Hearts and minds
Life under Russian occupation:
Russian soldiers patrol the streets of Berdyansk in cars and armoured vehicles marked with the “Z” symbol that denotes the Russian occupying force.
Local government officials in this city in southern Ukraine, which has been controlled by Russian troops for the past two weeks, have been kicked out of their offices, and the local radio station plays Soviet ballads and Russian pop songs, interspersed with excerpts from Vladimir Putin’s speeches and news items about Ukraine being “liberated from Nazis”.
Many towns in southern Ukraine are already under Russian occupation.
In Berdyansk, a port city to the west of Mariupol with a population of a little over 100,000, the majority of city councillors have remained loyal to Ukraine. They continue work to run the city, in defiance of the Russian occupation. However, the Russians may be about to transition to more violent methods.
In nearby Melitopol, the similarly defiant mayor was reportedly kidnapped by Russian soldiers on Friday night, marched from his office with a bag over his head, and has not been heard from since.
The Nazis are who now?
It seems the Russian army expected large segments of the population in places like Berdyansk and Melitopol to welcome the Russian army as liberators, as happened in 2014 in Crimea.
“For years they have been lying to themselves that people in Ukraine were supposedly waiting for Russia to come,” said the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a video address released over the weekend. “They did not find collaborators who would hand over the city and the power to the invaders.”
…
“Of course, there are some fans of the ‘Russian world’ among the population, but every day they are fewer and fewer. People can see that the ‘Russian world’ is not what Russian propaganda promises. It’s poverty, violence and destruction,” said Anna Ukrainska, a schoolteacher in Berdyansk.
But we were told Putin’s a great guy.
No, there’s no reason to hate Putin. He never told me I’m racist.
We face a very different situation than we did during the Cold War. There are, I think, three crucial differences between Putin and Soviet leaders. Firstly, post-Stalin, I do not think the leaders of the Soviet Union were actively evil. They served a horrible system, and they were greedy, shamelessly hypocritical, vain and ridiculous. But they were not actively malicious or cruel the way Stalin was, or the way Putin is. Secondly, from the Brezhenev era onwards at the latest, the Soviet leadership did not actively beleive in their own ideology. They claimed to be communists because their power was only legitimised if they did so, but they knew the system had failed, and were interested simply in lining their own pockets. However contemptible this may be, this made them less of a threat – after all, there is no greater disruption to one’s power and privaleges than nuclear armageddon. Putin, by contrast, seems to sincerely believe in his own dogmas. This brings me to the final difference, the nature of Putin’s belief. He is not a communist, he is a fascist. You might say there is no difference, since these are two equally repressive ideologies. But there is one crucial distinction: fascism is self-destructive in a way that communism isn’t. Communism is not filled with Wagnarian and romantic imagry of going down in a blaze of glory, taking as many enemies out as you can. Fascism is, fascism rests on such imagry. For these three reasons, Putin is a far more alarming prosepect to face than Khrushchev, Brezhenev, Kosygin, Andropov or Chernyenko.
Laurence #2
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I don’t think any of them (with the possible exception of Lenin and Trotsky?) ever had any interest in empowering the working-class, or creating a classless society in which everyone was equal and no group held dominance over another. The USSR and its European colonies were always meant to be permanent dictatorships with the party elite as a permanent new upper class. So while there are legitimate – and very serious! – criticisms to be made of Marxism, I think it’s fair to say that Marx and Engels would not have recognized what was going on in these regimes as their ideas put into practice.
I very much agree on the difference between Communism (or “communism” if you will) and fascism (or religious fundamentalism for that matter). Even those who genuinely believed in Marxism were not by and large anti-rationalists or anti-realists. It’s just that they thought (most of us would say wrongly) that truth, objectivity, reason, and science were on their side. Fascism on the other hand was the original “post-truth” (or perhaps the last spasm of the old “pre-truth”*) ideology and contemptuous of the very idea of objective truth, hence nonsensical distinctions like “Jewish” vs. “Aryan” science. And, of course, when objective truth goes. any concern for real-world consequences goes with it.
* One of the greatest ironies of this story is how leftist cultural relativists and post-modernists would later end up agreeing with the fascists on this point.
BF:
Putin is a latter-day Stalinist bureaucrat out to maximise his own wealth, power and imperial reach. He is now as cornered as a shithouse rat can ever be, and it is all by his own doing. Politically, he is as short-sighted as they come, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. But it cannot end well for him.
When Hitler gazed eastwards from his Eagle’s Nest, he saw a boundless plain stretching all the way to the Pacific, full of natural wealth and potential slave-labour for his Aryan Empire, and over which he had merely to do a deal with the like-minded ‘honorary Aryans’, the Japanese. He made his theory up as he went along and to suit himself, but with his ‘master race’ rant he played to the ego of his support-base most skilfully.
Classical Marxism as a philosophy was seriously flawed and survives only on the political fringe today. What it could not manage or contain was classical liberalism. If people are to be free to think for themselves, they have to be free to communicate their thoughts in speech and writing. That entails freedom of the press and publication; and thus of the book and newspaper trade, and of markets generally, and on to infinity. Because freedom is indivisible; its only boundary being set by the equal rights of others.
By focusing on economic problems and their passion for central planning solutions, Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the post-WW1 Russian Marxist revolutionary generation finished up seriously losing the plot. Probably the clearest-sighted of them was Rosa Luxembourg, who was murdered by a German soldier; a tragic loss for all of humanity. But Putin has inherited the Soviet-era mess, and is digging himself in ever deeper. His own physical survival is now at stake, and it is in his power to take down Russia and a large part of the world beyond in a final act of suicidal Wagnerian Gotterdammerung.
As I said, it will be most interesting to see how this plays out.