Stalin’s shadow looms over the Russian Federation today. In Putin’s Russia, Stalin’s mausoleum is untouched. Stalin, seen as the founder and protector of the motherland, seems to embody everything that today’s Russia aspires to be. The grandeur of its colonial possession evokes nostalgia, and its military glory inspires the President of the Russian Federation to launch a barbaric attack on Ukraine. Never really breaking away from communism, Putin’s Russia dives into this Stalinist Soviet past to absorb all the energy of the image. Today’s hours continue yesterday’s. A statue of Stalin enthroned, spectrally, in the vicinity of the Kremlin.

Stalin and the Russian people

Stalinism feeds Putinism with diverse and influential ideological material. If Lenin is blamed for the birth of an artificial state, Ukraine, condemned for the crimes of the first years after 1917, then Stalin embodies the greatness that Putin’s Russia looks to as a possible remedy. Stalin’s cruelty, as in a mirror, legitimizes the cruelty of the present. The paranoid suspicion of Stalinism is evident in the insistence with which Kremlin officials accuse an elaborate Western conspiracy.

The Stalin era in this symbolic revival sums up the efforts of Russian imperial reconstruction. Beyond collectivization, beyond terror, beyond collective trauma lies the image of the Soviet Union, which is confused, in ethnic terms, with the great Russian nation. Sacrifices are necessary to achieve the set goal: increasing military power and deterring aggression. Expansion after 1945 would not have been possible without five-year plans and without a great industrial impulse. On this path of consolidating Russia, sacrifices are an insignificant price.

Stalinism teaches Putin’s Russia one of the most important lessons: the necessity of autocratic leadership as the basis of empire. According to the dominant reflection in the tsarist imagination, Stalinism once again confirms the essential connection between the uniqueness of power and the expansion of the state. Disunity, instability, pluralism affect the granite order of Russia’s possessions. Those who oppose the Leader are committing an act of treason. Russia confuses itself with its leader. The brutality with which Putin persecutes his enemies is a sign of the Stalinism that lives in the Russian political imagination today.

The shadow of Stalinism also means suspicion, which prompts the construction of an Enemy that must be exposed, constantly. Faithful to the Stalinist ideological line, Putinism offers an alliance between internal and external enemies. Dissidents in Russia are participating in the West’s attempts to undermine the Russian government. The external enemy dialectically corresponds to the Enemy from the besieged city.

The logic of the authorities in Moscow resembles the first years of the Cold War. Russia is a fortress that must be managed like a garrison. The United States and its allies initiate conspiracies that teach those who deny Putin’s rule divine right. The strengthening of totalitarian control is a natural consequence of the encirclement syndrome. The peaceful Russian people must defend themselves in order to survive.

Putinism refines the Stalinist hypothesis when it combines Soviet nostalgia with Russian messianism. Like Stalinism, Putinism attributes the qualities of the enemy to entire nations. The deliberateness of the genocide committed in Ukraine in the 1930s presupposes the thoroughness with which today’s Russia bombs, rapes, loots and deports in the attacked Ukraine. Those who refuse to be part of the great Slavic people of the Russian world must be eliminated as a people.

The Stalinist precedent offers a remedy. The Katyn crimes were an attempt to solve the problem of another enemy nation – the Polish. Politics in the territories occupied by Russia is primarily Stalinist. The scenography of the captured annexation refers to the moments of the conclusion of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Deportations and terror are a hallmark of the Soviet era. Read the entire article and leave comments on Contributors.ro