Who is to blame that this war in the middle of Europe has not stopped for two and a half months? In his keynote address before the invasion of Ukraine, amateur historian and Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the tragedy on the Communists and personally on the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. In the early 1920s, this enabled the former Russian Empire to be transformed into a confederation.
This opened the dangerous door to the foundation of the Ukrainian state: “After the revolution, the main task of the Bolsheviks was to stay in power at all costs,” Putin explained his version of the history of the conflict. For this purpose the Bolsheviks were even ready to fulfill all the demands of the Ukrainian nationalists.
Legitimate the deaths of thousands of people with geopolitical decisions made a hundred years ago? Initially, at least, Putin’s criminal interpretation of history was absurdly logical. However, the further course of events in the occupied parts of Ukraine is not consistent with this.
As soon as Putin’s army, through destruction and bloodshed, eliminated the misunderstanding that allegedly arose because of Lenin in southern Ukraine, the occupiers in the city of Henichesk reinstalled a monument to the leader of the world proletariat that had been dismantled by Ukrainians in 2015. On administrative buildings in many conquered cities they hung the red flag next to the Russian white-blue-red flag, which is supposed to commemorate the victorious Soviet era.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
The coat of arms of one of the two Russian puppet states in the Donbass – that of the Luhansk People’s Republic – introduced eight years ago even looked like a parody of the coat of arms of the USSR. The five-pointed star is surrounded by sunbeams and ears of corn with ribbons in the colors of the flag of “Luganda”, the breakaway republic’s nickname in Russia and Ukraine.
The happy song from Stalin’s time
It is the nostalgia for the Soviet past that is shared by society and exploited by the government. When on May 9, Victory Day, Putin spoke about the return of “historical areas” related to Donbass, a viewer of the solemn military parade seized his idea in front of the TV cameras.
The Russian separatists in Ukraine refer to former Soviet borders.
(Photo: AP)
It was “our historical areas that the Soviet Union brought under control as a result of World War II!” he declared. He did not say what he specifically meant by that, western Ukraine, the Baltic states or large parts of Central Europe.
Many of these enthusiastic citizens remember the Soviet Union, at best, from childhood days. But almost every one of them knows the happy song from Stalin’s time:
“From the Amur to the far shores of the Danube,
from the taiga to the Caucasus
man strides freely in the wide land,
life became prosperity and pleasure.”
In the destitute years of 1990 and 1991, up to half a million people took to the streets in central Moscow and demanded the dissolution of the Soviet Union as quickly as possible. The protests were only 30 years ago. Where are these people now?
The politician and human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, who organized these rallies at the time, had to flee Russia these days. His recent calls to attend anti-war rallies have resulted in nothing but a criminal case against him.
Prosperity came under Putin, but then what?
Ponomarev recently admitted that the longing for a Soviet empire had never disappeared. Just as many East Germans from the disintegrated GDR did not drive to the FRG for freedom, but for Marlboro and bananas, in the last few years of the USSR the majority of the demonstrators did not rally for democracy or human rights, but for sausages and jeans. How wonderful it would be, many Russians dreamed at the time, if western prosperity made their acquaintance planned economy, free housing and state guardianship in all areas of life.
That prosperity has finally arrived under Putin, thanks to rising oil and gas prices. Some were content with villas and sports cars, others with filled refrigerators and Zara T-shirts. So the country was finally fed up. But with saturation came a diffuse feeling of aimlessness for many. The most important questions among Russians in the noughties: “What is our national idea? Where are we going?”
It might have been easier to set clear goals for the future if the new state had dealt with its history in good time.
It might have been easier to set clear goals for the future if the new state had dealt with its history in good time. With the emigration of intellectuals in the 1920s. With the deaths of many who remained in the Gulag. With the ruined peasantry as the price of rapid industrialization. With the expulsion of dissidents or their forced placement in psychiatric institutions – until the 1980s.
18 million Soviet citizens were members of the Communist Party shortly before the USSR collapsed. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian President Boris Yeltsin dared to use the Constitutional Court to dissolve and ban the party. The removal of former party officials and KGB people from the civil service was also publicly discussed at the time.
No ideology was hidden behind Putin’s love for the USSR
As early as the mid-1990s, Yeltsin’s team’s only task was to prevent the communists from returning to power. Presidential re-election in 1996 was close.
From now on, the government no longer tried to settle accounts with the communist past. On the contrary, USSR nostalgia has become a narcotic for a still weak state. TV shows with old songs, naive and beautiful Soviet films and the myth about what was supposed to be the world’s best industry and education at the time.
The result was a vague picture of a country where the sun always shone, where the official newsreel supposedly represented real life, where nobody eked out a miserable existence in countless barracks and shared flats, but instead made friends and supported one another. At the same time, it was also a picture of a country destroyed by traitors. Because how else could such a great power disappear?
Putin stuck to these clichés – but not because he necessarily believed in them. Already at the beginning of his reign he brought back the Soviet anthem. He declared the collapse of the USSR to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the world.
More Handelsblatt articles on Putin’s propaganda:
No ideology was hidden behind Putin’s love for the USSR. It was all about voter needs, populism, and stability—the word the president repeated most often.
Like in the early Soviet times
When this stability or inaction led the country into economic and social stagnation, Putin decided – as many of his comrades-in-arms say – to somehow go down in history with fame. After all, the enrichment of his childhood friends, the palaces, yachts and offshore billions would hardly have helped him to do so.
The citizens also longed for an end to this policy. Neither the enormous oil profits nor the entrepreneurial spirit emerging among younger Russians gave the country confidence. They longed for a vision like in the early Soviet times.
In public appearances, the Russian president often refers to old Soviet successes.
(Photo: AP)
With Putin’s return as president in 2012, the slogan of a “Russian world” moved from fringe talk of conspiracy theorists to the official nationalist agenda. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, and the Kremlin sent a clear message: “Look, fellow citizens, what we can do if we want to.” In 2022, the war of aggression in Ukraine began. The culprit is – it’s actually hard in that sense to argue with Putin about this – poorly learned Soviet history.
Had we grappled with this story, we would have come to uncomfortable but obvious conclusions. How that man does not exist for the sake of the state, but the state for the sake of man. That it is not about historical areas from the Middle Ages, but about a future-oriented economy. That it is not military special operations that count, but affordable operations for thousands of children in need.
It doesn’t need war, it needs peace. What bottomless past have we fallen into that these banalities sound like revelations in Russian today?
More: The sworn community: Germany’s lateral thinkers and their love for Vladimir Putin
The Russian journalist Konstantin Goldenzweig writes the weekly column “Russian Impressions” for the Handelsblatt. The 39-year-old was a correspondent in Germany for various Russian TV stations from 2010 to 2020. He recently worked at Dozhd, the last independent Russian TV station, until it had to shut down. In March 2022 he fled Moscow to continue working in Georgia – like many of his Russian colleagues.