Vladimir Putin’s war on history

Vladimir Putin became known to the world in 2000 as a New Russian Democrat. He was an aide to the charismatic reformist mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. The presidency’s top political post – after a series of rapid promotions – was blessed by retired Boris Yeltsin, a quirky ruler who was often absent from office but never backed down from his decision to end communism and seek it. in the West standards governance.

Putin’s first, modest speeches were to the applause of the West. He suggested that Russia join NATO. He defended the freedoms of the media and speech. He gave an extensive book interview in which he revealed that, under the influence of his mother since 1993, he had embraced Orthodox Christianity. In his own first opening speech, in May 2000, he said, “the road to a free society was not simple and easy: there have been tragic and bright pages in our history. “Building a democratic state is far from complete, but a lot has already been done.”

The facade he and his assistants had built in the first few months soon collapsed. The disgust, already corrupt and incomplete democracy that Putin inherited, has been undone in the 22 years since that speech. Among the most shocking, tragic appeals took place last month, just before Christmas: the headquarters of Memorial, a human rights group, were closed.

The Memorial was founded during the years of the late Soviet Union by Andrei Sakharov, a nuclear scientist and human rights activist, and historian Arseny Roginsky. Sakharov had been released from exile by Mikhail Gorbachev. Roginski was once imprisoned for publishing a document entitled “Memory” – a doomed attempt to hold the mass prisons of the Stalinist period accountable. The Memorial took on Roginsky’s solitary work. It had research offices in the main areas of the camp. It was supported by great support from abroad and researchers dedicated to often wild discoveries. Memorial would diligently publish its findings.

While I was a reporter in Moscow, I flew to Vorkuta in the Arctic Circle in the early winter of 1992 to cover the campaign for the forthcoming parliamentary elections of Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. Vorkuta was built in the early 1930s to be the administrative hub of a network of camps whose inmates dug coal from anthracite mines. Gaidar was detained to give a speech at the city’s cultural center. The city council organized a good performance by local dancers, musicians, actors and singers. When the petite, chubby prime minister took the stage, he was greeted – a reception that quickly turned sour. Gaidar, a brave and principled man, spoke of the city’s past as a center of oppression. Scattered at first, then louder, came the whistles and the applause. When Gaydar left, I had a hard time approaching him because of the crash of people who were furious with him, while his security information was passing through.

It was the first time I saw how much the invocation of the past as horror struck people as an insult. These citizens – who had a difficult life in this icy city that it is now it quickly becomes a ghost town – they wanted the feeling that they and their parents and grandparents, who had staffed the prison town, had honor. Gaidar disputed that.

Closing the Memorial, Putin, for a significant number of Russians, will win rather than lose points, as he and his advisers must have calculated. Does this mean, however, as many commentators, Russians and foreigners alike, now believe, that the crackdown on an institute dedicated to the exhumation of the truth foretells a descent into a state comparable to the Nazism or Stalinism of the 1930s?

Do not believe.

Hitler and Stalin proclaimed themselves tyrants from the beginning. Tyrants in a noble cause, they believed. Tyrants of need, who would lead their people even though they sacrificed themselves in societies of freedom and abundance, based on ideologies and violence that drove away enemies. Putin entered as an awkward democrat and gradually embarked on an awkward authoritarian, finding his mission not before, but as he ruled – a mission to rebuild as much of the lost Soviet Union as possible. And among many – though they tend to be older generations – this is a nice ambition. Not for so many young people.

Putin is not popular with the rising generation. Polls by the Levada Institute at February and October last year showed that almost half of young people aged 18-24 disapprove of the President’s performance and only a third want to be re-elected. One essay by commentator Andrei Kolesnikov last month, based on polls by the Carnegie Institution, described a strong aversion to a war with Ukraine and a positive view of the country by two-thirds of young people aged 18-24. Putin does not have the power, the ideology or, most likely, the stomach for mass repression, as large-scale demonstrations begin over a bloody war with his closest neighbor.

It is not the 30s. At that time, all over the industrialized world, the globalization of the early 20th century had failed. Depression prevailed. Now globalization is inevitable. Russia is under-equipped to take full advantage of this, as its weak efforts at industrial modernization have yielded little. But it is rich in energy: it is vital to keep much of Europe, especially Germany, supplied with light and heat. Its elite, many of the members of which have been enriched by corruption under President Putin, want to be able to spend their money in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. When Stalin was dictator he had an ideology that could be used to justify the horrific consequences of his rule. Putin’s corruption, which depends on international cooperation from tax havens and the City of London, is more limited in scale.

Russia’s increasingly strained relations with China also impose limits on Putin. In Stalin’s time, the Soviet Union was the inspirational model, the “big brother” for Mao Zedong. now China has taken on the role of big brother. The CCP, learning from the view of Gorbachev leaving the basis of communism, has retained its ability to inspire fear, recognize and suppress its enemies – at present, Uighurs. However, even more than for Russia, globalization is the soul of communism with Chinese characteristics. China seeks at least equal status with the United States, but not to destroy it, either through ideology or war. It also has limits and will impose them on the little brother.

What restraint options are available in the West, other than recording the aversion to closing a large institution like Memorial? The emerging possibility of an invasion of Ukraine exacerbates the question.

The answer is mostly obvious. It is to recognize the nature of the Russian (and Chinese) regimes, which are dedicated to the covert overthrow of Western states – and to strengthen democracies against them. This is partly military, where the US remains unmatched and where NATO leaders last week, According to New York Times’ Steven Erlanger “spoke, in talks with the Russians, with excellent unity about a 30-member alliance whose commitment to collective defense is increasingly being challenged.” Erlanger referred to Anna Wieslander, president of the Swedish Institute for Security and Development, who said that “Russia’s deterrence is in NATO’s DNA because Russia is the one that can bring existential threats to European nations.” Sweden, like Finland, is not a member of NATO, but both Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and Finnish Prime Minister Sauli Niinistö recently stated that can now argue for membership. Putin’s threats have boosted NATO’s popularity – probably not what he wanted.

Just as important as military force is the renewal of our ideology, which is based on freedom and depends on states with democratic policies that promote civil society. The Summit for Democracy, hosted by President Joe Biden in December, was encouraging: as was his earlier acknowledgment that democracy “does not happen by chance: we must defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.” Renewing it, above all, highlighting the fight against corruption as a constant issue in politics and the media. Without this struggle, western societies, where the majority of people just make it, will continue to fragment. The life of the citizens in a democracy must be exemplary. Democracy and freedom certainly do not happen by chance – and they are not maintained by taking them for granted.

Putin’s Russia warns of what happens when corruption is rampant. The monument was dedicated to revealing the tragedies of history, which is why the Putin government considered it a threat and an outrage. The state prosecutor accused them of being “traitors to the homeland and collaborators of the Nazis” – a bleak ironic retelling of the Stalinist language of the past. Such lies can only be a product of fragility and fear. The Russian government knows that a generation is growing up full of intolerant men and women in a state that has been set up to make authoritarian leaders rich, and that what Vladimir Putin is saying is history.