Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 8 – Vladimir Putin’s
decision to seek control over all Ukraine precisely by not shifting borders
rather than risk losing power over much of it by moving them westward shows
that the current Kremlin leader is doing what Stalin did in eastern Europe in
the late 1940s rather than what Vladimir Lenin had wanted, Andrey Piontkovsky
says
The Russian commentator makes this point
in a new article about the situation in Ukraine today, a situation he says he
been brought on by the party of capitulators now in control in Kyiv, and one
that he says was made by another commentator, Yury Shvets, who defected to the
United States (svoboda.org/a/30205097.html).
The analogy contains important insights
not only about Putin’s calculations but also about the sources of his
geopolitical ideas. He clearly accepts
Stalin’s approach while rejecting Lenin’s on this issue, one that divided the
two men as early as 1920 and that drove Stalin’s actions after Lenin’s death.
The
fight between Lenin and Stalin took place largely out of public view. In his draft theses on the national colonial
question for the second congress of the Komintern in 1920, Lenin outlined his
view that as the revolution spread, so too should the borders of the Soviet
state, an idea that the Red Army’s invasion of Poland may have made appear
plausible. (Cf. windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/12/if-lenin-had-had-his-way-ussr-might.html).
Stalin
registered his objections in two code cables, one of which was published in
Soviet times only once and by someone who did not die in his sleep as a result
as a footnote in the third edition of Lenin’s collected works and one of which
remained unpublished until after the demise of the USSR.
In
both, Stalin made clear that national identities would remain powerful even
after a socialist revolution and that trying to impose Moscow’s control via
incorporation on those who had never experienced Russian rule before would be a
mistake. He said that the Poles would
never accept Soviet RUSSIAN rule and that the same would be true elsewhere.
That
did not mean that Stalin did not plan to totally control those in the bloc he expected
to establish and did after 1945. Rather it meant that he was prepared to use
indirect methods rather than shifting borders lest moves in the other direction
create problems for him both internationally and within the borders of the
USSR.
In
the event, Lenin was incapacitated and died not long after the USSR was formed,
and Stalin was able to put his ideas into practice, ideas that gave birth to a
world socialist system in which there were many states not one with the kind of
diversity that he had no intention of allowing within the Soviet Union.
Stalin
violated his own view only when he occupied Western Ukraine, Western Belarus,
and parts of what is now Moldova and when after a gap of 25 years re-imposed
Russian rule in the Baltic countries, and it was these violations that contributed
mightily to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Had
Stalin moved the USSR’s borders further outward, the Soviet Union likely would
have exploded even earlier; but if it had survived in the form Lenin wanted, it
would not be a Russian-dominated system but rather one in which the majority of
its population would be speaking Chinese, certainly something that would give
even the most pro-Soviet Russians pause.
Like
Stalin, Putin has violated this principle only in the case of Crimea, an action
that may entail analogous consequences for the Russian Federation; but also
like Stalin, he recognizes the risks of shifting borders. Power and control are
more important to him than lines on a map, even if those are what his opponents
focus on and fail to see his strategy.
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