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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 20th 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
