My Take | The ghosts of Stalin and Lenin still haunt Putin’s Russia dream
- By channelling Stalin, the Russian president now claims to be correcting a perceived historic mistake made by Lenin by swallowing up chunks of Ukraine, if not the whole of it
He disputes the legitimacy of Ukraine’s statehood by saying it was Lenin’s big mistake to have advocated Soviet federalism and supported the creation of independent nations, among which was modern Ukraine.
“As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archive documents … And now grateful descendants have demolished monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. This is what they call decommunisation. Do you want decommunisation? Well, that suits us just fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunisation means for Ukraine.”
In the end, the controversy over nationalism, internationalism and the right of self-determination of peoples was brutally resolved by Stalin. Like Tolstoy in War and Peace, he launched the Great Patriotic War by appealing to Mother Russia, not the Great Proletarian Revolution.