Along with Ukraine, Putin is Destroying Putinism
The news from Ukraine gets ever grimmer. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is on a rampage. Thanks to the tough resistance by Ukraine, he is now expanding his offensive to include civilian areas. Apartment buildings have been destroyed, kindergartens bombed, and a nuclear plant set on fire. There is lots of speculation about what Putin’s end-goal is here.
But one thing there is no doubt about is that just as the ideological appeal of Soviet communism died when it rolled out the tanks 20 years before its official end, Putin has dug the grave of Putinism after making inroads in Western right-wing circles, notes Aviezer Tucker, a Russia and Eurasia expert at Harvard University’s Davis Center. Communism ended bloodlessly. If only this noxious ideology had died the same way.
It is a fascinating, complex and deeply historical piece.
Give it a read.
Shikha Dalmia
Communism’s end wasn’t bloody but the Russian dictator’s ideology is going down in an orgy of violence
The last time Soviet tanks rolled into the capital of a sovereign European nation was in Prague, 1968. But that invasion had an unintended consequence for the Soviet Union: the end of communism as an ideology. It took another 20 years for the regime to tip over and fall, but as an ideology, it ended that year. Something similar is likely to happen now to what can be called “Putinism,” the inchoate ideological mix of political authoritarianism, xenophobic nationalism and reactionary social values that has exerted significant “soft power” since Putin became Russia’s president for the second time in 2012.
An ideology that has soft power does not need to resort to invasions because it spreads from mind to mind, rather than from tanks to buildings. Czechoslovakia’s 1948 communist coup d’état received Soviet assistance — but it did not require direct Soviet participation because, after World War II, a substantial minority of Czechs and Slovaks converted to communism.
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Πηγή: theunpopulist.substack.com
