The intensity and fury, scale and barbarity of the war in Ukraine is no accident. In its dynamics and motivation, the war launched by Russia against Ukraine is the culmination of the evolution of a political regime that is confused with the recent history of Russia itself: Putinism. Beyond the tyrant’s personality lies a whole system of organization of society and the state. And “Putin’s Black Book,” a monumental synthesis coordinated by Galia Akerman and Stéphane Courtois, with a foreword by Thierry Walton, is the anatomy of this terrible metastasis: the articulations of Putinism are crime, propaganda, kidnapping, violence, totalitarian appetite. Imitating Stalin, Putin erected a building that holds an entire nation captive. Years of education are dialectically followed by years of war. Aggression is now the ultimate test for his Russia.

System

Vladimir Putin, the one who became the head of state on the ruins of Yeltsin’s government, is, above all, a child of the USSR, a Soviet man recovering from the mentality of totalitarianism. Its apparent chameleon adaptation after 1991, its deceptive commitment to pluralism, are all strategies to hide its true identity for tactical reasons. Putin’s only ideological and anthropological frame of reference is the world he comes from. The Soviet man in Putin’s case is a mixture of aggression, brutality, imperial nostalgia and resentment.

Putin’s ability to seduce and control a large part of the Russian nation is due to this common heritage. Putin, like his subjects, is a child of communism. The career of an officer of the special services of the USSR connects Putin with a whole ideological and institutional line. The political police is a pillar of the Soviet system. Terror and espionage are two faces of this totalitarian evil.

And the myth of the Soviet James Bond, ready to fight the enemies of the Motherland, will remain for generations. Through upbringing, the bodyguard becomes an image of the courage of the Soviet man. From here to the rehabilitation of the KGB is one step. The legacy of the Soviet era for Putin and his generation is mental and biological.

From his Soviet predecessors (since fascination with Stalin is central to the Putinist imagination), the new dictator will adopt an elaborate model of control and propaganda. The failed experiment of democratization under Yeltsin is followed by accelerated autocratic consolidation. Putin’s dictatorship reworks the themes of Russian nationalism and Sovietism in the new world of television. Gradually, through intimidation, killings and exile, pluralism ceases to exist. The fate of Andriy Sakharov’s legacy, the Memorial Association, is symbolic: the Russian state’s attacks on memory and islands of democracy are deliberate and brutal.

“Russian World”

The earth is being cleared to make way for another world – “Russian world”. In Putin’s baroque synthesis, residual Stalinism meets the theses of Ivan Ilin’s Russian proto-fascism. The appeal to “traditional values” is part of this huge Potemkiniad. Moscow’s kleptocratic cynicism is drawn into the folds of false conservatism. In this education equation, Soviet standards intersect with tsarist standards. The call for a “great war for the defense of the motherland” gives rise to an attempt to organize the entire society. Putin’s “immortals” connect Stalin’s past with his present. Parades in Russia are a mirror of the militarization of society itself.

From tsarism and Sovietism, Putin adopts the model of the Orthodox Church subordinated to the state as a mouthpiece of propaganda. The symphony between the tyrant and his clerical accomplice Patriarch Kirill is complete. The Church no longer disposes of souls, but of the geopolitical fate of Russia. Its mission is to legitimize Putin’s criminal exceptionalism. The pulpit becomes a space for spreading genocidal hatred.

Putinism would be incomplete without an obsession with history. One of its fundamental areas is memory limitation. State commissions are tasked with Orwellian rewriting of the past. The crimes of communism are being covered up. Stalinism is praised, and the thousand-year-old unity of Russia is perceived as a party-state dogma. Historical education is education under the sign of mystification and hatred. Military parks are part of the new Russian childhood. Rejection of the official mystique becomes a crime against the nation.

Terror and barbarism are the basis of the autocratic system. The treatment of Chechnya is a textbook example. The transition from genocidal attacks to the transformation of the Chechen state into the personal property of some bandits is part of Putinism’s route. Chechnya is a testing ground for tactics of control and recolonization.

The edifice of Putinism is inseparable from the obsession with Ukraine. Putin’s syncretic nationalism deprives the nation of its right to exist. The caricature image of Ukrainians as younger brothers of Russians is integrated into party-state propaganda. Ukraine’s statehood is contested at the moment when the Russian protectorate is called into question. The prospect of a democratic Ukraine is a mortal danger. The alternative to tyranny would fatally undermine Putinism.

The war in Ukraine becomes an opportunity to finally solve the Ukrainian problem. Denazification is a concept behind the intention to destroy an entire ethnic group. Between crimes against humanity and genocide, Moscow’s policy is aimed at destroying the people. Deportations and murders are Putin’s tools in Ukraine. Soviet restoration involves the application of a program of barbarism – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro