How Is Putin Possible?

 

This is a long piece for a log post, but I believe it to be important enough to be worth its length. It draws on my personal history as a person with a PhD in Russian history who spent some time in the Soviet Union in 1968 and again for the 1975-76 academic year. I hope that you will find it interesting and perhaps helpful in understanding what's going on in Russia today.

How Is Putin Possible?

April 16. 2025

I, along with other post-graduate degrees, have a PhD in Russian history. I haven’t been active in the academic discipline of Russian history for a long time, but I still know more about Russian history than most Americans do. Russia today is a major negative factor in the world. Its government is a major negative factor in the lives of the Russian people, or at least it is when viewed from a western perspective. Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has created what is in essence a Russian fascist regime. He has corrupted the Russian election system so that he wins every election in which he runs. As was true in the USSR, Russian elections are for show, deception, and propaganda purposes not for the purpose of actually choosing national leaders. Putin has had the government acquire or otherwise silence any media institutions that could possibly perform the legitimate functions of a free press. Those functions include investigating and reporting on illegitimate actions by the government. That doesn’t happen in Russia.

Putin has not set about recreating the USSR, though he has said that he considers the dissolution of the USSR to be the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century. He has, rather, set about recreating the Russian Empire. Not, perhaps, with hereditary succession to the top position in the government, but as a multi-nation regime in which the Russians are dominant politically, economically, culturally, and otherwise. He has invaded the sovereign nation of Georgia. He has invaded and waged a three year long war against the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Both Georgia and Ukraine had been parts of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for a very, very long time. Putin is attempting to recreate an empire with the borders of the former USSR but without the USSR’s Marxist-Leninist ideology.

That Putin’s Russia is a powerfully negative force in the world today is beyond question, which raises another important question: How is this possible? How could it happen in today’s world? Haven’t we moved beyond the 1930s, when fascist regimes in Germany and Italy and a Communist regime in the USSR threatened and actually destroyed the peace of the world? When fascism, with its complete suppression of civil rights, played a major role in the world? It doesn’t make much sense to most Americans. Perhaps most Americans have a negative view of Putin’s Russia, but few of them have any understanding of how the Putin regime is possible. I will attempt here to give a thumbnail view of how it is.

The basic fact here is that Russia has absolutely no meaningful history of democracy or of respect for the individual rights of its citizens. Russian history begins, essentially, in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the tenth century CE. The political structure of ancient Kyiv was controlled by a Grand Prince. When Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, known as Vladimir the Great or St. Vladimir, converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE, all of the people of his realm had to convert to Orthodox Christianity too. It may have taken some time for that to happen, but it happened. There was no question that could even be raised about the right of any resident of that realm to refuse to convert.

It is significant that it was eastern Orthodox Christianity to which Grand Prince Vladimir converted. He almost certainly did it because Kyivan Rus had important trade connection with Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire of which it was the capital. Whatever his reason for doing it, he converted his people to a form of Christianity very different from the Roman Catholic Christianity of the west. In the east, the Orthodox Christian church was closely tied to the imperial government of the empire. In the west by the tenth century CE there had been significant conflict between the Pope in Rome and the secular rulers of much of western Europe. There were no such developments in the east. The Orthodox Christian Church of the Byzantine Empire allied itself closely with the empire’s political administration. Therefore, in Kyiv, the church was in no way a locus of power apart from the region’s political rulers.

The Mongol Empire sacked Kyiv in 1240 CE. Kyiv’s prominence as the political center of the lands then called Kievan Rus’ came to an end. The center of Russian political and cultural life shifted from the Kiev to the northeast. Eventually, it came to be centered in the city of Moscow. Moscow was ruled by a Grand Prince just as Kiev had been. By the thirteenth century BCE, western Europe was experiencing the High Middle Ages, in which thought, especially theology, flourished. By then in western Europe there were political entities that saw themselves as quite separate from the Roman Catholic Church. It was not so in Russia. The Grand Prince of Moscow, not yet called the tsar, ruled pretty much as an autocrat. There was a class of nobles called the boyars, and the grand prince had to deal with them, but they had no institutionalized political power.

In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. There was no more Byzantine empire, which actually meant that there was no more Roman Empire, for Byzantium had been a continuation of the Roman Empire in the east. After Constantinople was no longer the imperial seat of an empire tied to the Orthodox Church, the people of Muscovy, that is, the lands of the grand prince of Moscow, began to call themselves “the Third Rome.” They said there had been a first Rome, the Rome we know as the Rome of the Roman Empire. It fell to barbarians, and, in the mind of the Russian Orthodox people of Muscovy, fell into hopeless theological error, an error that to these people amounted to apostacy. There had been a second Rome, Constantinople, but it had fallen to the infidel Ottoman Turks. The thinkers of fifteenth century Muscovy said that the fall of Rome and the fall of Constantinople meant that God had taken their role as Christian empires and the home of the true church away from them.

