President Vladimir Putin imagines himself Joseph Stalin in the year 1945. In his message to the Russian people this week, he said that he had started a war against Ukraine to “demilitarize and denazify” the neighboring country. That was precisely the aim in 1945 of the Soviet-Russian dictator Stalin (1878-1953) and the Allies after the ‘unconditional capitulation’ of Nazi Germany.
Putin’s attack order Thursday night was the violent climax of nearly 15 years of verbal revenge against Ukraine. That Kiev phobia had already reached its apotheosis in his 75-minute televised speech on prime time Monday night.
The president had poured his heart and soul into that speech, just short of communist length, intended to justify the war. Everything Putin has already said over the past decade and a half about what he sees as the tragic modern history of Russia came together in this speech.
Much of this historiography revolves around Ukraine, the neighboring country that, according to Putin, should never have become independent in 1991. That his predecessor Boris Yeltsin allowed this more than thirty years ago, in fact that he even applauded a sovereign Ukraine because the population had been ‘oppressed’ there for so long and that Russia would also ‘gain’, as he said in March 1990. NRC Handelsblad said, is irrelevant to the current head of state.
The core of Putin’s doctrine is that Ukraine has always been part of the Russian Empire and therefore cannot and should not be a sovereign state.
This doctrine is not new, not even for American or other Western government leaders. Putin was also a guest in 2008 at the now famous NATO summit in Bucharest, where the alliance did not offer Ukraine and Georgia any concrete membership, but only allowed an imaginary front door. Putin then said in a chat with Bush Jr.: „George, what is Ukraine at all? Ukraine is not a state. Part of the area is Eastern Europe and part we have given away.” After which Putin promised his colleague the annexation of Crimea and the east, Ukraine could still become a member of NATO. Putin has since elaborated this vision in speeches, essays and decisiveness.
Betrayal of Lenin
Central to his historiographical canon is that Ukraine is the main beneficiary of the end of ‘historic Russia’, as he called the dismantling of the Soviet Union late last year in a TV documentary. It is not Russia that is responsible for this, but the West and the Bolshevik leader Lenin.
The first time Putin denounced Lenin as a traitor to historical Russia was in 2014. In a jubilant speech about “reunification” with Crimea, Putin said the Bolsheviks are guilty of Ukraine’s existence as a political entity at all. It was the communists who, fearing that they would lose the civil war after the October Revolution of 1917, declared the Ukrainian area between roughly Lugansk and the Dniester as a separate Soviet republic. “God will judge them,” Putin said at the time. He did not mention Lenin by name yet. In his televised speech to the Russian people on Monday, he did, more than ten times. Joseph Stalin, who according to Putin advocated a much better nationality policy, had tried to prevent Lenin from proclaiming a Ukrainian Soviet republic. In vain. To make matters worse, the first constitution of the Soviet Union stipulated that all constituent republics had the right to leave the union. In the eyes of the president, that was not a rational right but a “generous gift”. “The most ardent nationalists could only have dreamed of that before,” Putin said. That constitution was “incomprehensible, insane, worse than a mistake.”
German agent
Six months after the annexation of Crimea, at a speech commemorating the outbreak of the First World War, Putin elaborated on this theme by unfolding a kind of stab legend. In 1917, the Russian Empire was winning against the German and Habsburg Empires. But “the spiritual revival of our people” was suddenly lost in “a revolutionary upheaval, in a brother-killing schism.” That was the work of foreign powers. “Victory was stolen from the country” by a force “that called for the defeat of one’s homeland, ripped power to pieces and betrayed national interests.”
Here Putin was referring to the Communists and again to their leader Lenin, who had ridden a German train back to St Petersburg from exile a few months before the October Revolution. So he was actually a German agent.
In early 2020, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the victory over the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), Putin added a new party to his history canon: Poland.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the “devil’s pact” in which Stalin and Hitler divided Poland among themselves, had always been interpreted in the classical canon as inevitable, because a year earlier Britain and France had abandoned the Soviet Union with their appeasement to Germany. Now Putin suddenly added that that pact was a piece of cake for Poland. After all, Poland had taken advantage of Munich ’38 – where part of Czechoslovakia had been given to Germany – by taking some Czech territory. If the Poles opened their “filthy mouths”, he would still open incriminating archives, Putin threatened.
A year and a half later, he suddenly also attributed a leading role to Poland in the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, so disastrous for Russia, in the nineteenth century. In a essay on historical unity Among the Belarusians (now Belarus), Lesser Russians (Ukraine) and Greater Russians (Russia), Putin wrote that this Ukrainian self-consciousness was not authentic. Nationalism, according to Putin, had been knowingly fueled by the nationalists in Poland, who did not want to resign themselves to their subordinate role in the Russian Empire but continued to yearn for independence. Those Polish fires “wanted to exploit the Ukrainian question for their own gain,” Putin said, and were controlled in the background by Western powers. The Habsburg Austrians in particular saw Ukrainian nationalism as a political weapon against Orthodox Christianity and thus the Russian empire. In other words, Putin argued, Ukrainian nationalism has been instrumental in a comprehensive “anti-Russia” project from the beginning until now.
brother nations
Putin’s statements and articles are almost always a mix of fiction and truth: a third is correct, a third is his own twist on the facts and a third is incorrect.
Monday’s television speech was also teeming with these elements. An example. Putin gave the impression that the communist empire was going down at the end of 1991 due to nationalism among the brother nations. In fact, it was Moscow itself that a year and a half earlier had inflicted the death blow on great “historic Russia.” On June 12, 1990, the Russian parliament led by Boris Yeltsin, for the first time more or less freely elected, decided that the laws of Russia would henceforth take precedence over the laws of the union. The Ukrainian parliament followed suit only five weeks later on July 17 that year.
This speech by Putin was the culmination of a fifteen-year burning desire for revenge. This revisionism can now actually become its revenge on history in Ukraine.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 26 February 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 26, 2022
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