Vladimir Putin is starting to look more and more like Joseph Stalin

After the ignominious defeats at Kiev, the flight of Russian troops from the Kharkov area and now – if it’s not a trap – the withdrawal from Kherson, Vladimir Putin really must be ready now. Many more military disasters are not possible. But so far there are no signs of that. Instead, the Russian president appears to be firmly in the saddle and has learned how to secure power from his role model, Joseph Stalin.

Hopefully today Stalin is roasting in a very special place in hell. Together with Hitler and Mao, he is one of the greatest mass murderers of the last century. He shot his opponents by the hundreds of thousands or had them shipped to the gulags, the infamous prison camps of the Soviet Union. He delivered millions of his own farmers to starvation.

Stalin secured power with the help of the Chekists, the infamous secret service men of the NKVD, later KGB, now FSB. Before he became head of government under Boris Yeltsin and then president, Putin was head of the FSB and today, like Stalin, rules with the help of people from the secret service, the so-called siloviki.

In the magazine “Foreign Affairs” Andrei Kolesnikov lists a whole series of other parallels between Putin and Stalin. Kolesnikov is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.

Given the incredible atrocities, Stalin should be exiled in Russia just as Hitler was in Germany. But he isn’t. On the contrary, more than half of Russians still consider him a “great leader”. To keep it that way, Putin recently closed Memorial, an organization that wanted to investigate Stalin’s crimes.

In the meantime, Russia is increasingly taking on the character of the Soviet Union from the time of Stalin. “In 2022, Russia has become a full-fledged autocracy,” Kolesnikov notes. “It is a tribute to an imperialist and nationalist ideology. Civil society is relentlessly suppressed and any dissent is nipped in the bud. Putin inherited almost all the classic elements of Stalin’s totalitarianism, from the cult of personality to the cult of the death of a hero.

Putin also copies Stalin’s behavior. Here are some examples:

However, there is also a striking difference. Under Stalin, the Red Army crushed Hitler’s troops, albeit at an unbelievable cost. Not only did this save the USSR, Moscow was then able to expand its sphere of influence to the border with West Germany.

Putin wants to return imperial power to the former Soviet Union. With his disastrous campaign against Ukraine, on the other hand, he achieved exactly the opposite. Michael Khodarkovsky, a history professor at Loyola University Chicago, notes in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “Instead of leading his country to new greatness, Mr. Putin could rule the last Russian empire.”

Russia is not only huge, it also includes a total of 21 republics. After the collapse of the USSR, Moscow had to give them some degree of autonomy. In many of these republics, Muslims are in the majority, and there is even a thesis that Russians will be the minority in Russia by the middle of this century.

Putin therefore had an incentive to invade Ukraine, which was based on his country’s demographics. “He partially invaded Ukraine to increase the proportion of the Slav population in Russia,” Khodarkovsky said.

This calculation does not appear to be correct. Resistance is growing in non-Russian republics such as Dagestan, Bashkortostan and Siberia, mothers in these regions are no longer willing to sacrifice their sons for this senseless war.

Khodarkovsky refers to the pre-World War I tsar, who also threw Muslims from Central Asia into the fray and sparked an uprising in the summer of 1916 that eventually led to his overthrow.

“Moscow will soon suffer a similar fate by sending ill-educated non-Russian men to Ukraine,” Khodarkovsky said. “Centuries of pent-up bitterness and frustration at Moscow rule could degenerate into civil war. Given Russia’s defeats, that’s not a distant prospect. Should this really happen, Russia will fall apart like the Soviet Union once did. The irony of history would then be that the man who wanted to restore the former USSR led the Russian Empire to its ruin.”