There is a phrase I keep hearing, and every time I hear it I feel a chill, because I know exactly where it leads. The phrase goes: if Russians don’t pour into the streets to stop this war, then they are all accomplices — every last one of them. It is meant to sound morally uncompromising. In fact it is the opposite. It is a slogan that hands an enormous, undeserved gift to the very people who started the killing. And I want to explain, as carefully as I can, why I believe collective responsibility is real and inescapable — and why collective guilt is a poison that has only ever produced fascism and Bolshevism.
Guilt is individual; responsibility is shared
Let us begin by being precise about words, because almost all the confusion here comes from collapsing two different things into one.
Guilt and responsibility are not the same thing, and they do not operate on the same plane. Guilt is always individual. It attaches to a specific person who did a specific thing, and it entails a specific consequence: punishment. You cannot punish a category. You cannot hang a nation. The moment you say “the Germans were guilty” or “the Russians are guilty,” you have stopped doing justice and started doing something else — you have begun the work of the totalitarian mind, which always thinks in collectives, always assigns fate by birth or passport or blood. That is the logic of the Nuremberg racial laws, and it is the logic of the Bolshevik tribunal that shot a man for his class origin. Collective guilt is not a stern form of morality. It is the abolition of morality, dressed up as severity.
Collective responsibility is a wholly different matter, and it is entirely real. I feel it myself, every day. As a citizen of Russia I have a far more complicated relationship with European states than, say, a citizen of Ukraine does — and that is not an injustice done to me, it is simply a fact, a consequence I carry because of the country whose passport I hold. That is collective responsibility. It does not require that I personally fired a shot. It does not even require that I approve of the war; I do not. It comes to me anyway, the way bombs fell on the heads of German anti-fascists in 1944 — not because they personally needed to pay reparations, but because they belonged, by the cold arithmetic of history, to the nation that had unleashed the catastrophe.
So: responsibility can be collective. Guilt cannot. Hold onto that distinction, because everything else depends on it.
Why “everyone is guilty” is a gift to the guilty
Now to the heart of the matter. The person who insists that all Russians are accomplices imagines he is being maximally tough on the regime. He is doing precisely the reverse, and the reason is almost mathematical: if everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty. When guilt is spread evenly across a hundred and forty million people, it dilutes to nothing. It becomes a fog in which the actual criminal can no longer be located.
Justice depends on the opposite operation. It depends on differentiation — on the patient, unglamorous work of separating one category from another. There is the man who conceived and ordered the war: Putin, first and above all. There are the combatants who crossed the border and pulled the triggers — a distinct category. There are those who built the missiles in the military factories — another category. There are the propagandists, the information troops, who manufactured the consent and the hatred — yet another, and a closely guilty one. And finally there are those who bear only moral responsibility: the people who live inside the country, who did not resist effectively, who perhaps live in a kind of internal exile. I do not exempt even those who protested and failed. But these are different people, with different weights on the scale, and a just reckoning must keep them apart.
This is not a softening of judgment. It is the precondition for judgment of any kind. Consider Nuremberg. The whole moral achievement of that tribunal was that it did not condemn “the Germans.” It singled out specific men and established specific crimes. Had the court instead declared the entire German people guilty, it would have handed the men in the dock the perfect alibi: why are you hanging me, when by your own logic the baker and the schoolteacher and the conscript are guilty too? To refuse to “sort through the categories” is to make it impossible ever to isolate the war criminal from the bystander — which means the war criminal walks free in the crowd. The slogan “I don’t want to distinguish between types of filth” is therefore not a hard line. It is an amnesty.
The false analogy that must be dismantled
Here someone always raises an objection that deserves a serious answer. If Russians bear collective responsibility merely for being citizens of an aggressor state, then — the argument runs — were the Jews of 1930s Germany collectively responsible for the actions of their government? And if not, why are Russians an exception?
They are not an exception. The objection simply hammers the nail into the wrong wall. The decisive fact is this: the Russian government acts in the name of Russians. It claims to speak for them, to fight for them, to kill in their name. Hitler did precisely the opposite with the Jews. Through the Nuremberg laws of 1935 he struck them from the rolls of German citizenship; he did not act on their behalf, he declared them his enemies and excluded them from the nation. There is no common ground between the two situations — there is total antagonism. A people whose government claims to act for them stands in a categorically different relation to that government’s crimes than a people whom that government has defined as victims to be destroyed. So the analogy collapses completely, and with it the idea that collective responsibility is some arbitrary curse laid on anyone unlucky enough to share a flag.
