WASHINGTON, DC, Mar 16 – Those who were born in the 21st century may not know what the U.S.S.R. was. For their sake, I’ll spell it out. It was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Note the word Socialist. The younger generations seem to love that word, notwithstanding the fact that it was the principal ideology of what was arguably the most oppressive form of governance the modern world has ever seen.
The Evil Empire, as it was known, was the brainchild of another immoral dictator whose name was also Vladimir – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. He and his successor, Joseph Stalin, held sway over Russia and its communist republics from 1917, the year the Russian Tsar was overthrown. Lenin held the reins until his death in 1924, and Stalin took over and ruled with an iron fist until his death in 1953. In that span of 36 years, some 20 million resistors were killed outright or died in the notorious Gulag—a system of detention and labor camps.
The rulers of the Soviet Union were ruthless. Disagree, and you became a dead man walking in the frozen squalor of a Siberian death camp. The Gulag system of detention continued until 1960, when the last death camp was shut down. But that didn’t stop the oppression of dissidents. It continued mercilessly until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. In the meantime, the persecution of anti-socialist rebels continued.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952. He became a loyal member of the Communist Party, studied law at Leningrad State University, graduated in 1975, and then joined the notorious KGB. He served in the KGB, also known as the Committee for State Security, for 15 years, including six years as a spy in East Germany. After the Soviet Union became Russia, President Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Republic, appointed Putin to the post of director of the FSB, Federal Security Service, the KGB by another name, he then became secretary of the Russian Security Council, Yeltsin’s agency in charge of national security affairs. In 1999 he was appointed to serve as the Russian president’s prime minister.
Later that year, President Yeltsin resigned, naming Putin to serve as acting president. He won the presidential election of 2004, serving in that capacity until 2008. He ran for the presidency again in 2012 was elected. And in 2014, he initiated his first invasion of neighboring Ukraine and took control of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea. He incorporated the Crimean peninsula into the Russian Federation. Putin then started calling Ukraine, Novorossiya the “New Russia,” possibly indicating that he planned the complete takeover of Ukraine sooner or later.
David Hoffman at the Washington Post produced a lengthy, insightful biography of Mr. Putin in which he suggests the president of the free nation of Russia never abandoned his communist background and, perhaps, never will.
Hoffman put it this way: “Putin defends the Soviet-era intelligence service to this day. In recent comments to a writers’ group in Moscow, he even seemed to excuse its role in dictator Joseph Stalin’s brutal purges, saying it would be “insincere” for him to assail the agency where he worked for so many years. Fiercely patriotic, Putin once said he could not read a book by a Soviet defector because ‘I don’t read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland’… While Putin has promised to keep Russia on a market path, his critics worry about his commitment to Russia’s young democracy. The institutions of a broad civil society – the press, political parties, free associations, and others – are not yet well developed. The rule of law has not been well entrenched. And these weaknesses are, in part, a legacy of the Soviet police state of Putin’s early career, when the Communist Party had a monopoly on power.”
Putin makes it easy for his detractors to call him a megalomaniac, a power-hungry despot determined to return to the good old days of the Soviet Union. But for one to be successful, he would need the support of the folks back home. The communist regimes of the past had the one thing that Putin doesn’t have—the unified support of the Russian people. Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev threatened the citizens of the U.S.S.R. They were a captive audience who listened and did what their rulers and their apparatchik uncivil servants told them to do.
It’s not just Ukrainians who are putting up a “surprising fight;” the Russian people have had some 30 years of freedom, and they have already begun to protest his war with Ukraine in great numbers. U.S. News says: “Protests have sprung in Moscow and other Russian cities since the attack began in the early morning hours of Feb. 24. As of Thursday, more than 8,000 people had been detained at anti-war protests across the country, according to tracking by OVD-Info. And several billionaire oligarchs – arguably the most powerful group of people in Russia other than Putin himself – have spoken out against the attack.
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