So now, they said, there is a Third Rome. It is Moscow, and there would, they said, never be another. Both the original Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire had been ruled by emperors who, though they did have to be concerned to some extent with popular opinion, ruled essentially unchecked by any other institution. Thus, Moscow would be ruled in the same way.

In the sixteenth century CE, Grand Prince of Moscow Ivan IV, known to the Russians as Ivan the Threatening (grozny in Russian) and in the west as Ivan the Terrible, declared himself to be “tsar.” The word “tsar” is a Slavic word derived from the Latin word “Caesar.” Ivan IV made himself out to be an imperial ruler just as the emperors of Rome and Constantinople had been. He had trouble with the boyars, but he essentially conducted a campaign of terror and oppression against them in order to secure his own unlimited imperial rule.

After the death of Ivan IV, there was a period of political and other chaos in Russia. Ivan IV left no heir as his successor to the throne, so different factions of Russian life supported various claimants to the throne. This period is known in Russian as the Smuta and in the west as the Time of Troubles. We needn’t go into the details of that difficult period of Russian history here. Suffice it to say that nothing remotely democratic came out of it.

In 1613, the house of the Romanovs became the ruling imperial family in Russia. A son of the Romanov family named Peter Alekseyevich Romanov ruled jointly with his brother Ivan V from 1682 to 1696, when Ivan died. Peter then became Tsar of All Russia with the title Peter 1. Peter 1 is known both in Russia and in the west as Peter the Great. He was in some ways a westernizer and modernizer of the Russian state. He founded the city of Saint Petersburg, named after himself of course, as Russia’s window on the west and as a port that facilitated trade with the west through the Baltic Sea. It was, and is, a much more western looking city than is any other Russian city. Peter studied Dutch shipbuilding in the Netherlands, and he created the Russian navy. e certainly was more fascinated by western Europe and its technology than any previous ruler of Russia had been.

He was, however, in no way a western-style democrat. His title was Tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1721, when he proclaimed himself “Imperator,” the Russian form of the word Emperor. It is a title grounded in western European history, but Peter apparently intended it as an expression of his total sovereignty over the Russian lands. He tried to make the Russian court look more western. He would, for example, punish any man in the court who would not shave off his beard. He built himself a summer palace at Petrodvorets, also called Peterhof, on the Gulf Finland modeled on, and perhaps intended to outshine Versailles.

Peter may have tried to make Russia more western, but he ruled it with an iron fist in a purely Russian manner. By the time of his reign, western Europe was in the midst of the Enlightenment, that world changing intellectual movement that made reason the standard by which to judge all truth. Peter did essentially nothing to introduce the Enlightenment into Russia. He ruled Russia with a iron hand in a purely Russia manner. He would tolerate nothing that in any way weakened the exclusive power of the emperor. In 1721, although the Russian Orthodox Church had never done anything anti-imperial, Peter abolished the Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with a Holy Synod presided over by an Over Procurator who was a government appointee not a man selected by the Church itself. He did it so that he could assert even more control over the Russian church than the tsar had ever had before. He made sure the church would never become an institution of power able to challenge the tsar about much of anything. Peter also significantly expanded the extent of the lands under Russian control in a purely imperial manner.

I’ll next skip ahead to the reign of the Empress Catherine the Great. She reigned as Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. She was, however, not Russian. She was German. She was born Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst, Anhalt-Zerbst being a minor German state at the time. She became the wife of Tsar Peter III. She came to the throne by deposing him and perhaps having him killed.

Catherine has a nasty reputation for her bizarre sex life, but that’s not what’s important for our purposes. What is important is that Catherine was fascinated with the Enlightenment of western Europe. She corresponded with major literary figures of her time in France and had some of them come to visit her in Russia. As much as she may have been intrigued by the western rationalism that led to such writers as John Locke and eventually produced the French Revolution of 1789, Catherine was no western liberal. She was as much an empress as Peter the Great had been an emperor. She greatly expanded the territorial scope of the Russian Empire. It was under her reign that much of what is today Ukraine came under Russian rule for the first time. Catherine did nothing in any way to weaken the absolute authority of the Russian emperor or empress. She tolerated anything truly democratic no more than Peter the Great had.

By the early nineteenth century, some Russians had begun to be disillusioned with Russian autocracy and to desire political reforms along western lines. Tsar Alexander I was Russian Emperor from 1801 to 1825. He is the tsar who defeated Napoleon after Napolean invaded Russia in 1812. He has something of a reputation as a liberal, but if he was liberal at all, he was liberal only by Russian standards, which is to say, not much. When he died in 1825, a group of liberal military and other dissidents attempted a coup de état. They’re known as the Decembrists. Their coup failed, whereupon Tsar Nicholas I came to power. Nicholas ruled from 1825 to 1855. He is known in Russian history as a rank reactionary. He did nothing to liberalize the Russian autocracy in any way. He is the tsar who lost the Crimean War to the British and the French.

