Vladimir Putin, converted to Russian nationalism, long ago disowned the Soviet Union, guilty in his eyes of pursuing, above all with Lenin, the national policy that led to the current state of Ukrainian autonomy. Some observers believe that he intends to recreate the Romanov Empire. If this is his goal, then, nevertheless, as the heir to Stalinist totalitarianism, he intends to achieve it.
The worldview of Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, was built inside the Soviet world, and he took the end of the USSR very hard, as he announced in 2005, six years after coming to power. that it was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. That same year, Putin’s youth movement was founded in April, whose name “Nachi” (“Our people,” spelled “Nashi” in Russian) sets the tone for what follows.
Because after a period of hesitation in his first mandate, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine seems to have made him fear that there will be another democratic revolution that will blow up Russia like the Soviet Union did yesterday. He somehow convinces himself then that in order to block this development, he must establish a personal dictatorship, believing that the fall of the USSR was primarily due to the weakness of power, both before and after this fall. In his opinion, after the policy of decentralization initiated by Boris Yeltsin, decisively recentralize power.
It was in those years that such formulas as “vertical of power”, “dictatorship of law”, “sovereign democracy”, “managed capitalism” appeared in the official phraseology. Then the central power is strengthened against the oligarchs and regional governors; the opposition is weakening. After a string of hoaxes in 2008, Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 was marked by controversy that caused the nut to turn again. He will not stop strengthening his power until he becomes a real autocrat.
Revisionist rewriting of history
Since the mid-2000s, he simultaneously engaged in the rehabilitation of Stalin, a model in his eyes of a true leader; clearly a revisionist enterprise. In 2008, new textbooks ordered by the presidential administration rehabilitated the former master of the Kremlin. They address, in particular, the question of the purges, arguing that there were many perpetrators among those held accountable and that these purges made it possible to win the war by getting rid of the fifth column.
The revisionist rewriting of history came to an end when, in December 2020, he disbanded the non-governmental organization Memorial, founded in 1989 with the aim of archiving violations of the Stalinist period and, more broadly, violations of human rights to the present day. In a spirit that is vehemently reminiscent of the trials of the 1930s, the prosecutor in charge of the case believes that the mere act of calling for reprisals is a justification for Nazism.
The false alternation of 2008 took place in accordance with the letter of the institutions and without touching the constitution. But on March 10, 2020, the Duma voted in favor of an amendment to a draft constitutional amendment that would allow Vladimir Putin to run for two consecutive new terms after 2024, thus paving the way for the Russian president to remain in power until 2036. On December 22, he passed a law granting lifelong immunity to former presidents and their relatives. This new text provides that the former president of Russia “cannot be held criminally or administratively liable”; moreover, he cannot be arrested by the police, interrogated or searched.
kingdom of propaganda
Putin, since then the only master on board, began to treat his employees the way Stalin treated his own, except for their murder, it’s true. It was enough to be convinced of this to watch how his head of foreign intelligence, during the Security Council convened in February on the Ukrainian issue, trembled and stuttered, standing in front of him, in a hurry to clearly express his opinion on the declaration of independence of the two self-proclaimed republics in the east of the country.
Some scholars considered Stalin a narcissistic pervert. Putin, he could suffer from paranoid delusions, isolated in his ivory tower, not very interested in the opinion of his employees, but demanding absolute obedience and loyalty from them. This madness is transferred to the public space. As under Stalin and later under his successors, Putin’s Russia is a realm of the most crude propaganda and pure disinformation, as Antoine Sigila noted in his 1938 work Ten Years in a Land of Disconcerting Lies.
This art of lying is second nature to these totalitarian regimes, where the authorities consider anyone who deviates from the official discourse an enemy to be killed and a worthless character to be treated with insults and contempt. Let us recall the time when Alexander Fadeev, at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in 1948, characterized Jean-Paul Sartre, who was absent from the ceremony, as a “jackal with a feather” and a “hyena-typist.”
