Vladimir Putin wants not only to seize new territories, but to own history. History often falls victim to autocracies and dictatorships. Reshaped historical narratives become compelling explanations of all-powerful leaders and serve their propaganda as one of the instruments to preserve and increase their political weight.
No wonder that Russian President Vladimir Putin comes up with absurdly manipulated historical facts to push his geopolitical policies. But it is more than just lies or manipulation. It is a well-grounded philosophy that not only revises the past, but also becomes his instrument to reshape the present.
Isn’t that what Putin does when he plays the “independent republics” card, with which the post-Soviet space that emerged 30 years ago is generously dotted by his bloody will: South Ossetia in Georgia, Moscow-created Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics in Ukraine and the breakaway Transnistria republic in Moldova – God knows how many more such black holes the Kremlin leadership can create with the help of mercenaries and propaganda.
Putin is offended by the collapse of the Soviet Union. His love for that bygone era is actively cultivated in Russia even 30 years after its implosion. Putin manipulates the notion of democracy by comparing artificially created pseudo-states with the real ones that constituted the USSR. He may indeed not see the difference between Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia and the conjured formations of LPR, DPR, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, or Transnistria. In this way, Putin suspends the understanding of freedom as a hostage to his biggest political intrigue – the confrontation between the West and Russia.
According to this primitive formula, if the U.S. once divided the USSR into some 15 republics, why can’t Russia today break those republics into smaller ones?
Having amassed nearly 200,000 troops with weapons and military equipment around Ukraine’s southeastern borders, Putin refuses to directly talk with the political leadership in Kyiv. Literally, he ignores any attempt at dialogue and sends messages through European interlocutors. This seems to be his response to the Ukrainian leadership’s unwillingness to negotiate with the Russian installed puppets whose Moscow-armed formations have been fighting in Ukraine’s two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donets for nearly eight years.
The parallels are blustering, but quite possible for a man offended by the historical collapse of the state he seems to consider his homeland, the USSR, and who is already personally expressing doubts about Ukraine’s sovereignty. “I am convinced that Ukraine’s true sovereignty is possible precisely in partnership with Russia,” Putin wrote in a diatribe in July 2021.
Putin acts as if he really sees no difference between the sovereign state of Ukraine and the quasi-republics that are under his own military control. It is as if the Russian leader is trying to teach the world a lesson by creating imitations and empty simulacra on copies of real historical facts.
Putin’s version of history distorts understandable values to help manage his own country. If you don’t know how to create, then ”protect” and take away. Russia’s hybrid or covert invasions of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and Georgia’s Abkhazia, and Moldova’s Transnistria province under the guise of “protection” was done against phantom enemies he conjured.
Isn’t this what happened to the Soviet Union? While the West was recovering from World War II, building democracy and competitive market economies, the USSR was building tanks to defend itself and intimidating its own people with U.S. aggression. A Ukrainian diplomat who survived Stalin’s death as a child recounted how his entire family stayed awake, gazing up into the night sky. “We waited that every second we could see American missiles that were going to destroy us,” he recalled vividly for the rest of his life.
The Soviet Union, in fact, was built on falsehoods, lies, and unrealistic, artificial ideals. Putin is deliberately repeating this failed scheme and therefore risks his empire falling just as loudly.
