70th anniversary of Stalin’s death: what are the similarities between his rule and Putin’s?

by time news

Joseph Stalin, like the best brutal dictators of the 20th century, is a constant focus of public interest. 70 years after his death, he is seen as a distinctly pragmatic leader who mainly advocated the concentration of power and authority and led an unprecedented regime of terror against his own people.

The extent of his commitment to the ideology of Marxism, on which he based his regime, and which called for the working class to create a revolution that would change the existing social order and power relations in society, remains controversial. This, despite being perceived as the successor of Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution.

While some researchers support the fact that Stalin rejected the Marxist principles and disregarded them when they did not match his political desires, as he also abandoned them in favor of perpetuating inequality, social conservatism and especially Russian nationalism – other studies believe that the opposite is true. According to the claim, it was precisely the dictator’s Marxist beliefs that convinced him of the existence of a ‘class struggle’, something that shaped the years of the “Great Terror” – a wave of arrests and executions that Stalin carried out against his opponents as well as his associates, in the 1930s. to establish his rule in the Soviet Union.

In addition, Oded the tyrannical ruler encouraged an extreme cult of personality. A cult that began with his breaking into the public consciousness in 1929, earned him the nickname “Sun of the Nations”, and reached its peak when he turned 70; Among other things, the worship was expressed in his portrait that appeared from every corner, in songs that praised him and in the media mobilized for propaganda purposes.

Part of the explanation for the phenomenon is related to the admiration that first revolved around the figure of Lenin, the spiritual father of communist Russia, and which was intended to institutionalize the government in the context of the charismatic leadership model. Although not endowed with superpowers, Lenin’s charisma resurged after the success of the October Revolution, giving him a legitimacy directly related to the ideological fanaticism of the time. This was later projected onto Stalin, his successor, who believed that “we need souls even more than we need machines, tanks, and airplanes,” and spent considerable time mobilizing the masses by various means. For example, he became a ‘patron of Soviet cinema’ in the 1930s, actively participating in the creation of films that conveyed appropriate socialist messages.

A tribute to Joseph Stalin (Photo: FPG/Getty Images)

A tribute to Joseph Stalin (Photo: FPG/Getty Images)

Dr. Roman Bronfman, an expert on Russia and Eastern Europe, and a former Knesset memberadds: “During Stalin’s time, culture, which was suppressed, nevertheless flourished in the Soviet Union. It reached great achievements in sports, literature, opera, and ballet. A new intelligentsia emerged, mostly or in large part a Jewish intelligentsia that replaced the Russian intelligentsia that fled after the October Revolution, and built the socialist elite, but all this good was erased by the blood of millions of people whom Stalin murdered.”

An estimated 18 million people were imprisoned in the Soviet prison camps (the Gulags) in Siberia, which were used as a means of suppressing political opponents and opponents of the regime. They were first established during Lenin’s time in 1919 and by 1921 there were already 84 in number. However, only after Stalin came to power, the number of those incarcerated in them increased considerably. In the camps, the prisoners were forced to perform forced labor, suffered from exhaustion, hunger and disease, and up to 1.7 million people perished in them. “How can a person who is warm understand a person who is freezing cold?” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in his book “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” which describes the ways of dealing with a prisoner in the Soviet gulag in an unbearable reality of life.

Even above the memory of the victory over Nazism during WWII, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, also known as the “Hitler-Stalin Pact”, which was signed on the eve of the war, and in which a non-aggression pact and the division of the spheres of influence in Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, echoes.

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin (photo: from Wikipedia)

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin (photo: from Wikipedia)

In 1953, Stalin died alone of a heart attack. His close circle for a long time was reluctant to check on him for fear that they would disturb him. After his death, thousands of camp residents were released, but the complicated political reality that included hard labor in the concentration camps as an accepted tool of punishment continued at least until 1964. The leaders who came after him, as well as the democratization process in the former Soviet Union and Russia under the Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin regimes did not pass the test of reality , until the resignation in 1999 of the first Russian president elected in democratic elections in the country, when it made way for the prime minister at the time, the former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin.

What similarities can be found between Putin’s regime today and Stalin’s?
Bronfman: “The main similarity is in the control and exploitation of the Russian people, as well as oppression, pressure and arrests. In recent years, especially after the corona virus, Putin’s regime imprisons dissidents, almost all of his dissidents, and this is reminiscent of Stalin’s time, and it is no coincidence that they call the prison camps in Russia ‘Gulag system 2’. The elimination of the opposition, the control of the media, the absence of free communication, eliminated courts, this is the same dictatorial way,” the expert noted.

He went on to say: “In Putin, all the qualities that resided within him in a relatively dormant and controlled manner increased and worsened during the Corona period. He felt great fear, and as a result increased his guarding and intensified the loneliness around him; the remote work, the lack of contact with the citizens, this is quite similar to the paranoia that Stalin had Many, many years, but towards the end it got stronger. This paranoia also helped him die awkwardly, because people were afraid to come into contact with him and be accused of murdering him, even though he had a normal heart attack, and it might be that if his companions had given him medical help It was also possible to save him.”

“As mentioned, there is a similarity between the regimes that are now emerging in Russia and Stalin’s regime, although not with the same power and brutality, but the similarity is between the dictatorships. Every dictatorship is similar to each other just as every democracy is similar to each other, and this is the path that Stalin took from the beginning in 1924 onwards, and grew stronger In the 1930’s, 1936, 1937, the great years of oppression. So did Putin, he came to power scared and alone and inexperienced, and as long as he entrenched his rule in the Kremlin, years pass, decades pass, he gets stronger, and he learns and understands how to manage the things, how to suppress and persecute and knows above all how to take advantage.”

