Monkey with a GrenadeBy Robert Ginzburg
20 Mar 2022
“Not even a pig shits where it eats.” So said Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev when attacking Nobel Laureate Boris Pasternak for publishing his masterpiece Dr. Zhivago abroad while still living in Russia. Mao railed against the “running dogs” of capitalism. Stalinist propaganda posters vilified priests as sly geese, while Stalinist war art depicted the Soviet Union’s foes as crocodiles and hungry frogs. In Nazi cartoons, Jews were rats and fleas. Dictators are fond of animal imagery when describing their perceived enemies.
Now we have Putin’s addition to the genre. In his speech to the Russian people on March 17th, he spoke of the “traitors” and “non-patriots” within his country as “moths” [literally “blackflies”] that the Russian people will “spit out.” Though he recently compared neighbouring westward nations to Tabaqui the jackal from The Jungle Book, this language, now applied to his own people, was a new step for the Russian president. With his back against the wall, Putin’s pastiche of Stalinist rhetoric is appealing to ancestral memories of fear. It suggests that he wants his Russian audience to see a new Stalin, a new 1941, a new collective endeavour to which they must rise, and for which they must be prepared to sacrifice everything.
But this is not 1941. Although sanctions and commercial boycotts are inflicting mayhem on the Russian economy, Russia is not under military attack. Putin’s invasion is a squalid, ignoble war crime, and so far it is going badly wrong. A note of comedy is entering the proceedings. Lavrov’s plane turned back halfway to a fruitless mission to beg for Chinese war-aid. A Russian regime spokesman was put out that the Ukrainians defending their own land from Russia’s assault are not sufficiently committed to peace talks. As a Russian friend said to me, “It’s like they’ve only got one soldier left. And even he’s getting a bit weary now.”
So, with nothing apparently going to plan, time to wheel out a bit of Stalinism! Putin has been laying the groundwork for years, promoting Stalin as an “effective manager” (in a state handbook for history teachers) and inveighing against the “excessive demonization” of the dictator as “one way of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia.”
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It is tragic, in more than one sense. A foolish man can still be dangerous—or, as the Russians put it, “Beware the monkey holding a grenade.” There are further tips awaiting Putin in the Stalin handbook of Russian leadership, and this is probably just the beginning. But about that—especially for those of us with friends in the country—one does not want to think.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/03/20/monkey-with-a-grenade/
