If you imagine the greatly increased number of commentators on Russia over the past year like a marketplace, then you will find: hawkers who replaced their Russian lacquer bowls with blue and yellow flags at lightning speed on 24 February last year; smart, often younger providers of specialist knowledge; the tank sellers who are preparing their now-empty stand for fighter jets; Vendors behind rummage tables with Russia and Putin kitsch; media speaking circles, which are better passed quickly; and there is Gerd Koenen.

Sketches or preliminary studies are not available with him. His profession is painting. The large tableau is created in sweeping, artistically guided brushstrokes. As in his latest book, although its content is not entirely new, because it contains essays already published in addition to some texts written for it.

According to Koenen, thinking about the last thirty years Russia does not mean analyzing, but tracing the madness of the war and the Putin regime. Thought today, withered tomorrow, he openly admits this danger, especially since the situation can change every day. In the F.A.Z., too, he slammed the sleepy caps in the SPD for their failed Russia policy. One would almost have forgotten that for many years the chancellor was called Angela Merkel, built Nord Stream 2 under her authority to issue directives, part of the German gas infrastructure was sold to the Putin clique and a CDU economics minister – what was his name? – did not notice that at the beginning of the war the largest German gas storage facility was not only under Putin's control, but was also almost empty.

In the new book, Koenen still doesn't want to name Merkel, but he does want to name others. When it comes to the passage about Germany's blindness to Putin, from energy companies to sports officials, one likes to linger. Has anyone heard their self-criticism? However, the author could have added that the war, after sixteen years of Merkel stagnation, is forcing a German perestroika in which the word acceleration is just as central as it was under "Gorbi" in 1987.

The optimist proves to be a fatalist

With the convincing furor of the enlightener and democrat, Koenen dismantles the "self-idiotizing" world of Putin and his clique, the evil of self-isolation, the entry into a ludicrous ideology of imperial greatness and civilizational peculiarity, which only reveals the "civilizational relapse", and fantasies of violence, which were not only brutally erupted in February last year, but had been laid out for a long time.

Again and again, Koenen takes up the thesis from his book "The Russia Complex", in which he combines the imperial continuity of the Soviet Union and Russia with the collapse of Germany's world power ambitions in 1945 and the Russian triumph. However, whether today's war criminals in the Russian army have this in mind when they murder, rape and plunder in Ukraine remains to be seen. So if someone shouted "That's how it was!" after reading the book, he would have misunderstood the author. Once Koenen has completed the painting, the historians' work begins.

What's next in Russia? This is where the optimist appears. The Putin regime, like the other autocratic regimes before him, will come to the point of self-ruination, to which the war against Ukraine contributes. That would be welcome, but how long should people wait for the regime to collapse? The optimist proves to be a fatalist. Koenen also overlooks the private armies of the Wagner and Kadyrov troops, which now have a total of almost 50,000 men. In Russia's misfortune, salvation does not grow. But the salvation of Russia is at stake, Koenen rightly believes, and this will only succeed if Putin fails, because the toxic mixture of historical lies, annihilation, repression and Russian messianism will not disappear otherwise. That is why the West must not cease to support Ukraine.

The uprisings come and go, but the autocracy persists

But what about society? There remains a void, because without an organized society, the self-dismantling of the regime will inevitably lead to the next autocracy. As much as Koenen raves about the Belarusian women of the summer of 2020, about the Ukrainian democrats and their President Zelenskyj, whose transformation from comedian to politician in the fire of the war of aggression he admires and whose never fanatical war speeches he contrasts with Putin's fantasies of annihilation, as much as he longs for the democratic spring in Russia and counts up the signals a bit like Trotsky once did before the revolution, so little does he know what role society should play.

It is always good for a revolution, as the twentieth century proves. The problem, however, is that there were three such revolutions in the last century, plus hundreds of local uprisings in the nineteenth, one massive rebellion threatening rule, and several smaller ones in the eighteenth – and the seventeenth century runs under "Age of Turmoil," while at the same time a wise Russian author was outraged by the "mindless silence" of Russians in the face of blatant injustice. The uprisings come and go, but the autocracy remains; today the majority is behind Putin. The optimist Koenen does not dispute this. Reading it is like a prayer: in the deepest need of Russia, faith in a better world helps.

Gerd Koenen: "Im Widerschein des Krieges". Thinking about Russia. C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich 2023. 317 pp., ill., br., 20,– €.