As in 1930s, Moscow Not So Much Going to War but Rather Drifting into It, Kukulin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 18 – In his 2008 book Mobilized Planning and Political Decisions, St. Petersburg historian Oleg Ken said that one must not say that the USSR at the end of the 1930s “went to war.” Instead, he argues, it “drifted into conflict,” an observation that Ilya Kukulin says applies to what is happening in Russia today.

            The literary critic and former instructor at Moscow’s HSE says that the parallels between the two periods and their two leaders are remarkably precise. The leaders in both periods took the actions they did in foreign affairs for domestic reasons and then those actions took on a life of their own (zona.media/article/2022/05/19/semiotics).

Kukulin makes this point in the course of an extended discussion about how current Russian leaders think about World War II and Nazism, attitudes that shape their thinking and actions and that they are trying to ensure the entire Russian population will share.

            According to Kukulin, Victory Day acquired its singular importance in recent years because it was the only national holiday that survived the demise of the USSR. The others either receded in importance or ceased to have the significance they had earlier. That has prompted Russians to focus more on that war than would otherwise have been the case.

            And since Vladimir Putin came to power, the scholar says, that war took on added significance because it underscored the idea that Russia has inherited from the Soviet Union its status as a victor country and that the USSR was “the main or even the only victor,” Kukulin continues.

            Moreover, as that victory was over the Nazis, he says, current Russian leaders emptied the term of its specific content and presented any opponent of the Soviet Union in the past or the Russian Federation now as being Nazis or at least Nazi-like.

            All this became possible because “the current political elites of Russia grew up in the 1970s,” a cynical decade and, more significant in this case, “the first in the history of the Soviet Union when there was promoted the idea of the correctness of the older generation” instead of to the younger ones as had been true earlier.

            As the current Russian elite has aged, it finds that point of view congenial and is promoting it, stressing traditions and the links the current generation has with its forefathers, especially those who fought and won the Great Fatherland War. Thus, that war and the fight against Nazism became central to their understanding.

            In other comments, Kukulin notes that this attitude helps explain Putin’s notion that Ukraine is not a real state. It wasn’t in the 1970s and so he feels it never has been and never must be, and it also why he invariably tilts toward Stalin rather than Lenin because the latter formed the union republics while the former gutted them of any real meaning.

            And he argues that there are several reasons why the Putin regime has not codified all this in a clear ideology. Not only are its members cynical about ideology as they were in the 1970s but they are very much aware that the content of any ideology that accurately reflected their thinking would resemble the Nazism they say they are fighting.

            Of course, Kukulin says, this fight against what is true of oneself is typical of the Orwellian world the current elite occupies. That is because such an internally inconsistent view not only devalues thought as such but also means that the Russian people are left feeling that they have no agency, exactly what the current Kremlin wants.