He was succeeded in 1855 by his son Alexander Nikolaevich, known as Tsar Alexander II. Alexander II was actually something of a liberal tsar, at least by Russian standards. He introduced a number of reforms in Russia, some of them along western lines. He freed the serfs, which most Russians were at the time, though he did it in a way that made actually becoming free very difficult for the former serfs. He introduced the jury system into Russian law. He created an institution called the zemstvos. They were local assemblies of people elected by the local gentry, not all of the local people, to rule over purely local matters. They had no say at the national level whatsoever. For all his supposed liberalism, Alexander II did nothing that in any way limited the power of the tsar.

Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by a group of Russian revolutionaries. He was succeeded by his son Alexander Alexandrovich, known as Alexander III. When Alexander II was assassinated, a group of imperial ministers had been working on something called the Constitution of Loris-Melikov, named for the man who was the Minister of the Interior at the time of Alexander II’s death. This so-called “constitution” was one of a sort, I guess, but it actually did nothing to limit the power of the tsar. It would have introduced an elected body that could pass legislation, but the tsar was in no way bound by such legislation. People in governmental circles expected Alexander II to make the Loris-Melikov constitution law, but he hadn’t done so by the time he was killed.

Enter Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev.[1] Pobedonostsev is known in Russian history as a black reactionary. Many historians see him as a power behind the throne during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, something he actually never was, with one exception, about which more anon. He was a well known Russian jurist. He was especially an expert on Russian civil law. He had worked on the legal reforms of Alexander II. He was a devout Orthodox Christian though he was attracted more by the ritual of Orthodox worship than he was by the church’s theology. In 1880, Alexander II appointed him Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, the office Peter the Great had established in place of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1721. He tutored both Alexander III and Nicholas II in civil law.

When Alexander II was assassinated, his ministers assumed they could get his son, now Tsar Aleander III, to sign the Constitution of Loris-Melikov, as they had expected his father to do; but in stepped Pobedonostsev. He outmaneuvered the other imperial ministers and got Alexander III to sign a document titled the Manifesto on the Reaffirmation of Autocracy, which Pobedonostsev had written. It says that God had chosen Alexander III to preserve the sole autocratic power of the Russian monarch. That Manifesto set the tone for the reign of Alexander III, 1881-1894. Those years were a period of reactionary imperial government. Alexander III was never going to do anything that in any way weakened the unlimited power of the Russian tsar.

Neither was his son, Nicholas Alexandrovich, known to history as tsar Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia. Nicholas Alexandrovich was not the sort of person who ever should have been tsar. He was not a strong personality. He never really wanted to be tsar. Up until 1905, he did nothing that weakened his imperial power in any way. However, in 1905, the first Russian Revolution of the twentieth century took place. People across the country, including in the Russian military, rose up against Russian autocracy. The revolution eventually forced Nicholas II to agree to the creation of something that looked on paper much like a western parliamentary government. There was an elected legislative body called the Duma. It could, and did, pass legislation. However, the appearance of parliamentary government was an appearance only. The tsar could, and Nicholas II did, dissolve the Duma at will. Moreover, he could keep any legislation the Duma passed from actually becoming law. I suppose the reforms forced by the 1905 revolution were, or at least could have been, a first step on a path toward democracy in Russia, but Russia never became any such thing.

In 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia. The Russians had long seen themselves as the protectors of the Serbs, who were, like the Russians, Orthodox Christians. So Russia declared war on Austria. Whereupon Germany, Austria’s treaty ally at the time, declared war on Russia. Whereupon Britain and France, treaty allies of Russia, declared war on Germany and Austria, and World War I was in full swing.

The Russians started World War I when they declared war on Serbia. Russia was actually far more responsible for World War I than Germany ever was. But Russia was simply not able to bear the burden of the war. The Russian economy and the Russian military began to disintegrate. Russia’s infrastructure could not support the war effort. Nicholas II was an inept war leader, and at one point he made matters worse by assuming personal command of the Russian army. Things got so bad that in March, 1917, Nicholas II abdicated the throne. Thus the reign of the Romanov family, which had lasted just over three hundred years, and Russian autocracy itself, came to an end.

It was succeeded by something called the Provisional Government. It’s most prominent representative was a man named Alexander Kerensky, who was, by Russian standards something of a liberal as were the other members of the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government proved to be as inept at solving Russia’s myriad problems as Nicholas II had been. It refused to negotiate peace with Germany. It refused to do much of anything because it believed that it had no actual authority to do anything until its status has been confirmed by a constituent assembly that would draft a constitution for Russia. But that never happened. Under the Provisional Government, things in Russia went from bad to worse.

