Things That Never Change

In FrontPage Magazine, Stephen Schwartz blasts Vladimir Putin's recent attempts to rewrite history and restore the Stalinist legacy in Moscow and Europe:

The United States officially rejected the Soviet absorption of the Baltic states and permitted Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to maintain diplomatic representation in Washington until 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet empire allowed their return to freedom. The Baltic peoples had nothing to celebrate about the Soviet triumph in Eastern Europe. Estonia and Lithuania, for instance, refused to send delegates to the recent hoopla in Moscow to commemorate the end of the Second World War.

Putin now seeks to reassert Russian imperialist "rights" in the border countries -- known in Russia as the "near abroad." He is infuriated with President Bush's forthright admission that the Yalta agreement, which divided Europe between the democracies and Stalin, was a tragic error; he is also enraged by the president's solidarity with the Balts and Georgians, and U.S. condemnation of the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus.

A reflection of Kremlin anger came on May 12 when Russian secret police boss Alexander Patrushev denounced the United States and Britain, along with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, for espionage against Russia. In other words, Bush and Blair are, in the Russian mind, moral equivalents of the Wahhabi terror agents coming from Riyadh and recruiters for the extremist Muslim Brotherhood based in Kuwait. Before 1935, Stalin similarly argued that the democracies and the fascist powers were all the same; the only change is that Islamofascism has replaced the fascists of the past.

Patrushev also repeated the now-common Russian complaint against foreign involvement in democratization of the ex-Soviet republics. But Putin has led the way in the Stalinization of debate over the future of Russia and its neighbors.

According to the Russian president, who calls himself a proud veteran of the Soviet secret police, the Baltic states were never independent and were never invaded or occupied by the Soviets. As quoted by Vladimir Socor of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, the Russian leader declared, "'Russia turned over some of its territories to Germany,' including the territories of what became the Baltic states. 'In 1939, Germany returned them to us, and these territories joined (voshli v sostav) the Soviet Union.'" Socor also noted "the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement of May 5, which similarly claimed that the Soviet Union could not possibly have occupied what it already possessed."

A century and a half ago the Russian liberal Alexander Herzen wrote, "The revolution of Peter the Great replaced the obsolete squirearchy of Russia -- with a European bureaucracy; everything that could be copied from the Swedish and German laws, everything that could be taken over from the free municipalities of Holland into our half-communal, half-absolutist country, was taken over. But the unwritten, the moral check on power, the instinctive recognition of the rights of man, of the rights of thought, of truth, could not be and were not imported." In Russia, some things may never change.

See also: this post