Putinism is the Fascism of Today and Will Destroy Russia, Vytautas Landsbergis Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 31 – There is a horrifying similarity between what Hitler and Stalin did more than half a century ago and what Vladimir Putin is doing now, Vytautas Landsbergis says, pointing out that the hatred that informed the mass meetings in Nazi Germany is informing Putin’s mass meetings today.

            Under Hitler, the Nazis told the Germans that “we are better than all the others and will rule the world.” Now in Russia under Putin, Kremlin ideologists are “shouting that the entire world is against us but we will defeat all this accursed world,” the architect of Lithuania’s recovery of its de facto independence says.

            “How is this different from Hitlerite fascism?” he asks rhetorically and answers “in no way at all” (svoboda.org/a/vitautas-landsbergis-rossiya-uspeshno-prevraschena-v-durdom/31781029.html).  “Russia has been successfully transformed into a mad house, but the inmates don’t recognize that they are sick.”

            Landsbergis says that he “sees a very great similarity and a common source, a common basis of these bestial acts which are taking place today in Ukraine and which occurred in Chechnya, the Baltic countries and so on. The similarity lies in the perverted and bestial nature of the Soviet man, itself the result of Sovietism, Stalinism, and now Putinism.”

            Their common view that they are surrounded by enemies who must be attacked and destroyed informs them all, the Lithuanian leader says. “It is only a question of time, format and pretext – and a pretext can always be thought up when needed.”

            Putinism presents itself as the defender of Russian culture and Russia itself, Landsbergis continues. But in fact, it is the enemy of both. It has destroyed so much of Russian culture and by its actions is putting Russian on course to its final dissolution, a process that has been ongoing since World War I.