Berlin – One reader writes that despite the war in Ukraine, there are still people around her who “show a lot of understanding for Putin.” There are people in the East who “successfully established themselves in the new life in the West” after reunification. She wonders about their attitude.
Yes, I also recognize such reflexes in myself from time to time. This is less about Putin and more about Russia. As an East German, you saw for yourself that the victors in the West did not care much about the feelings of their once powerful opponents. It all started when “the Russians” were not allowed to take part in the Allied farewell parade in Berlin in 1994, even though they had made the greatest sacrifices in World War II. Geopolitics was happily pursued in the West, while Russia was filed away in the archives of history as an insignificant regional power, as US President Obama did in 2014. Of course, that can be humiliating. Still, it’s no reason to show sympathy for Putin.
The center of the new world
I myself have long defended the former Soviet Union. Russians are among my friends. Many people around me influenced me. Including my godmother. She was arrested by the Nazis in 1936 and put in prison and a concentration camp for years because she had engaged in military espionage for the illegal KPD apparatus in Hamburg. The reports went straight to Moscow. In the eyes of the German communists, that was the center of the new world, the liberation of mankind from exploitation and war.
However, the more I later found out about the suffering in the Soviet Union – for example through Solzhenitsyn’s “Archipelago Gulag” and other books – the more shocked I realized: Anyone who lets entire slave armies of millions of innocent people toil and die in camps doesn’t care at all a better life for everyone. He despises people and freedom. What did that have to do with the original ideas of social liberation? Hadn’t Marx – to whom one referred again and again – once spoken of the freedom of the individual as a condition of the freedom of all?
Bare core of power
It can be argued that the Soviet Union was threatened by civil war and interventions as early as 1918. But that is exactly what has exacerbated the ruthlessness inherent in the system, perverted by Stalin’s paranoia. The security apparatus primarily fought its own citizens. Hundreds of thousands were eliminated, even leading to their own army leadership.
Yes, there were also thaw periods. But Gorbachev, who finally wanted to get serious about “democratic socialism” from 1985 onwards, failed miserably and was ousted. To this day, the Stalinist-style past has not been offensively addressed. Putin has finally stalled this process. A few weeks ago, the well-known human rights organization Memorial was also banned in Moscow.
Putin is a child of the Soviet Union. But above all he embodies their naked core of power, stripped of the “communist ideals” that some still mourn for today. The security apparatus that Putin comes from has always been technocratic. It was never about ideals. It was about pure power according to the motto “The end justifies the means”.
This thesis is also corroborated by a report that appeared in the ND newspaper in 1993 and was recently disseminated again by her. According to her, even as a politician in St. Petersburg, Putin is said to have described a military dictatorship in the style of Pinochet as a desirable solution for Russia. It was intended to end the “Russian Wild West period”, as Helmut Schmidt later called it. Putin was much more subtle. But the principle was similar: to rule smoothly by abolishing the opposition, neutralizing critics, preventing controversial debates in the media.
Twitter/nd.Aktuell
“No fake. This message was actually in ND on December 31, 1993” – nd.Aktuell refers to this on Twitter.
The elements of this domination have long been known. In any case, Russia only had a truly democratic parliament for a short time. Putin skilfully relies on nationalism and old great power symbolism. What is particularly dangerous is the stoked attitude of being surrounded by enemies (“foreign agents!”) who threaten you. And obviously a deep lack of understanding for democratic processes.
One cannot show any sympathy for Putin’s system. It’s an anachronism in a country populated by many cosmopolitan, peace-loving, modern people. You have my sympathy. I hope – also for my Russian friends – that the Ukraine war will end soon and that the beginnings of openness and freedom, which have all existed before, will be revived at some point.