Putin’s Power Grab

Those who wonder at Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rehabilitating Josef Stalin to hero status should remember one thing – Putin is a former KGB agent and intent on wielding power similar to Stalin.

The difference is that Putin is not homicidal, xenophobic nor paranoid.

He is simply determined to keep power, and restore Russia to what he feels is its rightful role as a world influence. Unlike Stalin, his goal isn’t to absorb the world into the Soviet Union, or subvert friendly and hostile countries as opportunities permit. It is to be the sole authority in Russia, and to dominate neighboring republics.

In some ways, Putin is the world’s most intriguing and enigmatic leader.

He has unbridled confidence, doesn’t blink when confronted, is personally fearless and adventurous. While ruthless when required, he opposes cruelty or misuse of animals and wild creatures.

Using the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII as justification, Putin took another of many recent steps to restore Stalin’s reputation as a progressive leader – the one who made the Soviet Union into an industrial giant and whose Red Army tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine in WWII.

Despite Russian overstatement, it’s irrefutable that Russia suffered the greatest casualties in WWII and inflicted the worst casualties on the German army.

Today, Russian propaganda claims they suffered 25 million dead in WWII – five million more than they claimed 20 years after WWII. Unmentioned is that Stalin killed twice as many Russians as Germans did. The Gulag and Ukraine’s famine are Stalin’s legacy as history’s most lethal tyrant — with the arguable exception of Mao Zedong.

Where once Stalin’s statue was banned in the Soviet Union (an exception was his home town of Gori), his bust now resides in Moscow’s war memorial, and his likeness on commemorative silver coins. Putin has steadily sought to use Stalin to consolidate his own position, and to encourage Russian pride for their country and its history.

Putin doesn’t deny the atrocities of Stalin, but tries to put them into a perspective that makes them more acceptable. He points out that every country has had shameful moments, but it’s “falsifying” history to ignore the positive aspects of Stalin’s legacy.

Under Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin was an unmentionable and blamed for every Soviet failing. This trend was eased under Brezhnev and Kosygin until finally, in the Putin era, Stalin has steadily been revived and even revered.

A peculiar nostalgia exists for dictatorial controls. The beginnings of democracy, choice, freedom and responsibility, create problems of order and routine.

Despite Putin’s efforts to exploit nostalgia (if that’s the word) for Stalin, reality is that Stalin’s terror is unmatched in modern times. Lenin used terror as a tool, Stalin used it as a weapon.

To gain power, Stalin first killed his political foes, then his friends and rivals, then the witnesses, and finally anyone who dissented. He surrounded himself with sycophants and echoes. Terror kept him in power, but it also paralyzed progress.

Irony in the 70th anniversary of WWII is that for the first two years of the war, Stalin was Hitler’s ally in the dissection of Poland. He massacred 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn Forest, and his deportation of seven nationalities verged on genocide. Without American aid, Stalin might not have prevailed.

Anyway, the old dictator is back . . . and Putin is stronger than ever.