However, Bronfman argued: “However, Stalin’s Gulag camps cannot be compared to the prison facilities in Russia today. It is not the same intensity of cruelty, not the same intensity of disappearance, because we live in a different era. In Stalin’s era, there was no Internet , television, etc., and the depth of the cruelty became known mainly after his death, after the appearance of the books, testimonies of people who were rescued, and slowly it entered the public consciousness. I believe that with Putin it is different because today there are civil brakes, public brakes, citizens who are much more aware, and it connects The times are different; between the 20th and 21st centuries there is a huge technological leap, which makes it possible to know everything at once, and at the same time, and it is not for nothing that the Canadian Daniel Rohr’s documentary about ‘Navalny’, the most famous opponent of the regime in Russia, which is a symbol, won at the Oscars Because you can follow his resistance, script a movie, document his imprisonment in prison, and you can correspond with his entire staff. So we live in a different era, we know much more online than what was known about Stalin at the time.”

As for the distinct difference between the rulers, Bronfman explained that Stalin was not economically corrupt, but morally corrupt, compared to Putin, who is both economically and morally corrupt, and mainly cares about deepening his pockets and strengthening his associates. Unlike Stalin, Putin is not interested in a cult of personality in the classical sense of the word. It is not the ‘Sun of the Nations’ – it is a capitalist brand.

Vladimir Putin (Photo: Sputnik/Pavel Bednyakov/Pool via REUTERS)

Vladimir Putin (Photo: Sputnik/Pavel Bednyakov/Pool via REUTERS)

“Ultimately, the system of Russia today is a system of exploiting natural resources that belong to the people, for the benefit of the pyramid of the oligarchs, who are not independent people, but are all under the command, control and money of Putin. This is very different from the time of Stalin. Stalin, who may have been a murderer Cruel, and yet he did not steal the natural treasures of the country for his own personal gain, but to build a new socialist society. Putin has a combination of cruelty along with being a political dictator who strives for rich personal enrichment. Some even claim that Putin is the richest person in the world, if To take into account everything that belongs to him through the oligarchs and straw companies that exist in Russia.”

Bronfman elaborated: “Stalin is the dictator with socialist aspects, and Putin is a dictator with malicious capitalist aspects. The Russian people today are in a poor economic situation because of the endless thefts, the transfer of money abroad and enrichment at their own expense. The oligarchs don’t make money out of thin air, they make money from natural treasures. This is the spirit of the times, and the existing models. It didn’t start with Putin, it started with Miltsin, with the collapse of the USSR and Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The approach of combining dictatorial control with the free market,” he claimed. “With that, in the free market you either have to have iron discipline and discipline like in China, or you have anarchy like in Russia, and Russia chose its very unique combination of anarchy, subjugation and oppression with the capabilities of the free market. In the free market, the strong got stronger Even more, and those who were poor will become even poorer – this is the difference between the regimes. On the other hand, of course, the ideological similarity exists, and there is the personal-psychological similarity between the characters of Putin and Stalin, two dictators, one more brutal and the other more dangerous, Stalin did not have nuclear weapons and Putin There is, if I say so carefully Stalin was dangerous to his people, Putin is more dangerous to the whole world“.

On The differences between Putin’s war on the Ukrainians and Stalin’s war on the Nazis: “The beginning of Putin’s war in Ukraine was basically a copy of the Nazi invasion of Russia, only in the opposite direction. That is, the Nazis invaded the east, and Putin invaded the west, but there was a great similarity in moves, goals, and also mistakes. The Russians, as in any false dictatorship, use the terms anti – Nazis, so to speak, against Ukraine, when they themselves behave like Nazis. It is very complex, there is a similarity – only in reverse – with the German army, which attacked the borders of the USSR in 1941.”

Meanwhile, Bronfman said that surprisingly, Stalin is being revived in today’s Russia, what can be called the tyrant’s ‘renewed cult of personality’, befitting the spirits of the anti-democratic regime prevailing in the country: “Today in Russia there is a very massive return to the admiration of Stalin, who who was considered a historical persona non grata during the time of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The new Russian historians are rewriting history, some politicians extol his contribution to the construction of the USSR, ignore the memory of the genocide, and this is not a marginal phenomenon; If not mainstream, it’s pretty close to mainstream, and that admiration has been growing stronger in recent years. There is already talk of the return of cities and streets named after him, and monuments, and this proves the claim that there is a similarity between the regimes. People feel that they are returning to a kind of dictatorship, which is characterized by blind admiration and the cult of personality. The sympathy is felt mainly among the older population, who still remember the USSR as a communist regime.”

Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the victory over the Nazis, Moscow (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the victory over the Nazis, Moscow (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

In conclusion, the expert emphasized that this is a wrong romanticization because, as mentioned, the history of Stalin Robetz is stained with blood: “Over time, the information piles up, and you get to know more things, more examples and numbers, and the culture of memory is growing. There is an important Russian organization – Memorial, which commemorates the murdered in its time of the dictator, all of this accumulates into one big snowball. It is impossible to talk about the good, not even in the margins, because this red stain, the blood stain, some say that no less than 20 million people were murdered during Stalin’s reign in addition to the losses of the -2, and this is as a result of the repression, the Gulag and the transfer of large ethnic groups from the Caucasus to Central Asia. It was brutal management, and therefore it erases from history all the achievements that the USSR achieved during its time.”

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