Putin has Failed to Learn What Jaruzelski Did: Repression Can Win a Battle but It Can’t Win a War, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 18 – In 1989, Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski warned Hungary against introducing martial law because of his own experience in doing so. “Yes, we did it and won the battle by crushing Solidarity but as a result we lost the war” to main the legitimacy of the government.

            That is a lesson Vladimir Putin should be learning but does not yet appear to have done so according to Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who is now a critic of the Kremlin leader, and the results for his regime are likely to be disastrous as a result (pointmedia.io/story/6a84340f75d0d3346a25cb77).

            According to Gallyamov, Jaruzelski discovered that by imposing martial law he was able to shut down the Solidarity movement, but only at the cost of “destroying a significant part of the legitimacy of the communist authorities. Before the Polish general imposed martial law, Solidarity might have been integrated into “some kind of reformed socialism” but not after.

            Once he had crushed Solidarity, the Polish general eventually recognized, he faced a country in which “millions of Poles viewed power as something kept in place exclusively by force.” Even more he learned that while “the absence of protest” first looked like “a lack of discontent,” it soon became obvious that “it was not the same thing.”

            “Using mass repression,” Gallyamov continues, “Putin managed to solve the same problem that Jaruzelsky once faced: to defeat the structures of the opposition and remove the protest from the streets. He won the battle. But the question now is whether the Kremlin leader is losing a similar war as a result.”

            What everyone must understand, the commentator says, is that “repression  destroys not so much discontent as the opportunity to demonstrate it.” And as a result, “the need to continually resort to coercion undermines previous formulas of legitimacy: it is increasingly difficult to assert that the government rules because society voluntarily supports it.”

            That is what is happening to Putin. He started by claiming that he represented the people by means of democracy but then he proposed another basis for the population to support him: patriotism. “Even if we aren’t democrats,” the Putinists claimed, “we are defending Russia” and “protecting the motherland.”

            But now that Ukrainian drones are hitting Russian cities, Gallyamov says, it is ever more difficult for the Kremlin “to explain what exactly the ability to ensure the security of the country gives the current regime the right to demand unconditional subordination” among the population of the Russian Federation.

            That has left Putin in “a very unpleasant situation.” He destroyed his claim to democratic legitimacy by repression, and his efforts to invoke patriotism as an alternative basis are failing given the inability of his regime “to ensure the very security the population was offered in order to get it to sacrifice its political freedoms.”

            As a result, Gallyamov concludes, now, “Russia has absolutely no need for Putin from any perspective whatsoever, whether democratic or even ‘patriotic,’” a lesson Jaruzelski learned albeit too late to save himself and his regime.  Whether Putin will have better luck very much remains to be seen.