Among the torrent of stories coming out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — military atrocities, blunders, sanctions, seized super-yachts, top-level spies and generals under house arrest and on and on, are regular reports of Russians, captured soldiers but self-exiled Russians in particular, expressing shame. Shame for what their country is doing and for what they didn’t do to prevent it.

You don’t have to be raised Catholic to agree that shame is a powerful human emotion. Few emotions motivate civilized people more. (My Jewish friends and I argue over who was raised in a denser cult of shame. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Simultaneous with these stories, I dropped in my DVD of “Andrei Rublev” , the classic 1966 film that is really more of a biography of 15th century Russia than the legendary painter of Eastern Orthodox icons. I don’t expect many of you to have have seen it, although I encourage you to give it a try. All three and half hours of it. (Shot in 2:35:1 “CinemaScope” black and white by the equally legendary Andrei Tarkovsky. ) Along with its mesmerizing imagery and epic scale, the film is often mentioned as the most vivid depiction of medieval Russian rural life ever put on film.

And, following the life of the ever-conscience stricken monk, Rublev, it simmers in shame.

The question I’ve been asking myself as I follow Putin’s invasion is, “What responsibility do common Russians have for what their leaders are doing in their name … again?” And, is it ever fair (or meaningful) to hold an entire culture responsible, with shaming, for repeated cycles of kleptocracy, despotism and psychopathology in its ruling class?

I ask this because Russia, of the world’s so-called “great powers”, is demonstrating again that it is unique in its inability to prevent regular devolutions into violent autocracy.

“Andrei Rublev” opens in 1400 with the peasant class living in farm animal squallor, periodically raided by rival villages if not Tartars from the Far East and wholly subservient to a regal class defending its status with vicious militaristic policing. Midway the film depicts the 1408 sacking of the city of Vladimir, organized by a Russian prince conspiring with marauding Tartars, in an attempt to kill his twin brother. (Although financed by the Soviet bureaucracy, Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin refused to release the film for years and cut it by almost 50%. The Criterion edition runs the original, full 209 minutes.)

And 1400 was already at least five centuries into Russia’s organized despotism, not even halfway through, with the calamitous eras of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, various weaker but no less vicious Czars, Josef Stalin, the grim, grey Soviets and now … Vladimir Putin still to come. In all, a truly remarkable thousand-year cavalcade of sociopaths … accepted, tolerated and often revered.

The informed will argue, “But every culture experiences this!” And the most woke liberals will point out the United States’ genocide of the Indians, racism toward Blacks and innumerable military misadventures. All of which is fair. As is the fact that Russia’s history is pock-marked with invasions from almost every direction.

But I still believe Russia is different. Not only is the violence of Russia’s despots borderline irrational and invariably unapologetic, but the common Russian, even today, in an era of Twitter, TikTok, McDonalds and Boeing jets, remains largely subdued, cowed and mute. For all our failures, the West, meaning the US, Europe, Japan, the Commonwealth and the like, has largely brought what you might call “the despotic impulse” under control. Certainly to the point where one man, a flagrant gangster, is not likely to be able to commandeer a vast army to attack a neighbor. Even repressive China sees that a better, stronger (near-term) future lies in providing cheap manufacturing for Western corporations.

So what is about Russian psychology that keeps its culture in this endlessly repeating, violent, self-destructive trap?

I’m asking. I don’t know.

But the eminent Russian historian Stephen Kotkin, recently interviewed by New Yorker editor and Russian authority in his own right, David Remnick, suggested that in addition to Russians’ historically heavy indoctrination in threats from “others”, they have also been fed a wildly disproportionate belief in their “exceptionalism.” (The FoxNews, American right-wing echo chamber comparison is right there to behold in all its naked ignominy.)

It’s as though having produced Rublev, Rachmaninoff, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sakharov and Tarkovsky (indisputably one of film world’s all time greats) they believe themselves every bit the cultural, technological and inventive equal of democracies like the United States, Britain, etc.

(Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institute and has been regularly interviewed on all things Russian. Here’s one recent video.)

The problem, says Kotkin, is that they are not. Not even close. Their repeated cycles of repression, kleptocratic corruption and violence pushes them back every time — as with Gorbachev — they showed the possibility of shaking off neo-Czar-ism or whatever you might want to call it. Consequently, because it regularly slides back into medieval tyranny and isolation, Russia simply hasn’t achieved like the “super power” it insists it is.

And today — with the world watching horrified and in real time as Russia bombards maternity hospitals in an obscenely irrational assault on a peaceful-enough neighbor — the shunning and shaming of Russia, all Russians, not just Putin, is going to be worse and more immediately punishing than it has ever been.

So the mostly younger, urban, elite, “modernist” class — the very people a retrograde culture needs to shake off the “despotic impulse” — is fleeing Russia in droves unlikely to ever return. (If you were young and bright how long would you wait abroad before you were convinced Father Russia had fully and permanently exorcised Putinism?)

From Turkey, or Europe or wherever will take them, they’re looking back, rightfully ashamed at their native land for what is doing, again, and for what they didn’t do to stop it from doing … again.