Washington used the lessons it learned from the Vietnam War to trick the Soviet Union into getting bogged down in Afghanistan. Now NATO has managed to lure Vladimir Putin into Ukraine. They did this by constantly expanding eastward and pretending they wanted Ukraine in NATO, when they didn’t. The seismic geopolitical developments the Ukraine-Russia crisis has triggered—including the destruction in four days of seventy-five years of German policy—is tremendous for big business. A New Cold War or New World Disorder makes great bottom line sense for energy, defense, aerospace and technology corporations, among others. When Putin sent his forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, executives at Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman broke out the Dom Perignon. They haven’t stopped celebrating since.
When the Soviet Union collapsed like a house of cards in 1991, the western establishment’s aim was to render Russia as weak and dependent as possible. Conversely, the Holy Grail for Putin has long been to break up NATO and cast himself as a national hero, a modern-day Alexander Nevsky, Peter the Great and Stalin guarding against foreign enemies.
On the morning of the invasion, Putin declared on national television that Russia was fighting “drug addicts and neo-Nazis.” Perhaps Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has smoked a joint in his day but as a Jew he’s certainly no neo-Nazi. Putin’s loose use of epithets is reminiscent of Stalin’s during the Great Terror in the thirties. Thousands of people were sent to an early grave for being Hitler’s spies—when many were Jewish.
Ironically—and quite tellingly—seven months ago, in July 2021, Putin’s government passed legislation making it a crime to equate Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Over the long years of his rule, Putin has pushed Great Russian chauvinism and idiosyncratic imperial revanchism. The efforts bore fruit. Ask the average Russian teenager what they know about the revolution in 1917, and they’ll shrug their shoulders. But like parrots they repeat that Stalin, more than anyone else, saved the planet from fascism in WWII. Never mind that it was the Soviet people who defeated the Nazis, and not Stalin. Consciously or not, the Kremlin uses Hitler to whitewash Stalin.
Putin says he wants to “denazify” Ukraine. This begs the question of why so many far-right, white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups around the world have idolized him all these years, holding him up as a Great Blonde Leader, their version of Donald Trump. Why is one of Putin’s gurus Alexander Dugin, a “national Bolshevik,” which is basically the same thing as a national socialist? If Putin is an anti-fascist why has he used Chechen Islamofascists in his war against Ukraine? Not to mention his deploying of the elite Wagner Group, his own private Spetsnaz army, so named because its neo-Nazi founder, Dmitry Utkin, appreciates the aesthetic of the Third Reich. Clearly, one doesn’t have to be a socialist (or even a moderately good person) to be anti-fascist. Being against evil doesn’t make you good. It turns out it isn’t just patriotism that can serve as a scoundrel’s last refuge. Anti-fascism works just as well.
Putin’s kleptocracy was founded on the cooperation between the Mafia and the police and security services. A poor boy from a poor family who surrounds himself with billionaires, Putin’s implicit bargain with the Russian people was that he would deliver economic growth and they would allow him to erode their rights.
For the first time in his twenty-two-year rule, Vladimir Putin is vulnerable at home. No amount of patriotic oxygen is enough to keep the common Russian’s attention from their rapidly worsening situation. Putin himself has often bared his own puffed-out chest. Yet things don’t bode well for the autocrat in the autumn of his reign.
So far the anti-war protests in Russia are by people with a university education, most of whom are liberal. Courageous and well-meaning, they are immediately arrested. More worrisome for the Kremlin is the fact that some oligarchs have come out against the war. Who was it that said revolutions always start at the top?
Naturally, this crisis is anathema to Russian entrepreneurs “of a lesser god” and professionals who support jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The high price of energy coupled with a weak ruble is great for oligarchs involved in the energy market but catastrophic for those who make their money through imports. Putin and his billionaire cronies have shown they can trample the “lesser bourgeoisie” with impunity. Doing so to workers, especially those employed in the country’s large public sector, will be a lot more difficult. Many Russians are fast realizing that their grey KGB mouse-turned emperor is naked from the waist down. If the war in Ukraine drags on or expands elsewhere, who can say for sure that the Russian people—as they did in 1917—won’t take a defeatist position and hope for their own country’s defeat in order to get rid of Putin?
[Courtesy: Presidential Executive Office of Russia]
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
The author holds a Ph.D. in Russian history from Columbia University. He has taught German and Russian history at universities in the United States, Canada and Russia. His work has appeared in Slavic Review, Russian and East European Review, Journal of Family History, Russian Review, Geist, Threepenny Review, The New Statesman, Dissent and American Motorcyclist, among others.
