On March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died. Three years later, in a secret speech, Khrushchev condemned the Stalinist personality cult. But the Kremlin soon became concerned that de-Stalinization was about to spiral out of control. On October 21, 1956, Władysław Gomułka was elected first secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party against the will of the CPSU. The Soviet Union threatened military intervention, and Gomułka submitted. On November 4, 1956, Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, where the government under Imre Nagy had introduced a multi-party system and declared its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. In 1968 the tanks then rolled to Prague.
All of these military interventions in formally sovereign states remained without sanctions or even intervention demands on the part of the West, because the Soviet Union acted within the zone of influence that had been granted to it at the 1943 conferences in Tehran and 1945 in Yalta. The Cold War was raging. In Europe, the Iron Curtain marked a clear demarcation line. In the second half of the 1980s, the communist bloc eroded. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev was no longer willing to intervene militarily in the vassal states, which also made German reunification possible.
Between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991, 15 union republics withdrew from the USSR. For Putin, this is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. But it was preceded by another catastrophe: the collapse of the Tsarist Empire at the end of the First World War. The Soviet Union attempted to restore the imperial greatness of the Tsarist Empire, but did not fully succeed. Finland and Poland did not become part of the Soviet Union (Poland only a member of the Warsaw Pact) and the Baltic States only in 1940 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Ukraine, which was defeated by both Poland and Soviet Russia in the conflicts that followed World War I, had been part of the Soviet Union since 1922.
destabilize, control
In recent years, Putin has massively promoted the Stalin cult in Russia, in contrast to before he even defended the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is certainly no coincidence that shortly before the war against Ukraine the organization Memorial, which worked to come to terms with the terror under Stalin, was banned. Putin sees himself not only as the successor to the dictator from Gori, but also as the successor to Peter the Great, which is indicated by his self-portrayal at public appearances, which would make any of the old tsars green with envy. Putin’s imperial ambitions do not stop at the borders of the Soviet Union. Finland and Sweden have been part of the EU since 1995, but are not members of NATO and until recently had no ambitions to join. But the fact that this has been discussed from time to time was reason enough for Putin last week to threaten military strikes on the two countries if they join the alliance.
Putin has consistently referred to the Soviet Union as “historic Russia,” when in fact it was a multinational state. His policy was aimed at making the former Soviet republics dependent on Russia, such as Belarus, which is now only an independent state on paper. Where this was not possible, he tried to destabilize the states through limited military operations, bring pro-Moscow governments to power or at least prevent a rapprochement with the West.
In the Second Chechen War (1999-2009), for example, Putin succeeded in bringing the country under full Russian control, with around a third of the population perishing in the clashes. At that time, Putin was still prime minister. The following year he became president and eliminated the last remnants of the rule of law that had functioned halfway under Yeltsin. Since then, Putin, whose career began with the KGB, has ruled Russia dictatorially with the help of the siloviki, a camarilla of military and intelligence officials devoted to him. In 2008, in the course of the Caucasus conflict, Russia separated South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia and recognized them as independent, causing Georgia to lose around 20 percent of its national territory.
The territorial integrity of Ukraine was guaranteed
A particular thorn in Putin’s side is an independent Ukraine. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe after Russia, is rich in mineral resources and has historical importance as the breadbasket of Europe. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was the third largest nuclear power in the world. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the country committed to scrapping its launchers and returning the warheads. In return, Russia, like the United States and Britain, has guaranteed the country’s territorial integrity. We now know what to make of this Russian guarantee. In 1917 Lenin explicitly recognized Ukraine’s independence – a historic mistake, as Putin says. He has been working to correct this error for a long time. When Ukraine wanted to sign an association agreement with the EU in 2013, Russia prevented this with massive economic sanctions. The Maidan revolution followed, and President Yanukovych, who was dependent on Moscow, left the country. In 2014, Crimea was annexed in violation of international law and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were destabilized by separatists supported by the irregular Russian military. To this day, these groups terrorize the population of eastern Ukraine through arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, torture and executions. According to the UN, this has already cost the lives of several thousand people.
Vladimir Putin, who is often active as a hobby historian, wrote the document in 2021 About the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. More radically than ever before, Putin denied the Ukrainian state any right to exist and referred to the Ukrainians as “Russians”. Like Belarus, the Ukraine was first created by the Soviet Union, and this error must be corrected, since the USA and the EU wanted to set up an “anti-Russia” in Ukraine, as the Maidan revolution had shown, and yet they tried to destroy the Russians in eastern Ukraine. Even then, Putin threatened to recognize the two “people’s republics” Donetsk and Luhansk, which has now happened.
In recent days, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly called for Ukraine to be “denazified,” a nod to its historic victory over Nazi Germany. In doing so, the Russian leadership is attempting to exploit the master narrative of victory over German fascism in the “Great Patriotic War”, which is still influential in Russia. The Russian people are said to believe that Ukraine is ruled by “fascists”. In western Ukraine there is still a certain cult surrounding the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who worked with the German Wehrmacht during World War II, went to Munich in 1946 and was murdered by the KGB in 1959. However, the right-wing extremists received just two percent of the votes in the last parliamentary elections in Ukraine, which is one of the lowest figures in all of Europe. In view of the fact that the Ukrainian President Zelenskyj is Jewish and a large part of his family was murdered in the Holocaust, the call for “denazification” is unsurpassable in disgust.
Let’s hope that this old-new imperialism, which is about to destroy the European peace order of the last 75 years, can be stopped.