Putinology: Translating the rambling from the Kremlin

Echo essay reported in the Lancaster Online news by Abby Schrader:

On the eve of his rise to power, when he was Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin penned a 5,000-word manifesto, “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium.” In it, he lamented that Russia was “becoming Portugal” — a once-important land mass slipping into second- or third-rate status.

Russia's Vladimir Putin seeks to avoid the fate of being a cornered dictator

Putin concluded: “We are running out of time to avoid this.” That was more than 20 years ago, and the 69-year-old Putin is more fearful than ever that he is running out of time. This is perceptible in the latest set of proclamations from the Kremlin in unleashing an all-out war on Ukraine that is designed to reestablish the Russian empire on the basis of false historical premises.

Ironically, this deliberate violence may lead Russia’s leader to another fate he also seeks to avoid: that of the cornered dictator.

What is unfolding is a tragedy of incomprehensible magnitude for Ukrainians, bombarded by mortar shells and missiles, in the path of tanks rolling into their country, and no longer safe in their homes. But Putin’s actions last week also fundamentally altered the European geopolitical balance in ways not yet clear.

I am a historian and cannot tell you what comes next. Crystal balls have no place in my tool chest. But I do have some thoughts about history, and why it matters.

Putin’s distortions: Both addresses that Putin delivered last week intentionally and massively distort history to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine.

In last Monday’s speech, Putin pursued dangerous Russian ethnonationalism (the Russian equivalent of white supremacy), dismissing “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine” as a diabolical creation impressed onto a people who, from “time immemorial,” had been “an inalienable part of our What is unfolding is a tragedy of incomprehensible magnitude for Ukrainians, bombarded by mortar shells and missiles, in the path of tanks rolling into their country, and no longer safe in their homes. But Putin’s actions last week also fundamentally altered the European geopolitical balance in ways not yet clear.

I am a historian and cannot tell you what comes next. Crystal balls have no place in my tool chest. But I do have some thoughts about history, and why it matters.

Putin’s distortions:  Both addresses that Putin delivered last week intentionally and massively distort history to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Putinology 201:  A Russian white supremacist

In last Monday’s speech, Putin pursued dangerous Russian ethnonationalism (the Russian equivalent of white supremacy), dismissing “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine” as a diabolical creation impressed onto a people who, from “time immemorial,” had been “an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space .... relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties.”

Putin absolved Josef Stalin of blame for this policy, praising him for the “creation of a tightly centralized and absolutely unitary state.” For Putin, Stalin’s only shortcoming was that he did not go far enough — he failed to “cleanse” Russia of the “odious and utopian fantasies” related to the “ethnic issue.”

According to this narrative, the Communist Party’s move in 1989. to endow the Soviet Union’s republics with “sovereign socialist status” set in motion the process by which the republics came under the sway of “aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism.” Putin says those attitudes were then stoked by the United States embassy in Ukraine, NATO forces and other institutions in Ukraine.

Preposterously projecting his own preoccupation with bloodlines onto Ukraine’s democratically elected government, Putin accused it of denying Russian-speaking Ukrainians “the right to self-determination” and of pursuing “humiliation and genocide.” He claimed that only the gathering of all Russian peoples, united by blood and directed by the Kremlin, would correct the historical wrong set in motion by Lenin.

There is no reason to believe Putin thinks that Ukraine is the only territory to which this grossly distorted concept can be applied.

Setting record straight:  Putin’s narrative contorts history, and it is important to set the record straight. Lenin did not invent Ukraine: A movement of cultural self-determination in the territory that is now Ukraine began in the mid-19th century and gathered strength during the final decades of Romanov rule, when the czars used heavy-handed tactics to “Russify” its populations and banned the speaking of Ukrainian.

Efforts to gain Ukrainian independence coalesced following the February 1917, Revolution toppling Czar Nicholas II. 

A messy struggle ensued against the backdrop of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War, during which two Ukrainian republics took shape — one in the former Russian Empire and the other in Habsburg Austro-Hungary.

After the civil war ended in 1921, Lenin, in an effort to popularize Bolshevism, adopted a policy aimed at colonized people that was “nationalist in form” and “socialist in content.”

Stalin reversed this approach in 1932 and 1933, turning on both Ukrainian leaders and the region’s peasantry, whom he accused of withholding grain from the market and impeding his plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. 

In the process, Stalin purposely unleashed a great famine — genocide via starvation that claimed upwards of 4 million Ukrainian lives and constituted the greatest catastrophe endured by modern Ukraine under Soviet rule.

This was not simply the byproduct of ham-handed agricultural policies, but a concerted effort to stamp out Ukrainian nationalism.

Putin mentioned none of this, of course. This nuanced conception of history flies in the face of the self-serving ethnonationalist vision he has been crafting for some time. This is why Putin addressed his rambling speech to “our compatriots in Ukraine.” 

And, this is why, in his declaration of war, he called upon these same compatriots to lay down arms and greet the Russian forces as liberators protecting “our common Motherland” from “today’s neo-Nazis” who are attempting to “seize power in Ukraine” and are “plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.”

Zelenskyy’s plea:  Putin’s ethnonationalist fantasy is flawed and manipulative. He believes that heritage Russian speakers and those of Russian descent will automatically join the Kremlin’s cause. The fallacy of his position was laid bare in the brave, desperate appeal by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the Russian people — one he conceded would never reach them via state-controlled Russian television.

Choosing to speak in Russian, Zelenskyy also appealed to a common heritage with Russia, but one based on mutual cultural respect, not centralization around a Russian core: “This is our land. This is our history. What are you fighting for and with whom? Many of you have been to Ukraine. Many of you have relatives in Ukraine. Some have studied in Ukrainian universities. Some have made friends with Ukrainians. You know our character. You know our people. You know our principles.”

Zelenskyy stands as a symbol of just this sort of intersectionality and is not, as Putin outrageously charges, a Nazi: He is Jewish. His grandfather fought in the Soviet army against the Nazis.

In his defense of being both Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-identified, Zelenskyy demonstrates a belief in intersectionality that resonates with modern liberal democratic systems and the Ukrainian public. It also resounds with the thousands of people across Russia’s major cities bravely protesting the invasion of Ukraine, risking their lives and livelihoods.

Putin’s ranting speeches suggest that they were not produced by professional speech writers skilled in crafting carefully worded statements. Which makes it highly likely that Putin has surrounded himself with loyal sycophants, not advisers empowered and able to criticize Putin from within the government.

Putin has retreated into a self-referential narcissism that stokes his most dangerous tendencies. He is notoriously afraid of being cornered; his latest rants contained whiffs of this when he raged about the “illegal” Western forces that ruined “Iraq, Libya and Syria” — desperately ignoring his own government’s devastating role in those countries.

Putin is clearly haunted by the fates of his fellow dictators. But his gambit in Ukraine makes that scenario more likely for him than it was even a week ago.

Abby Schrader is a professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College, where she regularly teaches a course called “Making Sense of Putin’s Russia.” She has extensive experience studying and conducting research in the Soviet Union and Russia.