Putin has Reason to Fear Those who Have Volunteered to Fight in Ukraine, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 17 – Those who have volunteered to fight for Putin in Ukraine either to escape prison or to get large bonuses represent a serious threat to the Kremlin leader because their reasons for doing so don’t make them loyal to him but do make them available for mobilization by those who oppose him, Abbas Gallyamov says.

            As such, these volunteers instead of being the supporters Putin believes  in fact constitute a real threat to the Kremlin leader and his regime, according to the former Putin speech writer and now Putin critic, who says his own interviews with many of them convince him of this fact (pointmedia.io/story/6697a52fdc48800406e0f489).

            That is because those who have volunteered have done so because they suffer from a low social status and low incomes and have never displayed much interest in politics but see joining up as a way to advance themselves and will be quite ready to turn on the country’s leadership if it fails to continue to help them solve these problems.

            The predecessors of such people, the masses in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, easily shifted from one extreme to another as shown in the works of Ilf and Petrov regarding Italy and more generally by American social theorist Eric Hoffer in his 1951 classic, The True Believer.

            Gallyamov cites Hoffer on this point in particular: “If a people is ripe for mass movements,” the American philosopher wrote, “this usually means that they are ready for any of them and not just for any one movement with a certain doctrine or program. The situation in pre-Hitler Germany was like that: would the restless youth go with the communists or the Nazis?”

“In the overpopulated areas of the “Pale of Settlement” of Tsarist Russia, the Jewish population, living in nervous tension, was equally ready for both revolution and Zionism; in the same family, one member joined the revolutionaries, the other joined the Zionists,” Hoffman continues.

And he relates the following anecdote: “Dr. Chaim Weizman recalls the words of his mother spoken at that time: “No matter what happens, it will be good for me: if Shmul (the revolutionary son) proves right - we will be happy in Russia, if Chaim (the Zionist) turns out to be, I will go to live in Palestine."

“In our time,” Gallyamov observes, “every mass movement, in search of its new followers, sees its potential followers in various adherents of hostile mass movements. Hitler, for example, looked at German communists as potential Nazis: ‘A petty-bourgeois Social Democrat or a trade union leader will never be one, but a Communist will always make it.’ [And]  Karl Radek looked at the Nazi Brown Shirts (S.A.) as a reserve of future communists.”

As a result of this phenomenon, the Russian commentator says, “one movement can easily turn into another: a religious movement into a nationalist of social revolution, a social revolution can turn into militant nationalism or a religious movement, or a nationalist movement can turn into a religious or social revolution.”

A consequence of this, Gallyamov concludes, is that those who take steps that look like acts of patriotism may become the most unpatriotic. And thus “it is quite possible to imagine these very people rebelling against the authorities. That is exactly how it was in 1917,” and that carries with it a warning to the current Russian regime.