Whereupon we get what is usually called the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks, later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, were a Russian Marxist revolutionary party led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin. They attacked and deposed the Provisional Government on October 25, 1917 OS, that is, under the calendar the Russians used at the time, which was November 7 under the western calendar that the Bolsheviks later adopted. Thus, the Soviet Communists always celebrated the so-called October Revolution in November.

The ”October Revolution” was, at first, actually no kind of revolution at all. It was just a coup d’état. It led however, to a civil war in the Russian Empire that lasted for something like five years. The Bolsheviks had always been a small if fanatic band of Marxist revolutionaries. They had some popular support, but not a lot. Nonetheless, they managed to win the civil war under the leadership of Lenin as the political head of the party and of Leon Trotsky as the commander of the Bolshevik military forces. Their victory was aided by the fact that their opponents were never unified. Some of those opponents wanted to restore the monarchy. Some wanted to create a democratic republic. Some, like many Ukrainians, were fighting for independence from Russia. What matters for our purposes is that the Bolsheviks won.

The government Lenin established was a terrorist organization and a one-party dictatorship from the very beginning. There were some differences of opinion in the party, but they were allowed only within the bounds of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Some people think of Lenin as a good guy. Maybe he was if you compare him to Stalin, but he oversaw the creation of an institution originally called the Cheka. That institution eventually became the KGB, and its purpose was always to root out of the party people considered to be insufficiently loyal.

Lenin died in early 1923. There was a power struggle after his death. The eventual winner of that struggle was a man named Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to history as Joseph Stalin. He became one of the most murderous dictators the world has ever known. He wasn’t Russian. He was Georgian, this Georgia being not the US state but a region of the northern Caucasus mountains that had been part of the Russian empire. He set about accusing and murdering the men who had been Lenin’s colleagues when the country now called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established. He conducted show trials of those men, most of whom confessed under torture to crimes they did not commit. Trotsky, one of the real leaders of the Bolshevik party, fled to Mexico, where Stalin had him assassinated. Stalin managed to put himself alone in charge of the party, and the party was in charge of the country.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin forced the country into a period of rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. He created the Gulag, the system of prison camps where Stalin had lots of free labor to work on his building of infrastructure and other projects.[2] Opposition to Stalin was a capital crime. The Communist Party terrorized the country by having the forerunners of the KGB arrest countless numbers of people, often in the middle of the night. Most of those people disappeared never to be heard of again.

Which wasn’t even the worst of Stalin’s crimes. He wanted Soviet agriculture to be collectivized. That is, he wanted all farm land held by, and all rural people organized into, collective farms. It seems he wanted to reorganize Russian agriculture in this way because of the Marxist rejection of the notion of private property. The peasants would no longer have their own land to farm. They would own no farm machinery or equipment. All of that would belong to the collective farm into which the rural people had been organized.

The people resisted this collectivization. There was resistance everywhere, but it was most pronounced in Ukraine, which the Communists had managed to retake during the civil war.[3] So Stalin decided that the farmers of Ukraine would either collectivize or die. He enforced a famine in Ukraine and a few other places. He appropriated and removed all harvested crops and sent goons to confiscate any food a rural family had. Stalin’s famine killed around four million people. It is known by the Ukrainian word Holodomor. Four million is not as many  as the number of Jews Hitler murdered, but it still a simply stunning number of people Stalin killed in his effort to collectivize agriculture, an effort that eventually succeeded.

It seems beyond comprehension, but very many Russians today consider Stalin to have been a great hero. That is due in large part to the fact that Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. This invasion stunned Stalin because at the time Germany and the Soviet Union had a mutual nonaggression pact, the signing of which in 1939 shocked communists and socialists all over the world. Under the terms of that pact, the Soviets had invaded Poland from the east shortly after the Germans invaded Poland from the west in 1939. Germany and the USSR divided Poland between them. Then Hitler turned on his ally with a massive invasion.

There followed the deadliest part of World War II. Stalin managed to rally the nation to fight the Germans. He managed to create a huge armaments industry that produced tanks and airplanes that were, if anything, better than anything the Germans had. Americans like to think that the D-Day invasion of France in June, 1944, was the turning point of World War II in Europe. It wasn’t. The turning point was the Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from July, 1942 to February, 1943, thus being over well over one year before D-Day. The Soviets suffered more than one million casualties in that battle. It ended when the Red Army surrounded the German army that was besieging the city, and the German commander, General Paulus, surrendered to the Soviets. The Germans were on the run back to Germany from that time onward. They tried to make a last stand at the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in human history, but that effort failed just as the siege of Stalingrad had failed. The Red Army eventually entered Berlin and brought an end to the war in Europe. Yes, they got some help from us Americans. Yes, the western allies also fought the Germans in Europe, and the fact that they did certainly aided the Soviets. But the allies didn’t win the war in Europe. The USSR did.

