part of humanity but exist only to teach the world some type of great lesson.” In how not to do things.

Roughly at the same time, one of Russia’s greatest poets, Lermontov, described Russia as a “land of masters, land of slaves”. Nothing has changed since then, certainly not for the better. And nor does the existence of Chaadayev, Lermontov and a few hundred other great poets, thinkers, novelists and composers disprove the characterisation of Russia as a thoroughly barbaric land, devoid of any civilisational bonds and restraints.

For a culture, defined as something produced for few by fewer, can happily coexist with mass barbarism. One can even go so far as to suggest that culture and civilisation are often antithetical.

Unlike a culture, a civilisation has to include the whole society, not just its intellectual elite. Even people who have no ear for music, no eye for painting, no talent for writing and no brain to think about serious matters independently must still be united by the ethos of their civilisation. That’s its function, which in Russia has always gone begging.

Hence the Russians are so willing to salute any red, brown or black flag run up the pole by evil ghouls. They lack a civilisational cut-off valve to be activated whenever they are exposed to cosmically wicked nonsense.

Hence, when evil men like Putin and his army of propagandists tell them for twenty years, day and night, that they are superior to everyone else not because of any individual achievement, but because they are Russians, they jump up and salute.

When told that, though Ukrainians and Russians are the same, identical people in every respect, the former are creating biological weapons to kill the latter selectively, they believe every word.

When told that Ukrainians must be saved from their Nazi oppressors, they go out to murder Ukrainians and level their cities as a way of saving them.

So yes, the general who orders carpet bombing of a city is guiltier than the pilot who releases the bombs. And those thousands of propagandists who have pumped nothing but poisonous grime into people’s heads, not so much washing their brains as amputating them, are more criminal than a silly lad who believed them. And yes, the butcher in the Kremlin (or rather in the bunker) is the criminal of all criminals.

But if we repeat Depardieu’s drivel about the nasty Putin and gorgeous Russian people, we debauch the very idea of humanity – at least the idea that formed our, great civilisation. The idea that the words ‘human’ and ‘free moral agent’ are synonymous. Fully and invariably.

P.S. -3C and snow in London tonight. Where art thou, global warming?