Previous Subchapter → 6.3 Are Russia’s annexations legitimate
No.
Alright I probably shouldn’t pull that trick on you a second time.
Let’s look at this seriously, ever since Putin rose to power many people have tried to understand his motives, his worldview, what makes him tick, and as Russia is dominating the headlines thanks to the war he’s perpetuating that speculation has only increased. Since the last time Russia was a boogeyman in the eyes of the Western world, it was the Communist- led Soviet Union, a lot of amateur politicians and commentators out there seem to think what we’re witnessing is a repeat, there’s this emerging concept that Putin is a sort of Communist, who wants to “remake” the Soviet Union. Ironically, even some Communists have come to believe this on some level, portraying modern day Russia and the Pro-Russian separatists as some sort of socialist cause.
And it’s true that on some level, Putin is nostalgic for the Soviet days, but here’s the thing, it’s not because of a commitment to Communism; This is something different, it’s about nationalism and power.
The USSR had half the world under its sway, a sphere of influence that started in Moscow and spread all the way to Berlin, Brazzaville, Hanoi, Havana, there was no continent that the USSR didn’t touch.
When the USSR collapsed, that influence collapsed with it, and its mortal enemy the USA took its place, and we saw in the previous chapters that meant Russia watched as its former allies were wiped off the map.
This is an experience of humiliation that Putin wants to undo, he wants to rebuild Russia’s reach again and block out its rivals, that’s a lot of what the war in Ukraine is about.
‘Soviet flags on vehicles should not be taken as an expression of a Russian policy of re-establishing Soviet power, but of re-establishing Russian domination over Ukraine’
Dr. Mark Beissinger, professor of politics at Princeton University, specialises in Soviet and post-Soviet studies. He told the FRANCE 24 Observers team why these flags may be appearing alongside Russian troops.
These scattered instances of Soviet flags on vehicles should not be taken as an expression of a Russian policy of re-establishing Soviet power, but of re-establishing Russian domination over Ukraine.
For the same reasons you could also say he’s nostalgic for the Russian Empire, which was even larger than the Soviet Union was, and even when showing some signs of Soviet nostalgia, he criticised the Communists for killing the Empire’s monarch, the Tsar, and for opposing Russia’s rich figures and religious leaders.
Really, Putin and his ruling party don’t have much of a platform beyond Russian nationalism, and that’s why his rhetoric often confuses outside observers. You see, both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were times of strength and influence for Russia, so despite their obvious ideological differences, they are often both looked back on with a strong dose of nostalgia by Russian nationalists, that’s how Putin has attracted followers from both conservative and progressive forces, he panders to this romantic nostalgia.
But when it comes to practice rather than theory, Putin’s party, United Russia has been described as either right wing or centrist over the years, but not left wing, let alone Communist.
And just to hammer home how Putin really feels about the Communists, he actually assigns a lot of the guilt for the current conflict in Ukraine to them, blaming them for, in his words, “creating” Ukraine, something that made Russia’s actual Communists rather unhappy.
Russian communist chief Gennady Zyuganov on Saturday rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s accusations that actions from the Soviet founders had led to today’s rift between Russia and Ukraine, as he marked 69 years since Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s death.
Speaking to the media after laying flowers at Stalin’s resting place under the Kremlin walls, Zyuganov threw his support firmly behind Russia’s military operation in Ukraine but maintained that the arguments blaming the original structure of the Soviet Union led directly to the 1991 split and today’s differences were devoid of “historical truth.”
In case you watched our Episode 1 history segment you may remember that the Communist leader here is right, Putin is being historically inaccurate; The modern Ukrainian state was not “created by the Soviets”, because the first modern Ukrainian state was the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which fought against the Soviets during the Russian Civil War, so Putin in fact blames the Communists for things they didn’t even do!