Every year in late December, diehard fans come to the Kremlin to deposit red carnations at Joseph Stalin’s grave. They are celebrating the birthday of the Friend of All Soviet People.
You might say, so what? The world is full of freaks, and some choose to worship mass murderers. When Charles Manson finally dies, a few nutty supporters may also come to his grave every year, praying for Helter Skelter.
But something is different this year. Not only did the red carnations show up as usual two weeks ago, but there are new monuments of Stalin popping up throughout Russia – and in the “Luhansk People’s Republic” in East Ukraine.
As they say in the fashion world, everything old becomes new again. Back when Stalin was in power, his monuments and portraits were ubiquitous throughout the Soviet Union and most of the communist world. But after Stalin died, de-Stalinization quickly followed. Nikita Khruschev broke with the past and denounced Stalin’s era for what it truly was – a reign of mass terror. He released most of the gulag’s prisoners and ordered the monuments to be demolished. Khruschev was soon pushed aside, but condemnation of Stalinism remained the consensus view among most Russians for decades.
Now, more than half a century later, Uncle Joe’s monuments are making a comeback. Why? Communism in its classic form is no longer practiced anywhere in the world except North Korea. A rebirth of the Soviet Union in its full glory is inconceivable. Stalin seems a relic of a bygone era. Nobody could aspire to replicate his vision in today’s world. Right?
Nostalgia for a strong leader and the country he led is a plausible but weak excuse. It’s true that under Stalin, the Soviet Union became a mighty empire. He had inherited a country devastated by nine years of upheaval – first World War I, then two revolutions, then another five years of brutal civil war and famine that ended with the Bolsheviks consolidating power. The young communist regime was despised by the rest of the world, surrounded by hostile countries harboring millions of ancien regime emigres. Many of them expected to return to power soon, when the utopian republic would surely collapse after a few hungry winters. Stalin ended up ruling for three decades and transformed that utopian republic into a superpower: a nuclear-armed industrial powerhouse, winner of World War II, half of Europe under its heel. And oh yes, tens of millions of its population got slaughtered in the process. Alas, that’s the price of empire-building, Uncle Joe and his fans would say.
So it must be that submission to tyranny for the sake of national greatness is an acceptable trade for people who bring red carnations to the Kremlin every year. To hell with democracy, they are saying, if it means the loss of empire. And, in their eyes, it has meant just that: in Russia’s case, both brief experiments with democracy – in 1917 and then the mid-1990’s – coincided with upheaval, a weakening of the empire, and losses of territory. Well then, bring back the despots! The end justifies the means for those who cherish a strong Russia more than a free Russia. And so they shrug away Stalin’s atrocities.
That preference – strong Motherland first, civil liberties a distant second – seems persistent among most Russians. (Opinion polls show that a respectable minority favors Western liberal values, but they are outweighed by a combination of Putin supporters, people who prefer a return to socialism and people who prefer an “iron fist” rigid order.) It explains much about both Russian history and modern Russia. It also suggests something more serious than nostalgia for old glory is now at play. The reappearance of Stalin’s monuments in Russian cities is a growing and alarming trend. No longer a fringe fetish, Stalin is becoming widely accepted again. And with him, so are his methods. Stalinism is coming back to life.
In some parts of the former Soviet Union, it never really died. Aside from the three Baltic states, the only post-Soviet states where political repression is limited today might be Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova. (And some of those are a stretch.) Try criticizing the government in Uzbekistan, or Turkmenistan, or Azerbaijan in the main town square, and see what happens to you. In Uzbekistan’s case, the same president has been in power since the Soviet Union broke up in 1990. Same is true in Kazakhstan. “Big Daddy” Lukashenko has ruled Belarus since 1994. But at least he has avoided shooting at crowds of opponents like many of his Central Asian and Ukrainian colleagues have done, so Big Daddy earns the Most Mellow Post-Soviet Dictator award.
Russia dabbled in democracy in the 1990’s and still maintains the illusion of a multi-party system, but its regime has grown increasingly authoritarian. Some protests are still allowed, and internet content is not censored like it is in mainland China. But real opposition to Putin is a shrinking and besieged ghetto. Even more ominous are the shady “frozen conflict” zones that are not formally Russian lands but are occupied by Russian and/or pro-Russian forces, from Abkhazia to Donetsk. Generally, these grey areas are ruled by men in military fatigues. These are perfect laboratories for restoring totalitarian rule. (Try shouting “Glory to Ukraine” in the middle of Donetsk, and see what happens to you.) So it is not surprising that Stalin posters and statues are a particularly frequent sight in rebel-held parts of East Ukraine.
Civil liberties are not flourishing in the rest of Ukraine, either. Russian TV channels have been turned off and the Communist Party has been banned. Kiev’s new rulers used artillery against rebellious towns in the East. Try advocating peace with the rebels, or separatism, in the middle of a street in Kiev, and see what happens to you. You won’t hear such views on any Ukrainian TV channel, even though millions of Ukrainians support them. Well, at least there are many political parties to choose from, including Darth Vader’s Party.
