Who Is Vladimir
Putin?
March 1, 2025
I wonder how many Americans really understand who Vladimir
Putin is and what he has done to Russia, never mind what he's doing to Ukraine.
Putin became president of the Russian Federation on Jan. 1, 2000. He has been
the head of the Russian government, either directly or somewhat indirectly,
ever since. When he became president, he was nobody. He had been a quite
low-level KGB officer in Dresden, Germany. He worked for a progressive (by
Russian standards at least) mayor of what was then still Leningrad, then went
to Moscow, where he quickly became the head of the KGB's successor, the FSB.
Russian president Boris Yeltsin made him the country's prime minister in 1999.
He became president when Yeltsin resigned on Jan. 1, 2000. He was elected to
his own first term as president shortly thereafter.
When Putin first became head of the Russian government, it
was not obvious that he would turn out to be what he turned out to be. He was
essentially nobody. There is an assumption that Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor
because Putin promised to pardon Yeltsin and his family for the crimes they
committed while Yeltsin was in office, something Putin promptly did after
becoming president. In 2000, Russia had been free of the Soviet Communists for
less than ten years. There was some hope that the country might develop in a
more western, democratic direction than it ever had before. It became obvious
after not too long that that was not going to happen. Both Yeltsin and Putin
threw their lot in with the new Russian oligarchs who had become immensely rich
taking advantage of the privatization of what had been government-owned
entitles like huge oil and mining companies. In fairly short order, Putin
forced out or took over any media outlets that didn’t support him and
established control over all of Russia’s broadcast outlets. The Russian people
have no domestic news source that Putin does not control. He got himself
reelected several times in elections that were obviously rigged. He has now
proceeded to squelch all opposition in Russia. He has murdered prominent
opponents, including most notably Alexei Navalny, an opponent who may have been
Russia’s best hope for the development of a democracy.
Vladimir Putin is a Russian fascist. He has maneuvered
himself into a position of complete control of the country. One of the major
ways in which he has done to is by aligning himself closely with the Russian
Orthodox Church, whose Patriarch obediently echoes whatever the Kremlin’s line
may be on any issue including the invasion of Ukraine. Putin is not a
Communist, but he has called the collapse of the USSR the greatest geopolitical
disaster of the twentieth century.[1]
He has also developed a national ideology that has been a key part of his
staying in power. He works to set Russia up as the world’s alternative to what
he calls decadent western culture and democracy. As part of that effort, he has
enacted measures that oppress Russia’s gay and lesbian people. He claims to
represent traditional family values (sound familiar?), values which are, by
western standards, extremely conservative.
As part of his effort to set Russia up as a world power in
opposition to the US, which of course is what the USSR was, he has worked to
turn the Russian people against the west and its cultural values. As part of
that effort, he has claimed over and over again that NATO is an anti-Russian
organization that would conquer Russia if it thought it could. He has cried
foul again and again over NATO’s expansion eastward, especially over the
inclusion of the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in
that US led alliance.[2]
He has declared Ukraine joining NATO to be a red line that the west must not
cross. His fear that Ukraine might join NATO and the European Union are among
the reasons he invaded Ukraine in 2002.
It is not, however, the only reason and probably aren’t the
major reason he did so. Putin has taken up a line about the Russian people that
directly echoes Hitler’s line about the German people in significant ways. There
are lots and lots of Russian people who do not live in Russia. They live all
over what used to be the USSR. The Russians were the dominant people in the
USSR by far, and they spread all over that huge country to work and to live. Putin
wants to reunite them all in Russia the same way Hitler wanted to unite all
Germans in Germany. As part of that effort, Putin has claimed again and again
that Ukrainians are really Russians and that he has the right to incorporate
Ukraine into Russia so that the Russian people aren’t so divided. He’s flat
wrong about that. The Ukrainians have their own language. It is related to
Russian, but it is not Russian. Linguists recognize both Russian and Ukrainian
as related but different East Slavic languages. The Ukrainians have their own
history, a history which includes very long periods of time when much of what
is today Ukraine was ruled by European powers, especially Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, that are considerably more western than Russia is.[3]
It is true, in a sense at least, that Russian civilization
began in Kyiv, the city which is and long has been the capital of Ukraine. But
that was a very long time ago, in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. By the
mid-thirteenth century CE, after the Mongols sacked Kyiv, the center of Russian
culture and of Russian political power had moved hundreds of miles to the
northeast of Kyiv, to the cities of Vladimir, Suzdal, and, eventually, Moscow.[4]
The Russians didn’t control any of what is now Ukraine for centuries
thereafter. Russia’s occupation of Ukraine became complete only in the late eighteenth
century CE under Catherine the Great, who was German not Russian, but never
mind. Putin here is echoing the contention and practice of the imperial Russian
government toward Ukraine before 1917. The imperial government never recognized
Ukrainian as a language separate from Russian. At times it banned the
publication of anything in Ukrainian and the use of Ukrainian in governmental
administration and education. Putin’s claims about Ukraine have a long history
in Russia. They have none in Ukraine. Ukrainians today insist that they are not
Russians, which they aren’t, and that they never want to come under Russia’s
thumb again.
