Soviet Leaders Engaged in Far Less Sabre Rattling than Putin Feels Compelled to, Grachnikov Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 28 – Unlike Vladimir Putin who talks about weapons all the time now, Ryazan blogger Valery Grachnikov says, Soviet leaders generally limited the display of the country’s military might to the annual parades on Red Square. They didn’t need to do otherwise to gain popular support for belt tightening to pay for weapons.

            Stalin didn’t announce the Soviet Union’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. He left that to Voroshilov. The only “exception” to that reticence by the longtime Soviet leader involved Moscow’s breakthrough in building a hydrogen bomb, Grachnikov says (valerongrach.livejournal.com/827630.html reposted at newizv.ru/news/society/28-02-2019/privivka-raketami-chem-razlichayutsya-sovetskiy-i-rossiyskiy-patriotizm).

            Brezhnev too didn’t talk about new weapons. Instead, he answered all queries about them by saying that “the USSR has everything needed to repel aggressors.” Nor did Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev or Yeltsin talk about new types of weapons,” the blogger says, picking up on comments on telegram channels.

            But Putin has taken a different approach, regularly talking about new weapons and even giving details about them.  The question must be asked: why is the current Kremlin ruler doing what his predecessors did not? Russia’s potential opponents abroad don’t need his words: they have other means of knowing what Moscow has or doesn’t have.

            That means that Putin’s comments are directed in the first instance at a domestic audience, Grachnikov says, and that they have two purposes. On the one hand, they are intended to distract attention from the economic problems the Russian people have by suggesting these are the result of the actions of foreign powers.

            And on the other, the blogger says, they are intended to show that not all the money the Kremlin and its cronies are extracting from the people is being sent abroad. Some of it, Putin’s words suggest, is being spent at home, not on the people’s needs but on the weapon systems he says are required.

            Why didn’t Brezhnev and the other Soviet leaders not use this kind of rhetoric “if it inspires the public?” The answer, Grachnikov says, is “simple. Then there was ordinary Soviet patriotism.” People who had experienced the war and did not want a repetition were prepared to sacrifice to ensure that it would not be.

            But now the situation is different. Most who experienced the war have passed from the scene, and capitalism in a version even harsher than in Europe come to Russia, snapping many of the things that bound the people to the regime In this situation, Putin feels the need to sabre rattle, something Soviet leaders almost never did.