In the process, the country suffered something like twenty to twenty-seven million deaths, the precise number being impossible to determine. For comparison, consider that American deaths in all theaters of World War II were around 420,000, far fewer than the Soviets suffered at Stalingrad. Far fewer then the number of people who died in the German siege of Leningrad. Orders of magnitude fewer than the Americans suffered in the entire war.[4]

The Soviet government used the devastation and loss of life in the war as an excuse for the poor standard of living of most Soviet people for decades after the war, but the party’s misuse of that tragic event doesn’t distract from the disaster that the war was for the USSR. When I, who was born in 1946, was in the USSR in the summer of 1968, several people asked me if both of my parents were alive. They were surprised when he said yes. No family anywhere in the USSR got through the war without losing family members in the fighting. We cannot deny that Stalin, human monster though he was, led his country in defeating the Germans.

Stalin never ceased his campaign of terror against the Soviet people even during the war. The NKVD, as what became the KGB was then called, was actively persecuting people even in Leningrad as over one million people died of starvation because of the German blockade. In the early 1950s, he was apparently preparing for a campaign of terror against Jewish physicians. But Stalin died on March 5, 1953. The whole country mourned his death, and not just because the party told them to. Stalin had presented himself to his people as their great friend. He was the children’s best friend, or so the people were led to believe. He had led them to victory against the Germans. Nonetheless, the world was well rid of one of humanity’s greatest tyrants and murderers in its entire history when Stalin died.

As there had been after Lenin’s death thirty years earlier, there was a power struggle within the party after Stalin’s death. That struggle was eventually won by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.[5] He had been a loyal party member and leader in Ukraine under Stalin. He outmaneuvered others who wanted the leadership position though he never had the kind of control over the party that Stalin had had. In 1956 he gave what became a famous speech to a closed session of the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He that speech he denounced Stalin, more or less. Mostly he condemned Stalin for what he did to the Communist Party and not so much for what Stalin did to the Soviet people. Still, Khrushchev’s speech was the beginning of such de-Stalinization as ever occurred in the USSR.[6]

Many people hoped that Khrushchev would usher in a freer atmosphere than had existed under Stalin, and for a time he did. Censorship of literature was eased, though, of course, it never disappeared entirely. The book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by staunchly anti-Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was actually published in a literary journal in Russia in 1962, something the likes of which would never happen again in Russia until the mid-1980s. Some Russians still look on the years known as the Khrushchev thaw with nostalgia.

In October, 1964, Khrushchev’s deputy Leonid Brezhnev carried out something of a palace coup and removed Khrushchev as head of both the Communist Party and the Soviet government. Brezhnev was the top man in the Soviet Union until his death in November, 1982. Brezhnev returned the country to rule more similar to Stalin’s than Khrushchev ever had though he didn’t kill anywhere near as many Soviet people as Stalin did. He tightened censorship. He prosecuted all expressions of opposition. He oversaw the arms race against the United States. He led an economy that strongly emphasized industrial production and the military over the needs of Soviet consumers.[7]

We’re getting near the end of the Soviet Union here, and things changed rapidly in that country after Brezhnev’s death. So let me say a few words about the significance of the Soviet era in Russian history. The Soviet communists always claimed that their “revolution” began in October, 1917 (OS). The Soviet Union dissolved on December 25, 1991. The Russian communists weren’t really in control of the what became the USSR until 1920 at the earliest, but I’ll use the Soviet calculation here. Communist control of Russia lasted for only seventy-four years. That is a very short time span in the long, long history of Russia. It is, however, a very important time span for today’s world and for understanding how Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is even possible. The Soviet experience still colors Russian life and politics today.

The Soviet period of Russian history was a period of tyranny, dictatorship, and terror. The Soviet communists claimed that they had created, or at least were creating, the freest society the world had ever seen. They created nothing of the sort. In truth, under the Soviet communists, the Russians and other peoples of the USSR had no meaningful civil liberties or personal rights. Yes, the constitution of the USSR said that they had all the rights we Americans claim under our constitution. The truth was, however, that no one was allowed to assert constitutional rights as a defense in any legal proceeding. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union controlled every aspect of Soviet life at least from 1921 to the late 1980s. The party controlled Soviet life in different ways. It ruled through propaganda. It claimed to be the party of the people, and it proclaimed its supposed goodness everywhere in the country. Any number of buildings had the slogan “Slava KPSS,” “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” displayed on their facades.

The party always controlled all publishing activity be it newspapers or books. Except for a brief period under Khrushchev, nothing critical of the Soviet Union could be published except, perhaps, cartoons lampooning shortcomings in the country like the shoddy quality of building construction. Not even that was permitted under Stalin. When I was in the USSR in 1975-76, I knew a journalism student at Moscow State University. He must have had some connections relatively high up in the party because he often associated with visiting Americans like me. He said to me: “It so hard when everything we see is bad, but they let us only write about things that are good.” That’s how it always was with the Soviet press. Essentially, there was no freedom of the press at all.

