Putin’s ‘Authoritarian Legalism’ has Soviet Not East German Roots, Lea and Taskin Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 25 – Many observers argue that Putin’s commitment to authoritarian legalism has its roots in his experience while serving as a KGB officer in East Germany; but in fact, Aaron Lea and Boruch Taskin argue, what Putin is doing now just like what the GDR did earlier arose from Soviet theory and practice under Stalin.

            The current Kremlin leader uses law to cover whatever he wants to do so as to simultaneously “paralyze” Western democratic institutions who forcing them into bureaucratic games and “neutralize” domestic opponents who are thereby stripped of the moral high ground, the Israeli analysts of Russian origin say (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=6A8DC886F3A48).

            Because the GDR pursued the same approach and formalized it, many assume that Putin picked its principles up from his service there, but in fact, his approach, like that of the Stasi, arose of “the Leninist concept that law is not a neutral arbiter over the state but a class instrument of the ruling party.”

            And that principle was elevated to a dominant feature of Soviet reality under Stalin when his prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky sought not to destroy the power of law but rather to appropriate it for use by the dictatorship itself against the people in whose name that power ruled, the two analysts say.

            To be sure, Lea and Taskin continue, “the Soviet tradition of political processes was public and crude. East German refined it to invisibility: psychological destruction without traces, legal persecution without obvious political motive, and even social death without physical violence.”

            This system worked in the GDR and is working in Russia now because of what they call “the Gulliver effect” because the system works not as a result of “a single massive chain by which the state shackles a person” but rather because it leaves people who wake up to discover that they are “held fast by hundreds of slender threads, each of which in itself is negligible.”

No single rule of this kind creates a totalitarian state on its own -- indeed, many exist in any modern legal system. The difference lies not in the existence of an individual thread, but in how they are combined,” Lea and Taskin say, pointing out when the state so chooses, “hundreds of regulations” work in concert to produce totalitarianism.

That is what has been happening under Putin, and this must be understood now and after he leaves office because then lustration of the kind that was visited upon the former GDR will be a minimum requirement for overcoming the system the current Kremlin leader is using.