Back in late Soviet times, it never occurred to anyone to denounce and cancel concerts by the country’s best loved performers. No one would have declared the singer Alla Pugacheva—a household name then and now—an enemy or agent of the West. The security services did not raid schools specializing in foreign languages to demand why they had foreign-language literature on their premises, as they do now. In some ways, therefore, the Putin regime has surpassed the late Soviet regime in its senseless cruelty and absurdity.
It is a mistake to consider President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle as the direct heirs of the Soviet regime on a mission to restore the Soviet Union. They might wish to restore the empire, but not the Soviet Union. On the contrary: Putin is nothing short of anti-Soviet. He views Vladimir Lenin as a destructive force and is indifferent to the scientific communism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Putin’s resurrection of the Soviet anthem back in 2000 was not a tribute to the Soviet Union, but a dog whistle to reawaken demand for an iron fist and for the restoration of a lost empire. Today he has been targeting the Soviet legacy both by attacking late-Soviet-era cultural figures and by firing missiles on Soviet infrastructure in Ukraine.
The Putin regime certainly has similarities to the Soviet regime, but no more so than to other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The absurdity and viciousness of the current persecution of dissidents most resembles the Stalinism of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the post-Stalin years, the harsh campaigns against “cosmopolitans” and “enemies of the people” increasingly became a thing of the past, and the number and severity of “political” court sentences were much lower than today.
All totalitarian systems seek out enemies at home and abroad. What matters is not how wide-ranging but how vindictive these efforts are, and those of the Putin regime are comparable only to the Stalin years, not to the later years of the Soviet Union.
Other trends that are closer to Stalinism than later Soviet periods include the promotion of representatives of less advanced layers of society—in Putin’s case, bodyguards and young military veterans—to elite positions; the introduction of excessive and degrading “security measures”; the denunciation of imagined organizations (such as an “international LGBT movement) as “extremist”; and the absurdity, pervasiveness, and jargony pathos of the propaganda.
Putin’s expansionism, too, is driven by national-imperial ideology akin to that of Stalinism rather than to the communist ideology of the late Soviet era. (The Red Army’s “liberation march” against Poland in 1939 was touted as an effort to save “Ukrainian and Belarusian brothers” from the Poles.)
Soviet leaders, unlike Putin’s elite, did not care what the West thought about them. The post-Stalin Soviet Union followed a complex and at times highly rational foreign policy (which allowed for the detente of the 1970s, for example). Until health problems reduced Leonid Brezhnev’s overall activity in late 1974, he personally took it upon himself to eliminate the hawks from decision-making in the Politburo and strived to preserve peace and build pragmatic relations with the United States and key countries in Western Europe. In the later Soviet years, the standoff between the Soviet Union and the West was simultaneously a means of relatively peaceful coexistence.
The national model that Putin has been building for the past quarter century resembles the Soviet Union only superficially—in its geographic contours. Its essence is very different. This is why today’s neo-Stalinist regime is not interested in or sentimental about the Soviet people who still live in Ukraine or the Soviet infrastructure there. It cares less about the nostalgic heritage of the USSR in its former territories and more about where the borders of modern Russia will be drawn.
The administrative hierarchy reflects vestiges of the Soviet Union, albeit diluted by the market economy and societal modernization. The nomenklatura still plays a key role as it did in Soviet years. There is also a similar “corporatization” of the system: various disparate segments of society are united into organizations controlled by the state, such as business associations and youth movements. The supremacy of loyalty rings familiar too: it is more important for civil servants to be true to the system, to say the right words, and to act (at least outwardly) in accordance with “traditional values” than to demonstrate their technocratic and professional merit. However, all of this is typical for totalitarian states in general and not unique to the Soviet system.
The KGB—from the middle ranks of which today’s Russian leadership emerged—was more concerned about the stability of the Soviet system than about maintaining its ideological markers. The security services protected Soviet ideology not because they believed in it, but because it was one of the “bonds” that bolstered the stability of the cumbersome totalitarian imperial system.
Where the Putin regime shows its anti-Soviet colors most clearly is in its destruction of key elements of Soviet cultural heritage—whether by banning songs by Alla Pugacheva, Andrei Makarevich, and Boris Grebenshchikov, talented artists whose music several generations of Soviet people grew up with, or by “reinterpreting” the biography of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who suffered extensive Soviet censorship, to portray him in a national-patriotic light. It would be more difficult for the authorities to ban nineteenth century literature, but those works are being used selectively: the anti-military works of Lev Tolstoy and the anti-tyranny poems of Alexander Pushkin are certainly not getting attention.
The Putin regime is just another loop in the vicious circle of Russian history that Stephen Kotkin described so aptly in his seminal multi-volume biography of Stalin: “Stalin’s regime had reproduced a deep-set pattern in Russian history—a country that considered itself a providential power with a special mission in the world, but that substantially lagged the other great powers to the west, a circumstance that time and again induced Russian rulers to turn to the state for a forced modernization to overcome or at least manage the power asymmetry. This urgent quest for a strong state had culminated, once more, in personal rule.”
Putin had no urgent need—even for the sake of maintaining his own power—to plunge the country into political and ideological archaicism, pitting it against the Western world, which Russia had previously joined as a result of modernization trends. However, ideological messianism, amplified by a lack of rotation in the elites and the personalization of perpetual power, transformed into a semi-totalitarian political regime with expansionist ambitions.
Putin thinks in terms of an imagined Russian empire rather than in terms of a heavenly Soviet Union, to which he referred as just one manifestation of the Russian idea or imperial dream: “The Russian world is Ancient Rus, the Kingdom of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and modern Russia—which is restoring, strengthening, and multiplying its sovereignty as a world power.”
The empire has returned as an ideological boomerang and has struck not only the liberal world order but also the remnants and vestiges of everything Soviet. In this sense, the boomerang is doubly destructive and suicidal: the population of a colossal country may be clinging to its Soviet self-perception, but it is no longer Soviet, nor Western—indeed, it has lost all semblance of identity. Putin has achieved a result that is diametrically opposite to what he sought: by imposing the Russian idea by fire and sword, he has deprived it of any attractiveness, and has thus almost destroyed it.