The party ruled through terror. Like I noted above, Lenin oversaw the creation of something called the Cheka. The word comes from the Russian words for “Extraordinary Committee.” It was from its beginning charged with securing the control of the party over the entire country. It did it through mass arrests, torture, and executions. Its name changed a few times over the years. For a time it was the OGPU. At other times it was the NKVD. It became the KGB in 1954, but its structure and purpose didn’t vary. It is hard to know how many people the KGB or its predecessors killed over the years. I have seen the estimate that Stalin killed something like twenty million or more Soviet people before the Nazi invasion of 1941. The KGB was involved in most if not all of that killing. The KGB had informants everywhere. Much of the time a person could not even trust members of their own core family not to be KGB plants. Many Orthodox priests were KGB agents. When I lived at Moscow State University for the 1975-76 academic year, everyone knew that someone named Boris was a KGB plant in the western students’ wing of the building.[8] The KGB was everywhere, which meant the communist party was everywhere.

The party ruled by continually touting the country’s accomplishments under communist rule, and there were indeed such accomplishments. The country defeated the Nazis. The country put the first person in space. The communists transformed the country from being mostly rural to being an industrial power. The communists made the country a major player on the world stage, something Russia had always wanted to be but not always was.

For our purposes, what matters most is that under the Soviet communists, the Russian people learned to live under an oppressive system such as their country, or much of anyone else, had ever experienced before. The communists claimed the people were free, but they knew they weren’t. It didn’t matter to most of them. The communist party had made the country secure from foreign invaders when it defeated the Nazis, something Russia had rarely been able to accomplish over its long history. The party created order in the society. The Russian people had always valued secure borders and internal order over the freedoms we westerners take for granted, or at least could take for granted until the second Trump administration. The communists gave them those things, and the people were happy that they did. When I was in the Soviet Union I never felt threatened by anything. There was crime, but it wasn’t very public except when the party wanted to make some crime public for propaganda purposes. Soviet society really was very secure though, of course, that security was bought at the price of oppression.

What the communists did not give the people was true freedom. They held elections, but only communist candidates could run in them; and the winner, always someone chosen by the people in power at the time, won the elections by absurdly high claimed margins. The country’s constitution proclaimed western-style freedoms and civil rights, and in the lives of the people they meant nothing. Most Russians were more or less happy to exchange those freedoms and rights for security and order. That is how it had always been in Russia, and the Soviet communists both used and reenforced that trait of Russian culture. Nothing in the entire history of the USSR prepared the people in any way for true democracy or meaningful civil rights.

Things began to change rapidly in Russia after Brezhnev’s death. Russians came to refer to the Brezhnev years as the “Era of Stagnation.” Brezhnev had maintained order and Soviet power, but he did little if anything else. After his death, Russia was anything but stagnant. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, pronounced Gorbachov with the stress on the “ov,” became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from then until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. He also held different positions in the Soviet government, but we just need to think of him as the top dog in the Soviet Union beginning in 1985 without worrying much about what office he held at any particular time.

He had been a loyal member of the communist party. By 1985, however, Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union needed radical reform if it were to survive, radical at least by Soviet standards. He instituted two policies. One was called perestroika, a Russian word that means “restructuring.” The other was called glasnost’, an essentially untranslatable Russian word that means literally “voiceness” but which Gorbachev used to designate a policy of relaxing legal restrictions on free speech. He tried to move the Soviet economy at least a little bit in the direction of capitalism and away from the strict central planning that had characterized the Soviet economy since the late 1920s. He wanted to make the country’s economy more responsive to the needs of the people. He, not surprisingly, ran into entrenched resistance to his economic policies from people who held positions of power or authority under the old system of centralized planning. He made some progress I guess, but not as much as he wanted or needed to make.

Glasnost’ was, I believe, Gorbachev’s undoing. He misread the mood of the Soviet public. He didn’t realize how much criticism and even rejection of the Soviet way of doing things would come pouring out if he took the controls off of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.[9] One of the most important consequences of glasnost’ was that different peoples of the multiethnic Soviet Union began to demand independence from Russia. True, technically speaking, the Soviet Union wasn’t an exclusively Russian entity; but the Russians ran essentially everything, and everyone knew it. Some of the Soviet “republics” began to declare independence from the USSR. Estonia, for example, declared its national sovereignty in 1988. Ukraine celebrated its independence from the Soviet Union in 1989. By 1991, the Soviet Union was clearly falling apart. It dissolved on December 25, 1991, (which is not Christmas in Russia). Gorbachev resigned, and the flag of the Russian Republic replaced the flag of the Soviet Union atop the Moscow kremlin. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more.

