Putinism and the Stalinist LegacyTomislav Kardum
26 Apr 2022
From the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, justifications offered for Moscow’s aggression must have struck most non-Russian observers as unrealistic, to say the least. Many observers were incredulous that any educated Russian could possibly believe Putin’s claim that Ukraine required “denazification and demilitarization,” or that the country housed multiple biological weapons laboratories and planned to build a nuclear bomb. Russia, however, is one of the top 10 countries with the largest share of people with completed tertiary education. In the age cohort of 55–64, they rank first—as many as 50.3 percent of Russians have completed tertiary education.
Russian propaganda is not successful because the population is uneducated, but because citizens have been efficiently indoctrinated by lifelong exposure to Russian and Soviet myths through the education system, state media, and prevailing culture. The original source of these myths and their shameless propagation lies in Russia’s failure to confront the poisonous legacy of Soviet politics. Instead, after the messy collapse of the USSR, the Russian state simply adopted Soviet propaganda and repurposed it to its own ends.
The myth of the Great Patriotic War became an instrument of Soviet self-legitimization in the 1960s under Leonid Brezhnev, supplanting the myth of the October Revolution that was supposed to lead to the global embrace of communism and the Marxist “end of history.” When the power of Marxist theory collided with economic reality, and Soviet elites discovered that they no longer believed communism would triumph over capitalism, they resorted instead to a myth of national glory forged in the fight against history’s greatest evil—Nazi Germany. The “fraternal” peoples of the Soviet Union certainly suffered the war’s most appalling military casualties, and for this blood sacrifice made on behalf of all mankind, Soviet leaders determined that humanity owed the Soviet Union eternal gratitude. Opposition to the Soviet Union and its agenda became synonymous with national betrayal and, ultimately, with Nazism itself.
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In June 2020, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin wrote an important article about Word War II for the National Interest, in which he emphasized the continuing importance of the Soviet state myth in global politics. “At the summit of CIS leaders held at the end of last year,” he wrote, “we all agreed on one thing: it is essential to pass on to future generations the memory of the fact that the Nazis were defeated first and foremost by the Soviet people and that representatives of all republics of the Soviet Union fought side by side together in that heroic battle, both on the frontlines and in the rear.”
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The centrality of this national myth has important implications for Russian foreign policy, and for the attitude towards Ukrainians, in particular. An essential component is the neglect or relativization of Soviet aggression between the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in August 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. On September 17th, 1939, Soviet forces invaded Poland from the east, just 16 days after the Nazis invaded from the west, and the country was cleaved in two. Stalin justified this aggression by arguing that the Polish state had ceased to exist, and that the Soviet Union was therefore compelled to liberate its Ukrainian and Belarusian brothers from what he called Polish “bourgeois fascism.”
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We are now watching this pattern of justification and aggression being repeated in Ukraine, and it is as cynical today as it was in 1939–40. Putin has claimed that Russia was “forced to invade Ukraine” and has refused to formally declare war, preferring instead to describe the attack as a “special military operation.” The plan seems to have been to capture Kyiv within days, decapitate the elected government there, and install a compliant regime that would do as it was told. This, it was hoped, would all occur before the Ukrainians or the wider world could organize any kind of response. That plan has been a catastrophic failure because it was based on the faulty assumptions of the Russian state myth.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/04/26/putinism-and-the-stalinist-legacy/
