Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 20 – Many observers are suggesting that Russians will accept Putin repressions for a long time to come because they accepted Stalin’s a century ago, but those who do are missing an essential point, Abbas Gallyamov says; and it is this: Unlike Stalin, Putin isn’t compensating for his repressions with victories.
According to the former Putin speechwriter turned Putin critic, “repressions against one’s own population, carried out by the authorities when they are defeating an external enemy, have far more legitimacy than do repressions when the authorities are unable to defeat such an enemy” (echofm.online/opinions/stalin-kompensiroval-repressii-pobedami).
“Therefore,” Gallyamov says, “it makes no sense in the current situation to point to the fact that Russians supposedly accept the Stalin-era repressions with equanimity. Stalin offset repressions with victories; in recent years, Putin has brought the country nothing but defeats alongside his repressions.”
And what that means in turn is that Putin must have an outcome in Ukraine that he can present to Russians as a victory or he will likely be confronted with a population that will be far less willing to accept his repressive policies because he hasn’t given them the victory that he has been promising.
That is a major reason why Putin can’t agree to anything other than what he can describe as a victory, however much pressure anyone puts on him because for him victory in Ukraine is not a geopolitical issue but an existential one of his survival in power and perhaps even more than that.
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