Many people hoped that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to democracy in Russia. It sort of did, but it mostly didn’t. Boris Yeltsin, who had been mayor of Moscow and president of the Russian Soviet republic, became the country’s leader. He was a somewhat charismatic figure, but he was also a hopeless alcoholic (as so many Russians are). He essentially made his bed with a small group of Russians who he made very wealthy in the way he privatized what had been state owned resources. He won what was probably a more or less fair election in June, 1991. He was reelected in 1996.

Enter Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Putin was from a poor family in Leningrad. After he graduated from Leningrad State University, he joined the KGB. He served in a relatively meaningless post in Dresden, East Germany. He was there when popular demonstrations arose against the East German government, which the Russians had installed and still supported. Upon his return to Russia he served under a mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, who was at least purported to be a liberal. Yeltsin eventually made Putin the head of the FSB, the Russian successor to the KGB. Then, in 1999, Yeltsin made Putin his preferred successor as president of the Russian Federation (as the Russian state was, and is, called). When Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve, 1999, Putin became acting president. He was elected president for the first time in March, 2000.

Putin’s rise from obscurity to becoming the president of his country is surprising at best. It is not entirely clear why Yeltsin put him in high positions in the Russian government including as head of the FSB. It is unclear why Yeltsin named Putin as his successor. Putin was relatively unknown to the Russian people. One theory has it that Yeltsin and Putin reached a deal under which Putin would become Russian president, then he would pardon Yeltsin and Yeltsin’s family for crimes, mostly economic, they had committed while Yeltsin was president. I doubt that there will ever be any way to prove or disprove that theory, but Putin did in fact pardon Yeltsin and his family.

Putin has held control of the Russian government ever since he first assumed the office of the country’s president on January 1, 2000. No one really knew what to expect of him as president. He had very little political experience. He had been the head of Russia’s secret police. He had been Yeltsin’s right hand man. When he first came into office, however, no one really expected much of him.

Certainly, no one suspected that he would become the Russian fascist dictator that he is today. No one expected him to ride roughshod over personal liberties the way he does today. No one expected him to seize control of all broadcast media in the country the way he did. Probably, no one expected him to become the international murderer he became when he had political opponents killed both in Russia and abroad. I doubt that much of anyone expected him to adopt an Orthodox Christian, morally reactionary ideology and proclaim it as superior to western liberalism the way he has. And certainly no one expected him to invade Ukraine. All in all, from a western perspective at least, Putin has been very bad news for Russia and her people.

So how was Putin possible? Well, consider that overview of Russian history I have given in this piece. Do you see any significant history of elected governments or the protection of personal liberties? No, you don’t. You don’t because Russia has no such significant history. The lack of such a history is perhaps the major way in which Russia differs from the countries of Europe and North America. What you do see is a history of Russia being invaded time and again by foreign forces. These include the Mongols, the Swedes, the Poles, the French, and, of course, the Germans. The Russian people crave protection against foreign invasions, and it’s not hard to understand why. Perhaps because they have no history of democratic government, the Russian people by and large prefer internal order to personal freedoms.

Putin plays into Russian culture quite successfully. Russia does not actually face foreign invasion today, but Putin makes out that it does. He sees the expansion of NATO into the countries that used to be the USSR’s unwilling allies and even into countries that were once Soviet Socialist Republics as an indication that NATO will come after Russia next. He particularly fears Ukraine joining NATO and becoming part of the European Union. Putin plays up a Russian fear of the west that has a centuries old tradition. Russians have for centuries felt themselves to be both superior to and inferior to the people of western Europe.[10] Putin convinces them that they now must fear NATO, and especially the United States, and rely on him for protection from them.

Putin isn’t as much about recreating the USSR as he is about recreating the Russian Empire, and he is very much about recreating the Russian Empire. Or perhaps what he wants to create is the USSR without any Marxist-Leninist ideology. In any event, he definitely wants to assert Russian control over at least the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as over Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia. He already has de facto control of his ally Belarus. Russian history leads him to that desire and to his belief that he can in fact create Russian hegemony over those nations. Russian history makes a dictatorial leader who wants to recreate the Russian empire possible.

Putin has established himself as, essentially, a fascist dictator. He holds elections, but they’re rigged. He imprisons or kills his political opponents. He controls all public media. He doesn’t have much of a party behind him, but he’s still a fascist. He has no apparent successor, which is typical of fascist dictators. Hitler and Mussolini didn’t have them either. Neither did Stalin, who was a fascist in everything except expressed ideology. Most dramatically, he has used the Russian military at will. He sent them into Georgia, and they still occupy part of that country. He has used them more than once against the breakaway Republic of Chechnya, a region in south Russia north of the Caucuses.

