A year has passed since the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, a conflict that has changed the world and whose resolution does not seem to be in sight. The war has revealed the hidden face of Vladimir Putin, who many did not see coming, although his obsession with his country’s imperial past is well known.
Many of the keys to the current warfare can be found in the period of Nikita Khrushchev’s presidency. The historic leader maintained close ties to Ukraine, where he rose through the political ranks to become head of the Communist Party, married a Ukrainian woman, led the reconstruction of the country destroyed after the occupation of Nazi Germany in World War II. , and, in 1954, decided to cede Crimea to the Ukrainian state.
Khrushchev was equal parts reformer and repressor. On the one hand, he promoted de-Stalinization and directed important social reforms, as well as the cultural opening of the Soviet Union. Despite his initial proposal for peaceful coexistence with the West, Khrushchev’s darker side involved him in Stalin’s purges, the brutal repression in Hungary, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the missile crisis with the United States, sealed in the menacing cry, shoe in hand, from the United Nations podium: “We will bury you!”
His great-granddaughter Nina Khrushcheva, a US-based author and professor of International Relations at the New School in New York, has written about Putin’s Russia, and is often seen as a commentator on political TV shows. She is an editor and contributor to the Project Syndicate-Association of Newspapers Around the World, an association that disseminates the opinions of leaders and referents of great international weight through hundreds of written media in 149 countries. Khrushcheva analyzes for this newspaper some aspects of her ancestor, Putin and the invasion.
– After a year of war, the prospects for peace are practically non-existent. What would be in your opinion the conditions for peace?
I don’t see an end in sight. It cannot be foreseen. The situation is at a point where Ukraine is neither losing nor winning enough to continue talking about a potential victory. And Russia neither wins enough nor loses enough to continue talking about a Russian defeat.
– Do you see a scenario of a possible change of leadership in Russia?
– There is always a possibility of change but, in general, it is an argument from the point of view of what would be desirable in the West. There is actually no proof that it can happen. And if it did, we wouldn’t know until it happened. It is a potential scenario.
– Do you think the war has weakened Putin’s position?
– The war has weakened Russia in the world, there is no doubt, because it is a war between Putin’s Russia and the West. But there Putin is not weakened, the Russians are still very supportive of him because no one wants to see his country fall, the same thing that most people in other countries would do regardless of what his government does. Many may wish to see the fall of the government, but not the country. The strategic defeat of Russia does not go down well with the population even when many oppose Putin.
– However, there seems to be concern in the government, a certain nervousness among the leadership.
– What happens is a problem of disorganization. There is a cacophony; Parliament says one thing, Prigozhim (the leader of the Wagner mercenary group) says another, Interior Minister Kolokoltsev says another, the government another, but it does not mean that Putin is in a position of weakness. He needs the war because, unless a victory is achieved, he urges the war to continue because as a war president he is more protected. As long as the conflict continues, it is more difficult for it to be stopped, unless the invasion goes horribly wrong. But I wouldn’t say he’s weakened because all the elite clans around him, as you saw during his Federation speech this week, have yet to decide who’s going to be in leadership and who’s not when he steps down. Oh. Those clans need you as a stabilizing element. For now. So as long as the war continues, he will probably remain in power.
– Nikita Khrushchev, your great-grandfather, was closely linked to Ukraine. He was a leader of the Communist Party, worked there, helped in the defense and in the reconstruction of the country after the destruction of the Nazi occupation. And he oversaw the cession of the Crimea.
– My great-grandfather grew up in Russia, but he worked in Ukraine from an early age. At 16, he was a miner in Donbas, and later became the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the equivalent of being governor. The ceding of Crimea to Ukraine is part of the myth because, being the head of the Communist Party, it was attributed to him after Stalin’s death. In fact, it can be seen that the documents were never signed. In 1954, Khrushchev was not yet consolidated in power, so it was a collective decision. It is an important clarification because now Putin blames Khrushchev for the handover – someone needs to be blamed – when in reality it was a decision of the collective government.
– Khrushchev loved Ukraine very much. What do you think he would think of this war?
– He thought it was a special nation, a special place. He was a great defender of the Ukraine. But the Ukrainian nationalism that is now on the rise he would never have defended, although he did support the Ukrainian identity as a different identity, independent from Russia. I think he would have been horrified to see the merciless shelling. The country that he helped rebuild from the ashes after World War II is being bombed to ashes right now. But he was also a centrist. In the Soviet Union, the Kremlin was the central power and, who knows, if he had believed that the Ukraine was trying to break up, perhaps he would have thought that it was necessary to reincorporate it. But I think he would have thought of winning Ukraine back out of conviction
– Can we talk about the existence of a Putin doctrine?
– There is no clear definition, Putin is many of the things that are attributed to him. He has imperial tendencies, although he would say that he only intends to preserve Russianness through imperialism. With a component of the KGB because in that entity you always have to win and demolish your enemies completely until the end because you are supposed to have the absolute right to do so. As a former member, the interest is always the security and defense of the nation. And when you’re KGB you see enemies everywhere. There is also a nationalism in the rhetoric. There is an anti-Western sentiment that is really strange because it is a contradiction. In all definitions of itself, Russia is a country that considers itself Western and continues to fight to be so.
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“I wonder how we could have gone backwards so unforgivably”
When he was a member of the KGB, Vladimir Putin used to say that he was an expert in communications. In the past year, many analysts have pointed out that the West did not see the autocrat of seductive rhetoric coming.
– Do you share the analysis of this double face of the Russian president?
– Putin was a recruiter in the KGB. He was in charge of attracting people and putting them at his service. He made sure he understood what people were thinking. He used to be incredibly charming but now she doesn’t care for him anymore after 20 years in power. He was as good as Bill Clinton: he spoke only to the one in front of him. And he used to read the audience brilliantly, he knew exactly what the audience was thinking. In the KGB they nicknamed him ‘the moth’, that dark thing that settles on sweaters; is a fitting term for someone who sits in the dark and opens the drawer and the entire sweater is totally devoured.
– While Putin was fooling them, Westerners thought they were fooling him.
– There was a general imagination about Putin, Bush senior was also from the CIA, although it cannot be compared with the KGB. It’s not that the CIA is a benevolent organization, but it doesn’t interfere in people’s lives. Americans don’t have to think about the CIA all day while people have to be aware of the KGB all the time. So there was a moment about Putin when it was assumed that capitalism, with all its bells and whistles, would gobble him up. I could never have imagined this. I wake up every day wondering how, after all the horrible things we’ve been through, after the Gorchachev era, we’ve been able to go back so far and in such a bad way, so unforgivable.
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