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After weeks of rising tensions this Thursday the Russian military has invaded Ukraine through a large-scale offensive ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This week the situation on the Russian-Ukrainian border had already escalated after Putin recognized the independence of the two self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, in a speech full of historical distortions that actually denied Ukraine’s right to exist as a state: for Putin, a An independent Ukraine separated from Russia exists only because it was created by Lenin after the communist revolution.
This is not the first time Putin has voiced this idea. Although knowing what the Russian president really thinks and what his political definition is is extremely complex, understanding his historical assessment of Soviet communism helps to better understand the events of these days. Putin’s aggressive and nationalist stance, in fact, stems from the rejection of a particular part of Soviet history, particularly pre-Stalinist history.
In the more than twenty years he has been in power, Putin has been associated with the Soviet period for several reasons; first, since he was born in 1952, he is a politically educated man at the time and was famous as part of the formidable Soviet secret service, the KGB. Moreover, since becoming president, he has concentrated power on himself through methods of domination.
Putin did little or nothing to dismantle the Russian state structure formed during the decades of Soviet rule and to lead the country toward something resembling Western democracies, a process that was instead initiated by the last secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. , Mikhail Gorbachev and Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
However, in his speech recognizing the self-proclaimed republics, Putin strongly insisted on the need for “decommunization” and on the Soviet Union, which he blamed for giving too much power to the socialist republics, thus laying the foundations for Russia’s weakening. Putin argued that Ukraine is a corrupt state, led by America, trying unsuccessfully to reconcile with its Soviet past.
“Do you want decommunization?” “We are ready to show you what decommunization really means.” This is one of Putin’s main excuses for invading Ukraine, which he said was created by Soviet communism, decommunism means erasing it from the map.
If from an administrative point of view Putin wanted to preserve some aspects of the old regime, in economics he could move away from the Soviet model by studying its distortions and avoiding them carefully. To avoid a repeat of the great economic imbalances that occurred in Russia in 1986 and 1997, due to fluctuating oil prices, since the early 2000s the Russian government began to accumulate large foreign exchange reserves to withstand financial shocks. .
Moreover, some of the more serious problems of the Soviet era have been reduced, such as chronic dependence on imports of agricultural goods, military spending consuming income for other sectors, and economic stagnation.
Contemporary Russia is still characterized by technological and productive backwardness, as well as the low incomes of a large part of the population. However, as Foreign Affairs magazine recently wrote, the Russian economy has achieved two important, vital goals for Putin; maintain the continuity and stability of government and reduce the impact of Western sanctions.
In 2005, in a speech to the nation, Putin said the break-up of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” which he said was the main cause of the spread of separatist movements inside Russia. In the following years, the Kremlin chief periodically returned to such a topic.
Speaking on state television last December, Putin said the end of the Soviet Union marked the disappearance of “historic Russia.” The statement was commented on as a signal of Putin’s future foreign policy plans, but also showed something about his assessment of that period. In fact, in both 2005 and 2021, Putin viewed the event from a nationalist perspective. The Soviet Union, for Putin, was functional for Russian hegemony over the Soviet republics and for the prosperity of the Russian people, not for the spread of communist ideals.
Putin rejects the political vision of the revolutionaries who thought of uniting the Soviet socialist republics after the overthrow of the tsarist regime in 1917. The Soviet Union, according to its first leader Vladimir Lenin, would be a federation of republics among themselves, because the real goal is not was the hegemony of one country over another, but the spread of the communist revolution in the world.
It was also one of the main beliefs of Lev Trotsky, who nevertheless was isolated, deported, exiled and later killed by Stalin when he became the leader of the Soviets after Lenin’s death. Stalin supported the idea of socialism in one country and abandoned the idea of exporting revolution to Europe. He gave a new importance to the Russian language and culture, replacing them with those of other Soviet republics, including Ukraine.
If Putin refers to a Soviet tradition it is that of this period, but in a way it is also inspired by that tradition before the communist period. As Harvard historian Sergei Plokhy well explained, Putin actually wants to take history back to the pre-revolutionary period.
“He has a very imperialist idea of the Russian nation, which he sees as composed of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. the latter two have no right to exist separately. “We are almost back in the mid-nineteenth century, when imperial officials tried to hinder Ukraine’s cultural development.”
From this point of view, the attitude of Putin’s intervention in the former Soviet republics should be seen as an attempt to restore the former hegemony of Tsarist Russia and not a renewal of the Soviet regime.
He has shown that he wants to have strict control over the Caucasus and some other areas belonging to the Tsarist empire, contributing to the formation of small pro-Russian republics unknown to the international community; as in Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), Azerbaijan (Nagorno Karabakh) and Moldova (Transnistria).
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