Still, Moscow remains the big prize for Uncle Joe’s avid fans. If they can bring his true old ways back to life there, Pussy Riot won’t get away with serving less than two years in jail as they did. In the “good old days” they would have never been seen alive again. And forget about unlimited internet access and freedom of travel overseas, still available to most Russians. Much work remains to be done!
The new Stalin monuments are a harbinger of more ugly days to come. Once again, Russians feel surrounded by enemies, just like 1922 when Stalin took over power from the dying Lenin. And once again, some people yearn for a strong Uncle Joe to steer the nation’s ship through choppy waters. Sanctioned by the West, Russia’s rulers have little left to lose by acting tyrannically and are now less likely to be criticized by their citizens. They can plausibly argue that Russia is again facing existential threats: the threat of losing what little remains of Russia’s external sphere of influence – due to Ukraine’s defection to the West – and, not much further down the road, threats to internal Russian cohesion from Islamic fundamentalism, regional separatism, and pro-Western “traitors” funded by the CIA. These threats may be half real and half nonsense, but that’s not the point: they are helping to fuel the rebirth of Stalinism in Russia.
Stalinism may have gone to sleep, but Russian nationalism and paranoia never did. Facing new dents in the dwindling empire, the Russians had a hard choice: accept Russia’s new status as a crumbling has-been, or support Putin’s costly fight to regain the status quo that existed before 2014. Most chose the second option.
The status quo cannot be restored consensually. At least not with the current leaders in charge in the West and in Kiev. So we have a stand-off. The West has emphatically rejected what most Russians have long viewed as their national entitlement – earned with much blood over centuries of wars and cemented by Stalin in the Yalta treaty at the end of World War II: a buffer zone of weak or neutral states around Russia’s European borders. That was the core legacy of Stalin, one that Russia has always treasured and never fully relinquished – even after taking down his monuments. Never mind the piles of bones of Russians and their neighbors that this buffer zone was built on.
This retention of a rump semi-empire after the Cold War is why the seeds of Stalin are more durable than the seeds of Hitler. Unlike the Germans, the Russians never fully turned the page on their bloody butcher. Unlike Germany, Russia never experienced total defeat. The Russians never had to bend the knee and say “I’m sorry” to their bruised neighbors. Are they better off for being unbeatable? Germany and Japan have shown that total defeat can sometimes lead to a magnificent rebirth.
The Russian people didn’t like Stalin’s massacres, yet accepted the result. They were proud of the empire that this bloodshed produced. And they were convinced that nobody would ever contest Russia’s retention of dominion in “her neighborhood.” But some of their neighbors – and their Western sponsors – did not concur, and blew up the status quo when a compelling opportunity arose. Now, the bill for Stalin’s atrocities in Eastern Europe may be finally coming due – with interest and penalties.
Not surprisingly, the majority of Russians do not accept this “new normal” and are willing to fight back despite the economic pain caused by Western sanctions. Capitulations are rare in Russian history, while poverty is the norm. And allowing the buffer zone to vanish is viewed as capitulation – the end of Russia as a great power. American tanks would be 300 miles away from Moscow. There would be nowhere left to retreat. Why should the Russians surrender to someone whom they can still annihilate?
Moreover, in many Russians’ minds (and certainly on Russian TV), they might be winning. Russia’s flag flies defiantly over Crimea. It is doubtful that Russia’s other neighbors, such as the Belarussians, will try to repeat the Ukrainian and Georgian experiments given their mixed outcomes so far. And the rise of China, ruled by an even more authoritarian regime than Putin’s, encourages some Russians to believe that the preeminence of Western liberal values may be ending. Pretty soon, the TV box is telling them, the Western bastards will have much more to worry about than Russia trying to hang onto some former colonies. They cannot possibly want to confront us and China at the same time, and will have to be nice to us again. We just need to close ranks and wait them out. Time and geography are on our side. We are patient and very strong, and this is our backyard. Ukraine is not getting any stronger and has nowhere to run from us. And if they try anything stupid, we can always kick their butt again.
So, both sides are doomed to a stalemate and a new cold war for the foreseeable future. Russians will be told to focus on mobilizing national resources and digging in to protect the fortress. In this harsh environment, the rights of journalists to write exposés about corruption, or the rights of gay people to marry, can be dismissed as trivial and subversive by most Russians. Not that individual freedoms were ever held in high regard by most of them anyway.
And this opens the door for a new strongman, be it Putin or a more brutal successor, to abandon any pretense of pluralism and declare himself the new Dear Leader. The TV will show patriotic crowds, excited by the second coming of Uncle Joe, waving red carnations and applauding him. On to Berlin! Or at least Kharkiv.
Francis Fukuyama was wrong. History is not over. Instead, history keeps repeating itself. Democracy has not prevailed all over the globe. It remains the minority blood type that seems hard to transfuse into new patients. Somewhere in his grave, Muammar Gaddafi is giggling: I told you so. Tyranny remains the oldest, and widely practiced, form of government for a reason. And it is particularly appealing to ailing nations accustomed to imperial ambitions, when those ambitions appear to be in peril.
Welcome back, Uncle Joe. May God help us all.
Vadim Mahmoudov
December 31, 2015
