WITH a nod to the bard’s Richard III, now is the winter of Vladimir Putin’s discontent, made odious summer by every commentator in the media of the Euro-American world. He has been identified as a vengeful bully who evinces no respect for the rule of law, a former KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, a repressive autocrat who ravaged the people of Chechnya and, following his troops’ recent incursion in the Ukraine, as a Hitler, a moniker leveled against him by none other than former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Truth be told, many charges have been pressed against Putin, but being a Hitler cannot be one of them. Hitler was a fascist, whereas Putin is an unrepentant communist who is the product, in mindset and character, of Soviet political culture. There is a striking difference between fascism and communism. Whereas fascism is a political system led by a dictator exercising complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition of any sort, communism presents itself, theoretically at least, as a mythology of the human future, a vision rich in moral demand, a personal encounter with which has marked the consciousness and career of many a writer, intellectual and critic in Europe since the 1850s.
Except for this: In Germany, the malignant issue of race, or in this case the putative racial superiority of Germans, was added to the mix, turning the fascist model into a system that tyrannized through contempt of man, and in Russia, Russian theoreticians subverted the Marxist model by proceeding from the assumption that the communist ruling elite, representing the “working class,” is entitled to seize and monopolize state power, introduce social change by violent means (consider collectivization here), and gradually “persuade” Russians, along with recalcitrant ethnic minorities in the republics, to see the light — or else. When Chechens, for example, chose to give Moscow some lip in the late 1990s, the Russian president sent his troops to bomb their capital back to the Stone Age. “I have never seen a more extravagant, terrifying and ultimately futile use of firepower in populated areas than that which the Russians unleashed on Chechnya,” wrote the Washington Post’s Lee Hockstader in October 1999. “Chechnya’s capital Grozny was reduced to a smashed, smoldering husk reminiscent of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.”
Putin is an autocrat, and a brutal one at that, whose identity is the product of a repressive process of socialization that Russians absorb as if by osmosis. That the government, or more accurately the Party, is able to penetrate the deepest reaches of societal structures — that it holds total control over all aspects of public and private life — is a norm. “Imagine a boot stamping over your face forever,” wrote George Orwell in his iconic book, 1984. “In the end the Party would announce that two and two make five and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that [Party apparachiks] should make that claim sooner or later: The logic of their position demands it.”
Thus it was no surprise that the collapse of the Soviet Union (responsible for the death of millions in the Gulag and in labor camps) came from within, the result not of military competition with the US, but from the contradictions (a term beloved by communists) inherent in communism itself, from its long-held but elusive dream for “socialism with a human face.” Well over two decades after the death of that ideology in the Soviet Union, long after many of its leaders have been swept into that time-honored Marxist receptacle, the dustbin of history, unrepentant communists like Vladimir Putin continue to be saddled with insecurity and nostalgia for the lost empire.
Ever since he took control, as the hand-picked successor to Boris Yeltsin, Putin has reconstituted and reconsolidated power in the Kremlin, reversed the Russian people’s post-Soviet hopes for political change, and transformed Russia back into an authoritarian state that waged two wars against Chechnya during which he chose to focus his anger on western critics who dared suggest a political solution, or question his army’s atrocities there, an army that turned the Chechen people’s once rustic capital of 400,000 into a shattered heap of craters and collapsed buildings — and now on to Ukraine. Putin is no Hitler, unless you are using the name, as it is indeed at times used, to refer to a leader imbued with a barbarous or facile disregard for the humanity of others. Maybe that was Hillary Clinton’s context when she called Vladimir Putin a Hitler. In that regard, she would have been right on the button.
