Are Russians collectively guilty of the regime’s crimes?

Recent talk of travel restrictions for all Russians has produced a debate about the morality of such a step. Is it right for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opponents to be lumped together with Putin’s supporters? Isn’t a blanket prohibition unjust?

The answer is that it depends on whether Russians do or do not collectively share some trait that would warrant such a punitive measure. Obviously, it can’t be the mere fact of being Russian or speaking Russian or living in Russia.

The only trait that could justify collective opprobrium would have to be behavioral. If all Russians acted in a manner that enabled, promoted or directly caused the Putin regime’s crimes, then all Russians would be guilty or responsible collectively for those crimes.

Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has argued that Russians aren’t collectively responsible for any crimes: “There are many Russians who shamefully support Putin’s hideous aggression in Ukraine — directly, by waging war, and indirectly, for example by refusing to condemn Russia, or by maintaining false detachment as if the war is no concern of theirs. I will judge them individually, and let myself be judged, too, but only to the extent that they and I are personally responsible for specific crimes and misdeeds.”

Significantly, he insists that collective responsibility or guilt is a totalitarian notion (tell that to Alexander the Great when he razed cities), thereby overlooking the inconvenient fact that the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the German theologian Martin Niemöller, and the German philosopher Karl Jaspers all spoke of German collective guilt for Nazi crimes. They may have been wrong to do so, but their anti-Nazi and anti-totalitarian credentials are impeccable.

In fact, while the notion of collective guilt is no longer accepted by most Germans, they do acknowledge that they share a collective responsibility for Adolf Hitler’s crimes. As a leading German politician recently put it: “Our collective responsibility remains. It extends to future generations and to Germans whose families came to Germany after National Socialism.”

In sum, if the Germans could have felt collectively guilty, or still feel collectively responsible for Hitler’s crimes, so, too, can the Russians. They may have participated directly in killing innocent Ukrainians (or Georgians or Chechens or Crimean Tatars …) or they may have supported the killing of these people. Support could be expressed publicly, as in taking part in pro-regime demonstrations, voting for Putin, or smearing a “Z” on some wall, or it could be expressed privately, as in feeling pleasure that Crimea is “ours” again, lauding Putin for making Russia great, or failing to express outrage at the regime’s crimes. This last action — or, rather, the absence thereof — is important. One can become complicit in a crime by perpetrating it, supporting it, or failing to condemn it. Commission of crimes is punishable by law. Supporting or failing to condemn them is not illegal, but it is immoral.

Of course, the mere fact that individual Russians may be morally complicit in crimes does not yet translate into collective guilt or collective responsibility. Numbers matter, as do sustained patterns of behavior. Germans overwhelmingly supported the Hitler regime and overwhelmingly failed to condemn its actions between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1945, when World War II ended and the Nazi regime collapsed. To be sure, the Nazi repressive apparatus was efficient and terrifying. Although the very real possibility of being arrested for some minor protest affected what Germans could or could not have done under Hitler’s regime, we still regard them as collectively having “fallen.”

Putin and his criminal regime have enjoyed fantastic levels of support in Russia for the past two decades. His popularity has often approached 90 percent and usually remains in the 60-80 percent range. Russians cheered when he violated international law, invaded the Donbas, and annexed Crimea in 2014. The war against Ukraine provoked some initial demonstrations and mass flight from Russia, but Putin’s popularity remains distressingly high even as thousands of Russians are losing their lives in Ukraine. Many Russians openly support the looting, killing, raping and, ultimately, genocide in Ukraine.

If 100 percent of all Russians must be guilty of some action in order for their guilt or responsibility to be deemed collective, then Russians cannot be collectively guilty or responsible. But neither can Germans. If we loosen the requirement and substitute “an overwhelming majority” for 100 percent, then collective guilt or responsibility becomes plausible.

What, then, should Russians do? A courageous Russian soldier, Pavel Filatyev, who recently published a scathing critique of the war and regime, has an answer. He’s opposed to apologizing to Ukrainians. One apologizes “when one steps on someone’s foot. At the moment, to say ‘excuse me’ is insufficient.”

What would be sufficient? The international community and the Hague will have to decide that. In the meantime, Russians could help their cause by expressing collective shame and outrage at the Putin regime’s genocidal behavior. Both shame and outrage entail no risk and can be expressed easily by an overwhelming majority. They won’t end Putin’s regime, but they’d be a start toward Russia’s moral regeneration.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”