Putin's attempt to re-write history

Russia's shocking and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has brought home to the Western world, as if it needed reminding, what sort of regime governs Russia.

After the collapse of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was hoped that at long last the Russian people could escape tyranny and embrace the benefits of representative government and the rule of law.

Such an outcome has not eventuated. When President Vladimir Putin came to power at the turn of the millennium, he did so with the support of powerful figures from his former employer, the Soviet KGB. Far from seeking to break with the past, he publicly declared in 2005 that "the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century". To undo this, he has sought to re-assemble the bloc of countries which constituted the old USSR, so that Russia can become a superpower again.

Under Putin's rule, government corruption has proliferated, while death squads have assassinated numerous independent journalists and government critics, both at home and overseas. As Putin is nostalgic about restoring the Soviet Union, it would be well to heed the words of the late American commentator, Irving Kristol. He said that, in order to understand how the former Soviet Union was ruled, you need read only two books: Mario Puzo's The Godfather I and The Godfather II.

An enthusiastic collaborator of Putin's thugocracy has been the government of Russia's neighbour, Belarus — ostensibly an independent, self-governing country, but in reality a repressive police-state and Russia's obedient satellite. Belarus's dictator Alexander Lukashenko is Mini Me to Putin's Dr Evil.

In 2020 Lukashenko contrived to get himself re-elected President of Belarus on the back of a nationwide vote marked by widespread electoral fraud. He hounded into exile the opposition presidential candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who has been internationally recognised as having won the Presidency, and arrested numerous other political opponents.

In particular, Lukashenko has been an unswerving supporter of Putin's aggressive foreign policy. Belarus's armed forces are currently fighting alongside Russia's against the inhabitants of Ukraine.

Erasing historical truth was Putin's first step in his war to erase Ukraine from the map of Europe.

First, he tried to delegitimise Ukraine, with its 44 million population, by alleging it is "not a real country", despite its being more than 1,000 years old and centuries older than the Duchy of Muscovy from which Russia emerged.

Improbably, he accused Ukraine of posing a military threat to its larger nuclear-armed neighbour, Russia.

He falsely characterised Ukrainians as being neo-Nazis, despite the fact that in 2019 they elected as their country's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, by a landslide.

Moscow's accusation of Ukraine being partial to Hitlerism used to be a constant theme of postwar Soviet propaganda. In reality, Hitler, after he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, treated his subject Slavic populations — Ukrainians no less than Russians — as untermensch (subhuman) and fit only for enslavement or extermination.

American foreign correspondent Edgar Snow, who visited the USSR in 1945, said that the "whole titanic struggle, which some are apt to dismiss as 'the Russian glory', has in all truth and in many costly ways been first of all a Ukrainian war… No single European country has suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry, its farmlands and its humanity".

Ukrainians have far more reason to be aggrieved with Russia than vice versa. During 1932–33, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin deliberately engineered a famine in Ukraine in an attempt to smash Ukraine's resistance to communist rule. Soviet authorities sealed the country's borders so that no one could escape, then confiscated all the food supplies from the farms. Five to six million Ukrainians, many of them children, perished under what came to be known as the Holodomor — that is, "death by starvation".

The late British historian and Sovietologist, Robert Conquest, in his book, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986), described Ukraine of 1932–33 as a concentration camp, "like one vast Belsen", where the camp guards walked around comfortably while their victims perished.

Putin's pretext
Putin, however, has used as a pretext for his invasion of Ukraine the supposed need of the the Russian-speaking people in the country to be rescued from the Ukrainians.

If he continues in his quest to reconstruct the USSR from its former subject populations, he may use similar justification to invade and occupy the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on account of the sizeable Russian populations that settled in these Soviet-occupied countries after World War II.

Ukraine, far from posing any threat to Russia, either in the past or today, was prepared, after the collapse of the Soviet Union to hand over its nuclear weapons (the world's then thirdlargest stockpile) to Russia in exchange for a solemn pledge by Russia that it would respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in its then borders.

This historic agreement was enshrined in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, signed in Hungary on December 5, 1994, by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United States and the United Kingdom.

In February 2014, in breach of Russia's promise, Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine. Today his forces are shelling cities and killing innocent civilians across the entirety of Ukraine.

Putin's actions recall the cruelty and cunning of his most notorious predecessor, Stalin.

The Russian people themselves should heed the solemn warning of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to Soviet leaders after the death of Stalin:

So I ask our government
To double
To treble
The guard
Over this tomb.

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