naturalplastic wrote:
Your post is silly.
you're trying to create contradictions where there are no contradictions.
Russia only had authoritarian rulers during its whole history. No history of democracy.
During the decade of the 1990s Russia attempted to adopt democracy. Putin represents a backslide from that brief moment back towards authoritarianism. Nothing complicated, surprising, nor contradictory about it. Putin allies himself with the Chief Patriarch of the Orthodox church in Moscow, and Evangelical Christians in America like Putin too. And Putin also allies himself with capitalistic oligarchs. So Putin is more fascist than Communist in style because he aligns himself with capitalism and with religion- rather than opposing those things like an old time Communist. But a dictator has got to do what a dictator has got to do.
There is no contradiction in "wanting to restore the empire of the Czars" and wanting to restore "the glory of the old Soviet Union" because those two things are actually one and the same thing.
The empire of Czar Nicholas was eleven time zones long. Stretched from the Polish-German border in the west, to the Bering Sea in the East. Russians ruled a vast number of other nationalities in both Europe and in Asia. Much like Queen Victoria ruled India and Australia, and much of Africa.
The Bolsheviks inherited this geopolitical Empire. But lost some territory in the west. Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all became independent countries at the end of the first world war. But the rest of Czarist Russia became the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".
On the eve of the second World War Stalin made a deal with Hitler to divide up Poland. Hitler invaded Poland, and triggered World War Two. Stalin invaded Poland from the East, and also conquered Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and tried but failed ...to conquer Finland. Stalin was trying to restore "the glory of the Czarist Empire" by retaking countries he thought he and his Communist regime rightly inherited from the Czars.
After the War Russia retained the territories it seized on the eve of the War, and then dominated basically all of eastern Europe. It didnt outright annex the iron curtain countries of eastern europe, but it did dominate them.
After the war the colonial powers of western Europe (Britain, France, Portugal, Netherlands) began to shed their colonial empires and grant independence to their former colonies in the third world. Russia was the only European colonial power to not only retain its size in the post war years- it expanded its size.
Finnally at the beginning of the Nineties with the fall of Communism Russia (like Britain and France fifty years earlier) gave up its colonial empire. Subject peoples in both Europe and in Asia were allowed their own independent countries. The Soviet "republics" like Ukraine, Kazahkistan, Lithuania, Georgia, etc all became seperate countries (much like Kenya and India ceased to be colonies of Britain and became independent countries).
Putin seems to want to turn back the clock and to restore Russian rule over these former "Soviet Republics" that are now separate countries. Which in effect we be restoring an Empire that the defunct Soviet regime itself inherited from the earlier Czars. So I dont see how you can distinquist between "restoring the glory of the USSR" and "restoring the empire of the Czars" because the two things amount to the same thing.
When Stalin invited his mom (whom he hadnt seen in almost thirty years) to see his new office in Moscow he boasted to his mom that "they made me General Secretary of the Communist Party". When his mom asked what that gobblydegook job title meant he replied "it means I am like the Czar". So Putin thinking that he is like both Stalin, and like the Czars, would not be a contradiction since Stalin thought of himself as being "like the Czar".
What you are saying is that the common denominator between czars and communists is that they are both authoritarian. But you can't equate authoritarian regimes. Because they can be authoritarian in promoting opposing concepts. For example, Hitler and Stalin were both authoritarian. But they were promoting opposing concepts, thats why they ended up at war with each other. Similarly with Czar and communists. So the question remains: is Putin "forcefully promoting" Czarist ideas or communist ideas? I guess strictly speaking neither. But he might still have "inheritted" some "concepts" of both while rejected others. So thats a good question as to which inheritted concepts of which is he promoting.
You also mentioned that communists were fighting to keep the territories they have inheritted from the czars. Thats a good observation. But still that doesn't necesserely equate them with czars. Instead, they could have thought of czarist inheritance as a "tool" of promoting communist regime. Interestingly, when they pulled out of World War 1 and refused to pay their czarist loans they said "we are not czars so we don't have to take care of the problems that czars had". But with territory they want it. So they basically wanted to take all the good without taking all the bad. Similarly, they liked to bash czars in order to praise Lenin for getting rid of them -- yet they liked to praize Russia for winning over Napolion -- even though it is really a czarist victory.
As far as Stalin telling his mother he is like a czar, he might have done it just so that she could understand. Because she didn't seem knowledgible about the current situation so he was just trying to refer her to whatever she can relate to. This reminds me of what I seen at a Jewish club on campus two decades ago. So a Jewish girlfriend brought a non-Jewish boyfriend. During the prayer after meals they were praying for Messiah to come, and she told her boyfriend they were "praying for Jesus". Well they weren't: Jews are very big in rejecting the concept that Jesus is the Messiah. But thats how she explained it to him just so that he could understand.
26 Mar 2022, 4:46 pm