Vladimir Putin is clearly a Russian fascist. By that I mean
that he has established essentially one person rule across that vast nation and
has eliminated essentially all opposition to that rule, which is, of course,
his. His claims about Ukraine are clearly fascist. They are direct parallels to
what Hitler claimed about Germans living outside Germany except that the
Austrians and the Sudeten Germans really were of German language and culture
while the Ukrainians really are not Russians at all. Hitler took the Sudetenland
from Czechoslovakia with the consent of the western European powers. He invaded
and conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia not long thereafter. He occupied
Austria without violent resistance and quickly incorporated it into the German
Reich. Putin has invaded Ukraine under the same pretext that Hitler used in
those aggressive acts of expansion, or at least most of them. He has initiated
an unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine the same way Hitler initiated
an unprovoked war of aggression against Poland.[5]
Vladimir Putin is who Donald Trump wants to be. Trump is an
American fascist, and he wants to be an American fascist dictator. He has Putin’s
complete support in that effort. We’ll never know for sure, but Putin may well
be responsible for Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election. Trump
plays into Putin’s had at nearly every turn. He wants to pull the US out of
NATO, NATO being a bête noir for Putin. Trump is flipping the US from Ukraine’s
side in its war against Russia to the Russian side, something that must have
Putin dancing for joy in the halls of the Kremlin’s various palaces. So far, as
far as we know, Trump hasn’t murdered any opponents the way Putin has. Trump
is, after all, working in an American context while Putin works in the very,
very different Russian context.[6]
Nonetheless, Trump has set out to destroy any institution of our federal
government that could in any way stand in opposition to him. Though he hasn’t
committed any atrocities like the one the Nazis committed at Babi Yar or built
any death camps the way the Germans did, Trump uses America’s immigrant
population much the same way Hitler used the Jews and Putin uses the west. In
both of those cases, a dictator has blamed people for their country’s problems
that those people simply did not and do not create. Trump isn’t yet a dictator
(though it’s not clear that he knows it), but he blames immigrants in our
country for things they simply are not responsible for, and he accuses them of
dastardly acts that few if any of them commit.
I seriously doubt that Donald Trump knows the first thing
about the differences between the Russian context and the American context.
Rather, he sees Putin unequivocally as his role model, as the man he wants to
become. Putin is a Russian fascist who has created a fascist Russia. Trump is
an American fascist who wants to create a fascist America and will create one
if we don’t stop him. Folks, the way Trump fawns over Putin should set off
alarm bells in every American. It is a tragedy that it doesn’t.
[1]
This is a blatantly absurd claim in any event, but it being made in a country
that suffered between twenty and thirty million casualties in World War II is
simply stunning.
[2] At
least, it was US led until Donald Trump became US president. Trump wants to
scuttle NATO precisely because Putin hates it. And, by the way, I too think
bringing former Soviet republics into NATO is foolhardy, for if Putin attacked
one of them, we would be a war with Russia.
[3]
This is more true of western Ukraine than it is of eastern Ukraine, where the
population is more Russian than it is in the west. The most western parts of
Ukraine came under Russian control only as a result of World War II when Stalin
took them from Czechoslovakia and other nations.
[4] I
don’t think anyone should go to Russia these days, but the cities of Vladimir
and Suzdal, both north or northeast of Moscow, are otherwise well worth the
trip. They have the greatest old Russian architecture still in existence.
[5] Hitler
didn’t invade Poland because there were lots of Germans there who he wanted to
incorporate into his Reich. He did it because he intended to murder or enslave
the Slavic people of eastern Europe, including the Poles and the Ukrainians, to
create “Lebensraum,” living space, for the Germans.
[6]
The United States has a democratic tradition, Russia doesn’t. That is one of
the main differences between the two countries.
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