Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 31 – Vladimir Putin
has consistently attacked Lenin for setting up the union republics that the
current Kremlin leader argues put a delayed action mine under the edifice of
the USSR and ultimately caused its destruction, but according to Russian
journalist Nikolay Svanidze, Putin is fundamentally wrong.
And Putin’s critique of the founder
of the Soviet state is wrong in a more general sense, Svanidze suggests, reflecting
Putin’s failure to see that on most issues, Stalin, whom the Kremlin leader
clearly admires, was the true heir of Lenin and that Stalin, an ethnic Georgian
who became a Russian was like many such converts more Russian than those born
as such.
On an Ekho Moskvy program
hosted by Sergey Buntman, Svanidze observes that Putin believes Stalin was correct
in pushing for centralism and giving non-Russians only autonomous status within
a Soviet Russia and that Lenin was wrong in promoting federalism because that
ended with the collapse of the USSR (echo.msk.ru/programs/beseda/2579066-echo/).
“That
is,” the journalist continues, “in the opinion of the president, if there had
been a unitary state and the republics had not had the legal possibility of leaving
the USSR, they would have remained there.” Svanidze says he “doesn’t agree with
that” on the basis of his analysis of Lenin’s actions on the nationality
question, actions that were, in his view, “irreproachable.”
While
his interview is devoted to a discussion of Lenin’s last years, Svanidze’s comments
about Lenin and Stalin shed important light on Putin’s position, one that reflects
more than just his commitment to centralization and authoritarianism but also
toward various social and ethnic groups, including the Russian nation.
The
Soviet generation which came of age during Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin campaign
considered it good tone to oppose Lenin to Stalin, Svanidze says. “But to a
great extent, Stalin was Lenin’s heir,” prepared as was the founder of the Bolshevik
state to use terror and to demand unquestioning obedience.
But
there were important differences. Lenin was a pragmatist, and his list of hated
groups was different than Stalin’s. Perhaps even more important, Lenin as a Russian
intelligent was disposed to be sympathetic to ethnic minorities seeing them as
victims of the Russian state and less inclined to sympathize with Russians or
those who became Russians than Stalin.
“Lenin,
who terrorized the peasants, who hated the intelligentsia, and who destroyed
priests, on the nationality question was absolutely beyond reproach.” Why that
was so “God alone knows.” But he was, and therefore he was prepared to be more
deferential to non-Russians as in the Georgian case than Stalin, the Georgian
who had become a Russian, ever was.
In some of his final notes, Lenin made clear
that he had little use for Stalin and little use for the ethnic Russians. To be
sure, he didn’t think especially well of any particular people. “He was in this
sense a real Marxist and did not understand what made one people good and another
bad.”
But
Lenin was especially hostile to Russians because of their innate authoritarianism
and tendency to lord it over all other peoples, and the founder of the Russian
state put his finger on Stalin’s problem: “Russified non-Russians often exceed
Russian national attitudes at least in part.”
Svanidze
concludes: “Here is the basis of Lenin’s attitude toward the nationality question.
And he wrote things with which it is difficult not to agree and under which one
is prepared to sign that a big nation must be especially tolerant to a small
nation, to reach any agreement with it, and to be extremely kind.”
Stalin,
of course, was anything but, and from this it follows that Putin’s attitudes
toward Lenin and Stalin reflect not just his belief about the role of union
republics in the collapse of the USSR but also his own identification with the
Russians and their traditional style of rule and his view that non-Russians are
a problem rather than potential friends and allies.
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