In Lockstep with Stalin
Not Hitler...Stalin.
April 17, 2022
As Russian atrocities in Ukraine are brought to light by NGOs, Ukrainian human rights organisations, and the press, many in the West have taken to believe that Putin is following in Hitler’s footsteps. Our point of reference is the Holocaust - the genocide committed by the Wehrmacht and their Nazi leadership in the Second World War.
Not so, as I was told in our recent Kremlin File podcast chat with Maria Avdeeva.
Putin is much more in lockstep with his role model Josef Stalin: the concentration of power within a small clique of henchmen, the total repression of civil society (NGOs, Memorial), the murder of political dissidents (Nemstov, Litvinenko, Gebrev), political imprisonments (Navalny), the poisoning of dissidents (Kara Murza, Navalny), the murder of journalists (Politkovskaya), the intimidation of dissidents and their families, prison camps, and the powerful surveillance state, including total control over the media.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has made it stata-non-grata. Many Western manufacturers and retailers find Russia too toxic for business and have left, which means that Russian manufacturers and retailers will have to provide goods for Russian consumers instead. Say goodbye to your Rover and hello to your spanking new Lada. Restrictions hitting Russian financial institutes have got the Governor of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, scrambling to offset the damage through a series of aggressive financial state controls on all economic and industrial activity.
In other words, Putin is now at the helm of a totalitarian state with very few friends.
He’s also cos-playing Stalin in another respect. From the get go, Putin brought back the Soviet anthem, erected new Soviet memorials, and instituted military training in schools and through the youth group, Nashi. He’s has also resurrected many Soviet symbols and has added one of his own - the ‘Z’ - in an attempt to drum up support for his genocidal war.
Now on to the most terrifying similarity. Putin is following Stalin’s playbook in the annihilation of a people that don’t want to live under Russian rule or influence. I’ll expand on this in future posts but let me say here that Russia’s war of genocide against Ukraine brings us back to Stalin’s repression and genocide of a myriad of peoples living within the Soviet Union and close to its borders during the period of collectivisation and colonisation starting in 1917.
As part of Stalin’s 5-Year Plan, he ordered the forced collectivisation of farms in Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union (i.e. Kazakhstan). His henchmen passed laws forcing farmers off their land, and made planting and harvesting crops illegal off the collective farms. In order to find food, peasants and kulaks (industrious farmers) were forced off their farms, and many made their way to the cities. Grain was ‘Stalin’s gold’. The grain which was harvested in Ukraine was sent to Moscow. In 1932, he ordered an increase of Ukrainian grain quotas - impossible quotas - that were violently enforced by local Communist Party lackeys. These aggressive measures caused death by famine, Holodomor, of over 5 million Ukrainians and the deportation of more than 1.5 million Ukrainians to gulags in Siberia and other areas for daring to oppose these measures.
If you’d like to read more about the Holodomor and other related issues of Russian colonisation and genocide, pick up Timothy Snyder’s ‘Blood Lands : Europe Between HItler and Stalin’ and Anne Applebaum’s ‘Red Famine : Stalin’s War on Ukraine.’ If reading isn’t your cup of tea, watch the film Mr Jones, directed by the renowned Agnieszka Holland with a screenplay by Andrea Chalupa. (Scott and I talked with Andrea and you can listen to our conversation in our next post.) These are a good start.
We are witnesses today to the same sick horror, and it’s terrifying for the Holodomor survivors and their families. For them, this is reliving history. There is no doubt: this is genocide. Putin is specifically targeting Ukrainian civilians in his war. The OSCE’s latest report makes for grim reading and confirms what we are witnessing: indiscriminate missile attacks and bombings, abductions, torture, murder, rape, mass graves, forced deportations to Russia of adults and over 120,000 children.
The RIA Novosti article penned by Timofey Sergeytsev , “What Russia should do with Ukraine”, and a plethora of Russian TV programming puts Russia’s genocidal intent in black and white. The RIA Novosti article shouldn’t be dismissed as the mutterings of an insignificant author — this is a state media organ and mouthpiece, and its articles are crafted to disseminate Putin’s thoughts.
This is as Stalinesque as it gets.
That said, there is a difference: Putin doesn’t have an ideology. Stalin believed in communist mission, and he was hell bent on showing the world that the Soviet state was a successful paradise of joyful workers. He was determined to make communism work at the expensive of Soviet lives, tons of them.
Putin doesn’t believe in communism even if he’s decked out in all the Soviet trimmings and paraphernalia. I think his Rolex, villas, yachts, and stolen cash give it away. What Putin has, instead, are ideas, as exhaustively argued by Nicholas Tenzer.
He’s the perfect poster child for ‘The Godfather’. He’s a mafioso thug with nukes and, yes, one idea: Russia must have respect in the world. He wants Russia to be respected as other nations respect the power of the United States. He was quite clear about it in his speech at the Munich Security Council meeting in 2007, at the NATO summit in Bucharest 2008, and most recently, in his summer essay in 2021 inter alia.
By undertaking his genocidal war against Ukrainians, Putin has achieved the opposite of what he set out to do; he and Russia are and will not be respected. He has united the nations of the West and strengthened NATO. He has triggered disgust and the isolation of Russia, not respect. He’s unleashed a totalitarian storm of misery and destruction and violence.
This is how he’ll be remembered. This is his legacy.
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