Vladimir Putin talks about fighting terrorism while Russia has been committing outrageous terrorist acts at home and abroad. Joe Biden has focused on Russian hacking against the United States (as well as other targets, such as the Ukrainian power grid). But there is nothing new about this and cyber is simply the latest weapon in Russia’s never-ending war against the world.
In the final half-century of the Russian Empire political terrorism became an integral part of the left-wing revolutionary struggle. It began during the fairly liberal reign of Alexander II, who himself was assassinated by a terrorist, and reached its bloodiest point in the first decade of the 20th century when its casualties totaled over 15,000, a staggering number.
The early terror group was called People’s Will but in the 20th-century terrorism was actively practiced by leftist political parties, mainly the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Anarchists.
And then there were the Bolsheviks. After Lenin’s older brother Alexander was hung for a plot to assassinate Alexander III, Lenin reportedly told his mother that he’d use a different tactic against czarism.
Bolsheviks were above all opportunists and for them their ultimate goal justified all means, no matter how dirty or immoral, certainly including terrorism. Armed heists were practiced by them, notably by Stalin, to fund revolutionary activities.
Nevertheless, it is true that terrorism was not central to their activities.
After the end of the civil war, when the Soviet state developed its first-class foreign intelligence network, it practiced international terrorism without any qualms. White military commanders Pyotr Wrangel was probably poisoned by an OGPU agent and Alexander Kutepov was kidnapped. In the 1930s the NKVD murdered numerous people abroad, including Ukrainian nationalist Yevhen Konovalets in Holland and Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
At the same time, domestic terrorism was also widely used. While Soviet citizens were executed in their hundreds of thousands, some key figures were assassinated by police agents, including actress Zinaida Reich and actor/director Solomon Mikhoels.
The practice of international terrorism outlived Stalin: Ukrainian nationalists Lev Rebet and, famously, Stepan Bandera were murdered in West Germany in the 1950s.
While killing others abroad Soviet leaders were remarkably fearful of terrorists at home. Stalin’s security chief Lavrentiy Beria played into his boss’s paranoia, forever uncovering phantasmagorical assassination plots supposedly directed against Soviet leader and Stalin personally.
Putin resembles Stalin the most among post-Stalinist denizens of the Kremlin. In many ways, including fear for his personal safety. FSO, the Russian equivalent of America’s secret service, insulates him from any contact with ordinary people, even impersonating those ordinary Russians for Putin’s photo ops. Serving on his bodyguard detail seems to be the surest way to make a political career in Russia.
He recently asserted that Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund was teaching its supporters to make Molotov cocktails. This lie is yet another of the ominous throwbacks to Stalinism lately seen in Russia.
True, Putin hasn’t yet unleashed domestic repressions on Stalin’s scale but under his rule political terrorism — meaning the killing of political opponents at home and abroad — has reached Stalin’s level, and perhaps even has surpassed it.
There is a difference, however. Terrorism is typically the weapon of the weak against the strong. The weak are trying to raise the price paid by their enemies and are trying to be taken seriously. But state-directed terrorism in the way it is practiced by the Soviet Union and now by Russia is different. It is directed against specific opponents and is designed to eliminate those individuals and frighten their followers.
It is, I would argue, a military tactic. During World War II resistance fighters killed German military commanders and military governors of occupied territories. Israelis have been assassinating Palestinian military commanders for decades, and have recently been doing the same to Iranian nuclear scientists. Americans, having declared a war on terror after 9/11 attacks on American soil, have been using drones to assassinate radical Islamists.
The truth about Russia is that since taking power in 1917 the Bolsheviks have been fighting a war on two fronts. They fought to eliminate all opposition at home during the civil war and to bring communism to the rest of the world.
Officially the civil war lasted five years, but it actually never ended. Czarist officials, former military officers, professionals of all kinds, engineers, clerics, and others were persecuted, imprisoned, sent into internal exile, and shot throughout the 1920s. Then, in the 1930s, this one-sided civil war gathered momentum, culminating in 1937. It went on unabated during the war and intensified once again in the 1940s and early 1950s.
The decades that followed are sometimes characterized by Russians as “the vegetarian years”. The civil conflict didn’t end but smoldered below the surface. The 1990s then marked the truce in that war but with Putin’s emergence it flared up once more, getting more intense with every year.
Poet Bulat Okudzhava, a keen observer of Soviet reality, wrote a poem back in the 1960s, stating that his fate was to be killed “in that same unique civil war.”
The foreign war to bring communism to the rest of the world began as part of the Russian civil war and was initially limited to parts of the old Russian Empire. The Red Army crushed the national aspirations of Ukrainians, Trans-Caucasus peoples and others, and brought them into the Soviet Union by force. An initial attempt to do the same to Poland failed, but the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave Russia another chance. Stalin recaptured the Baltic states and attacked Finland, except the Finns thwarted him in the 1939-40 Winter War.
After the victory over the Nazis the Soviet Empire widened its reach significantly. While still committed to spreading its ideology, Russian nationalism was fully revived and it became increasingly Moscow’s expansionist, colonial project. Another keen observer of Soviet reality, satirist Vagrich Bakhchanyan, once created a list of all UN member states altering them along the lines of the Soviet constituent republics, e.g., the French Soviet Socialist Republic, the Japanese Soviet Socialist Republic, the Kenyan Soviet Socialist Republic, etc.
Now the ideology is dead but both wars continue to be fought — both at home and abroad. And Moscow propagandists speak openly about a war Russia is fighting against the United States. The annexation of Crimea was framed as a response to a supposed American design on Sevastopol and Putin periodically declares that “our partners” (meaning Washington) have designs on Russian territory and natural resources.
The Biden administration has hinted darkly that it may respond in kind to Russia’s hacking and cyber-terrorism. Americans have offensive capabilities that they have deployed against Iran and may use to retaliate against Putin as well. But these will be partial measures unless Washington comes to grips with the reality that Russia, despite giving up on its communist ideology, continues to wage a rather pointless, senseless, and ultimately self-defeating war against the rest of the world. It is the kind of war that was described by George Orwell in his 1984, in which Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are engaged in a senseless forever conflict.