The two faces of responsibility — passive and active
It helps to see that collective responsibility comes in two forms, and that they must not be confused.
The first is passive. It arrives whether you welcome it or not. The bombs, the sanctions, the ruined relations with the world, the diminished life — these descend on a population as a fact, indifferent to anyone’s private feelings. This is responsibility in the realm of what is. The Germans under Hitler bore this in the fullest possible measure: their country was reduced to rubble, the price they paid was immense and total. Russians today bear it too, though far more lightly — if I had to put a number on how much ordinary Russian lives have been worsened by the aggression, I would say somewhere around a three or a four, certainly not a ten, certainly nothing like the German experience.
The second form is active, and it lives in the conscience. It is the shame felt by a person who recognizes that he belongs to a community which has done terrible harm to others — who feels the responsibility personally, not because anyone forced it on him, but because he has a conscience and claims belonging to the nation. By this measure the Germans again rank highest; a real reckoning, a real awakening, eventually came. And here Russians rank very low — I would give them, honestly, close to the floor — not because such conscience is impossible, but because in the overwhelming majority it has not yet awakened. This active responsibility is, in the end, a matter of personal choice. If you feel your belonging and the harm done in your name, you carry it. If you say “this has nothing to do with me,” that is your prerogative, and good for you. But the people of conscience are the ones who will, in time, redeem the rest.
I notice this active responsibility in myself in a small but telling way. I find that I cannot bring myself to criticize the country that is being attacked — Ukraine — even though, as anyone can see, there is plenty in any country at war that could be criticized. That self-imposed reluctance is not a professional rule; it is a citizen-of-the-aggressor’s instinct, a quiet form of the active responsibility I am describing. It is not eternal, and it is not pretended objectivity. It is conscience choosing its silences.
The absurd demand, and the American mirror
This brings me to a demand I consider both cruel and unserious: that ordinary Russians should resist by, in effect, living on fresh air — that anyone who has not stormed the Kremlin with a pitchfork is thereby an accomplice. Under a totalitarian dictatorship this is simply not how reality works. Show me the case in history where a population overthrew a fully consolidated totalitarian regime from within — it did not happen in Hitler’s Germany, it did not happen in Stalin’s Soviet Union, it did not happen in imperial Japan. To demand it as the price of innocence is to demand the impossible and then pronounce everyone guilty for failing to deliver it. And yet — and this is the crucial balance — the impossibility of effective resistance does not erase the population’s historical and collective responsibility. Both things are true at once: you cannot reasonably be commanded to die uselessly, and you still carry the weight of belonging to the nation that did this.
Lest this sound like special pleading for one country, let me turn the same instrument on my own argument’s hardest case. Americans, too, bear collective responsibility — for a president they legitimately, democratically elected. Tens of millions voted for him. If the Russian population bears responsibility for Putin, then by exactly the same principle the American population bears responsibility for Trump; one cannot consistently affirm the first and deny the second. They will feel it first as shame, and later, when the consequences mature, as material cost. The degree is different, and the difference matters enormously: Putin was not legitimately elected and is actively killing people, while Trump, whatever else one thinks of him, was chosen at the ballot box and is not. So the American share is real but lighter. Yet it is the same kind of thing, governed by the same law — and the fact that the principle applies even to a free people choosing freely is the strongest proof that it is a genuine principle and not a grudge.
What is at stake
I return, at the end, to where I began, because the stakes are not abstract. When we say “all of them are guilty,” we feel righteous, and we accomplish the opposite of justice: we blur the line that separates the man who gave the order from the woman who buried her head in the sand, and in blurring it we let the first man hide behind the second. The only path that leads anywhere — the only path that could ever truly uproot this regime and its logic — runs through differentiation: the chief criminals here, the combatants there, the makers of weapons and the makers of lies each in their place, and the merely responsible held to a wholly different standard.
Guilt is individual and demands a name. Responsibility is collective and demands a conscience. Keep them separate, and justice remains possible. Collapse them into one, and you have not become more moral — you have simply rebuilt, brick by brick, the very machine you claim to oppose.