Putin Plays Follow the Leader

Friday, Jan. 18, 2002
Back in 1941 as Hitler attacked the U.S.S.R. and the Red Army crumbled, General Georgi Zhukov is said to have muttered after a dressing down from Stalin: "Damn the mustachioed bastard!" Stalin stroked his moustache and asked: "Who do you mean, Comrade Zhukov?" "Hitler, of course," Zhukov said. "Who else?"

On an official visit in Poland this week, Putin suggested that the Russian law regarding the compensation of victims of Stalinist repression should extend to Polish citizens as well. "We won't compare [these] repressions to Nazism," said Putin, "But we don't want to close our eyes to the negative sides of the Stalin regime."

A couple of days earlier, Polish journalists asked Putin about Stalin's place in Russian history. Putin regarded the question as "provocative", but answered reluctantly that Stalin was a dictator. However, he added, "The problem is that it was under his leadership that this country won World War II ... It would be stupid to ignore that." If Nazi Germany had won that war, would we have seen some president of a post-Nazi democratic Germany suggesting 56 years later that the Hitler regime had other sides beyond the negative ones? Hitler built highways, won the war, etc...

Putin, has shown some sympathy for Stalin. He restored the music of the Stalin era-national anthem and seems bent on controlling the Russian media and regional governments as well. What does this portend for Russia? If the country won the war under Stalin's leadership, it only proves the sad adage ascribed to Churchill: Russians are adept at creating problems first and heroically overcoming them later.

Was it not Stalin who facilitated Hitler's rise to power by his policy of setting communists against social democrats in Germany? Was it not Stalin who dreamed of setting Hitler against the bourgeois West to advance the communist revolution? Was it not Stalin who made a deal with Hitler in 1939 to carve up Europe between the two dictators? Was it not Stalin who ignored all the warnings that Hitler would attack the U.S.S.R.? By 1945, Stalin had learned enough about warfare to defeat Hitler. But this victory had a price: over 26 million lives in four years. Not much of a bargain. All in all, Stalin's dictatorship cost Russia over 100 million lives. This is what Stalin's regime was really all about--and "It would be stupid to ignore this."

Back in the victorious 1945, Stalin raised a toast to the patience of the Russian people. "Any other people would have overthrown such a government," Stalin said in reference to his own regime, and went on to praise the patience and the steadfast confidence the people had in his leadership.

Today, many Russian are befuddled by poverty, mayhem and a reform process that seems to lead nowhere. Putin is positioning himself as a firm and resolute leader, a father figure for the democratic era. Hence, his respectful references to Stalin. Why should the Russian President consider a question on Stalin's place in history "provocative?" To quote Stalin once again: "When provoked, don't succumb to provocations." Indeed, we shouldn't--not to Stalin's provocations, nor to Putin's.