Most dramatically, and most tragically, he has invaded Russia’s neighboring country Ukraine. In doing so, he imitates Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Mercifully, so far no world war has developed as a result, perhaps because Russia has all of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons. In good fascist fashion, Putin has started the largest land war in Europe since the end of World War II. He justifies his invasion of Ukraine on a couple of grounds. He claims he is doing it to keep Ukraine from joining NATO, something that, if it happened, would make Russia feel even more surrounded by enemies than it already does.

Putin also justifies his invasion of Ukraine by reviving memes imperial Russia used in the nineteenth century to keep the Ukrainians suppressed. He says they’re really Russians. They aren’t. They don’t think of themselves as Russians. They speak Ukrainian not Russian, and Putin is flat wrong when he says Ukrainian is just a dialect of Russian. Ukraine has a different history than Russia does, and at least some of that history is far more western than is any Russian history.

So far, the Russian people have accepted if not enthusiastically supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They have done so for various reasons. Opposing Putin’s war in Ukraine, or even calling it a war, is illegal.[11] Openly opposing it will get you thrown into prison. Perhaps more importantly, Putin ties into very old strands of Russian culture when he says Ukraine is really Russian. He echoes Russia’s pre-1917 imperial government when he says the Ukrainians are really Russians. Apparently, most Russians agree with him on that problematic point. Most Russians probably agree with him that NATO is a threat to Russia’s very existence, never mind that it is no such thing. The Russians do, after all, have that long history of foreign invasions and the history of conflict with NATO, and most particularly with the United States, in the Cold War. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is possible for all of these reasons.

So how is Putin possible? How is it possible that a large, internationally significant nation like Russia can today be ruled by a man who is nothing but a Russian fascist? It is possible because of Russian history. Most Americans don’t understand the power of history in world affairs, but Russia’s history is crucial here. Russia has no meaningful history of democratic government whatsoever. It has no history of the people enjoying what we call civil rights, although the oppression of those rights was never nearly as severe under the tsars as it was under the Soviet communists. It has a history of authoritarian or totalitarian rule. It has a history of multiple foreign invasions over the centuries. It has a history of having been a major world power under the Soviets and no longer really being one. How is Putin possible? Russian history pure and simple. We will never understand Putin or Putin’s Russia if we don’t consider them in the context of that history. It is that history that makes Putin possible.

 

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[1] I wrote my PhD dissertation on Pobedonostsev.

[2] I lived for an academic year in one of the buildings Stalin started building with what was essentially slave labor. It was completed in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. It’s the main building of Moscow State University.

[3] Ukraine was, and is, the location of some of the richest agricultural land in Europe.

[4] I mean in no way to diminish the suffering and anguish of American soldiers and their families during the war. The loss of over 400,000 lives is a horrendous tragedy in its own right. It does not, however, remotely compare to the losses the Soviet Union suffered in that war.

[5] The stress in this name is on the “ev” at the end. The name is pronounced as if it were spelled Khrushchov. In Russian, the Cyrillic letter “e” is sometimes pronounced “o.” Written Russian doesn’t tell you which pronunciation is used an any particular word, one of the many things that can make learning Russian a bit difficult.

[6] A side note: The Crimean Peninsula had been part of the Russian “republic” in the USSR. In 1954, for reasons that aren’t exactly clear. Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukrainian “republic,” a deed that has had dire consequences in recent times. I will also note that by 1968, when I went to the Soviet Union for the first time, all public trace of Stalin had disappeared. It had done that everywhere except in Stalin’s native Georgia. I spent a few days in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in the summer of 1968. Stalin was everywhere. His picture was on the walls of our hotel and even in the city’s taxi cabs. I always figured that the Georgian people though well, he was an SOB, but he was our SOB, and boy did he kick some Russian butt.

[7] When I was in the Soviet Union for the 1975-76 academic year, most of the time there was no point in going into any Soviet store that supposedly sold consumer goods including food. There was rarely anything in them. When there was, the line of people hoping to get to buy something stretched around the block. Most people lived off the black market, where it was possible to procure goods and services the government supposedly supplied but actually didn’t.

[8] There was a western students’ wing of the building because the Soviet authorities wanted to separate Soviet students from western students so that the westerners wouldn’t contaminate the minds of Soviet people with nonsense about democracy and freedom.

[9] This outpouring of opposition to the Soviets doesn’t mean that most Russian people were unhappy with their government. There has long been a sharp divide in Russian society between the educated classes, who tended to look more toward the west for their ideas, and the bulk of the Russian people, for whom anything western was simply foreign. The opposition that Gorbachev unleashed came mostly from those educated classes.

[10] That’s the kind of paradox you’re faced with when you study or deal with Russia. Another one is that Russia is both Asian and European at the same time.

[11] Putin calls it a “special military operation” not a war. That is, of course, a thin cover for the fact that Putin is engaged in an illegal and immoral war of aggression in Ukraine, something Putin will never publicly admit.