Today, “internal enemies” are not treated much better than yesterday, even if the Moscow trials have not resumed: the murders of journalists, the poisoning of opponents such as Alexei Navalny, who was sentenced to harsh prison terms, the raids of thousands of demonstrators against the war. The “special operation” in Ukraine is internally accompanied by the use of totalitarian measures of control over the Russian population.
Thus, parents of students received warnings from schools instructing them to monitor their children’s use of social networks. In schools, students attend special classes designed to instill in them the official line. Internet censorship is becoming more and more complete. We are talking about disconnecting the population of Russia from the outside world. Thus, we are witnessing the revival of the Stalinist nightmare. The word totalitarianism should not be taken lightly, but here it is important to describe the evolution of Russian society.
External enemy
An external enemy must be treated as an internal one. Here again the vocabulary is reminiscent of Stalin’s times. Thus, the Ukrainian government for Putin is just a gang of Nazis and drug addicts who need to be eliminated. As for the Ukrainian population, it must be crushed by bombs and achieve unconditional surrender. For these two people there is neither the right of peoples to self-determination, nor the price of human life. Mass destruction and murder are the only adequate responses to the demands of freedom.
It is necessary to re-read Robert Conquest’s Sanglantes moissons, which describes the martyrdom of the Ukrainian people during Stalin’s policy of forced land collectivization in the winter of 1932-1933, which led to widespread famine and a five-year famine. million deaths. Repressions, persecutions and purges were carried out here even more widely than anywhere else. It must be said that Stalin, like Putin later, hated any form of national thought that deviated from the “Great Russian” model.
It is this policy of extreme brutality that Putin carried out in Chechnya with the destruction of Grozny, then in Syria, and seems to be moving in the same direction today in Ukraine. The entry of Russian tanks into the big cities refers to their entry yesterday into Budapest in 1956 and into Prague in 1968: the law of force and the politics of terror.
As for Stalin, Putin’s enemy is the West and its democratic regimes, whose possible and dangerous expansion must be protected. Hence the lowering of the new “Iron Curtain”, isolating the inhabitants of the Russian Empire. NATO is the armed wing of this enemy, which is considered solely responsible for the “purely defensive” responses adopted by the country. Thus, after several years of hesitation, Putin returned to the Stalinist vision of the Cold War.
In this world, two camps are irreconcilably opposed on the planet. The United States and Russia are the two dominant powers. Faced with a Western enemy, Putin is trying to reconnect with Stalin’s “patriotic mobilization”. Without giving the Russian people the promised economic modernization, this mobilization, which turned out to be especially effective during the “Great Patriotic War” (actually activated by political commissars), knows how to adapt to the present. Because if we assume that the West is fighting against Russia, then the latter, on the other hand, is only “defending itself”, and its invasion of Ukraine is only a “special operation”, and not a war, a kind of military operation. Like Stalin, Putin presents himself as the only one capable of protecting the Russian people from external aggression.
Stalinism and Hitlerism
However, one key element distinguishes Putin’s Russia from Stalin’s Russia. Stalin, more cunning and cautious than Putin, fought an offensive war in 1939 only against little Finland, a war he eventually won despite hard and numerous setbacks (it was during the Winter War that the Finns invented the Molotov cocktail used by the French) . Ukrainians today are against tanks), and against Poland, he did not threaten to lose the war, since Hitler attacked this country on his side. On the other hand, it was a defensive war against Nazi Germany, which he fought victoriously. Putin, less cautious and more prone to megalomania, clearly underestimated the balance of power in Ukraine.
In fact, it is precisely with Hitler’s offensive against Russia that one is tempted to compare Putin’s failed blitzkrieg. It should be remembered that the last time Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities were subjected to such military brutality was in the early hours of June 22, 1941. This was when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Two days before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, RIA Novosti published an editorial with a premature announcement of the conquest of the country, where the author described the “special operation” as “the solution of the Ukrainian question”…
On the other hand, if Stalin did not lose the war, his successors lost the war in Afghanistan. The defeat that played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin’s defeat in Ukraine, probably in a more or less long term, will certainly cause, but after what a humanitarian catastrophe and what destruction, the end of Putin’s and Putin’s Russia, in some way the second death of the Soviet Union.