Barbarous Actions of Russian Forces in Ukraine Product of Continuing Influence of Soviet Ideology, Savin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 9 – Many observers blame the barbarity of Russian military actions in Ukraine on Putin, Dimitry Savin says. He certainly bears responsibility for these horrors, but their real source lies in the Soviet tradition of “ideologically motivated sadism and barbarism,” a tradition that the Russian Federation has continued as something that binds it together.

            The editor of the Riga-based conservative Russian portal Harbin says Russian liberals and the West generally want to blame anyone or anything else other than Soviet leaders and their approach to opponents but that this approach has horrific consequences both within Russia and in Moscow’s relations with others (harbin.lv/istoki-antifashistskogo-sadizma).

            From the outset, Soviet leaders blamed and targeted for attack not individuals responsible for specific actions but rather entire groups whose very existence was deemed unacceptable and thus whose destruction by any means including sadism and looting was held to be the highest good, Savin continues.

            That approach, which continues in Ukraine, thus has its roots in Soviet ideology rather than in fascism, Savin says. Soviet leaders talked about fascism long before Hitler and World War II and long after it as well. And Putin is using this longer tradition in Ukraine rather than only taking ideas from the war against Hitler as many assume.

            Neither Russian liberals nor the West understands this, he says. On the one hand, most Russian liberals think about the world around them in terms heavily informed by this Soviet approach of believing that once an enemy group has been identified, all means are justified in destroying it. They disagree with the Kremlin only about which group that is.

            And on the other, European and American liberals don’t want to blame the Soviet system as a whole for anything. Instead, they prefer to separate out “’bad’ Stalinism’ from ‘good’ communism and socialism” and thus to blame all of Moscow’s crimes on longer Russian historical traditions “but not on Marx, Lenin and communism.”

            “As a result, those forces which appear to be trying to fight the Kremlin in fact act as its defense lawyers.” But “the price of this is too high,” Savin argues. Moscow remains a threat to the Russian population and to outsiders as well, a trend that is likely to continue and expand unless the true sources of “Russian barbarism” are recognized and attacked.

            Unfortunately, the conservative commentator says, the chances that Russian and Western liberals will come to their senses are not great and thus the chances that more such crimes will continue in the future is “very high” indeed.