What Vladimir Putin has in common with Stalin Because of salmonella: Norway has to throw away several tons of kebab meat

Hardly any man in Russian history was more feared than Joseph Stalin. But on March 1, 1953, the almost all-powerful dictator of the Soviet Union was completely powerless. Slumped on the floor of his dacha, the bodyguards discovered the 74-year-old man who had suffered a stroke.

What you should do? That was the question of members of Stalin’s entourage, including his later successor Nikita Khrushchev and the head of the secret service, Lavrenty Beria. In the climate of fear that Stalin had created, any decision could quickly turn out to be disastrous.

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“Irony of History”

One of the last misdeeds that Stalin had devised at the end of his life also proved fatal: the so-called doctors’ plot, after which Jewish doctors in particular would have tried to kill Stalin. Complete nonsense, but with consequences for the dictator himself: most of the doctors who could have treated him were locked up.

“It is an irony of history that Stalin became one of the last victims of the Stalinism he created,” says historian and Russia expert Stefan Creuzberger. On March 5, 1953, the dictator who had led the Soviet Union to the height of its power after the end of World War II died. The Soviet Empire stretched from the Pacific to the Elbe, including the satellite states dependent on Moscow, such as the GDR.

It was there in 1989 that a KGB officer would witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron Curtain. His name is Vladimir Putin. “For Putin, a world collapsed,” says Stefan Creuzberger, who last year published the book “The German-Russian Century. Story of a Special Relationship”. “For him, the GDR was a kind of war trophy acquired by the Soviet Union for sacrificing some 27 million dead in World War II.”

To simply abandon this in favor of a reunification of the two German states? An absurdity for Putin. Like the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the past century for the current president of Russia. A “disaster” that Putin wants to “correct”.

Make a pact with the deadly enemy

In statements, the strongman in the Kremlin repeatedly imitated the ruling personalities of the tsarist empire, such as Peter I or Catherine II, who were called “great”. But Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for more than a quarter of a century from 1927, also played an important role. For Putin, who has been in charge of the Kremlin for more than 20 years, thinks more in terms of Stalin’s dimensions when it comes to his war of conquest.

“Putin sees himself in a tradition with Stalin,” explains Stefan Creuzberger. “In fact, he first turned the former regional power, the Soviet Union, into a superpower and then, after the end of World War II, into a superpower.”

To achieve this goal, Stalin was fine by almost any means. In 1939 he made a pact with the Bolshevik hater Adolf Hitler, joined him in invading Poland in 1940 – and in the spring of that year had thousands of captured Polish officers killed in the Katyn massacre.

In the 1920s, Stalin had set the still heavily agrarian Soviet Union on a course for industrialization. How? Through ruthlessness and the use of extreme violence.

“Stalin pushed through the industrialization of the country and the collectivization of agriculture without regard for human life and far from any economic rationality,” says Stefan Creuzberger. The dreaded Gulag camp system served not only to discipline the populace, but also to “make workers available.”

But how can Putin match a man who was arguably one of the most vicious tyrants in world history? The Gulag, the “Great Terror” that broke out in 1936 and the way in which Stalin, from 1941 onwards, waged the so-called Great Patriotic War against the National Socialist invaders, which was ultimately victorious but the lives of his own soldiers – all this cost millions .

Putin prefers control

“What’s always interesting about Putin is what he doesn’t focus on,” says historian Creuzberger. In 2017, Putin opened the “Wall of Mourning” in Moscow, a memorial to the victims of the Stalinist dictatorship. However, upon closer inspection, this event turned out to be little more than a coming to terms with the Stalin era and its crimes.

No, Putin had other things in mind. The Russian president understood the event more “as a rule” under the Stalin chapter. “Putin thus seized control of the historical discourse, which from then on eventually came under central control,” says Creuzberger. From the Kremlin’s point of view, civil society had proved far too uncontrollable.

In general, Putin’s view of the state and society is in some way similar to Stalin’s. The individual counts little in this, the Kremlin is concerned with the big picture. The “Day of Victory” over National Socialist Germany, celebrated every year on May 9 in Moscow, testifies to this attitude. Almost every family in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union has members who fought in World War II and suffered against the fascists, as they say in Russia.

However, the “Victory Day” and the official commemoration of the “Great Patriotic War” led by Putin are less about the suffering experienced individually. Rather, the focus is on patriotism and the willingness to make sacrifices, the willingness to become a martyr for “Russia”.

Handle in the historic moth box

“There were certainly other phases in the commemoration of World War II in Russia, both in general and in historical studies,” says Stefan Creuzberger. “But that’s over.” At least since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Even if he is only an amateur historian, Vladimir Putin knows the power of history. Just like Joseph Stalin once did. It was not for nothing that he called the defensive struggle against the Wehrmacht in 1941 the “Great Patriotic War” – based on the “Patriotic War” in which Russia had once successfully resisted another aggressor: Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, who in 1812 with his Grande Armée wanted to conquer the empire of the tsars.

In the present, Vladimir Putin avoids using the word “war” in reference to the Ukraine he attacked, rather it is a “special operation”. Why? To eliminate “Nazis” from the Ukrainian government, according to the Kremlin’s argument. What justifiably seems ridiculous is telling the Russian public a story that the government has been teaching people for years.

“You can mobilize the population with such ‘stimulative words’,” summarizes researcher Creuzberger. “All the more so as Putin evolved from autocrat to dictator.” Russian society is becoming increasingly isolated, a free and open discourse is hardly possible anymore.

end is programmed

“War is peace,” wrote British author George Orwell in his novel of the century “1984.” For Putin, the current war against Ukraine is its own form of “peacekeeping,” just as Joseph Stalin once planted a belt of slave states in Eastern and Central Europe. And with that the will of the people in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia has been pushed aside.

The people of the Eastern Bloc tried again and again to revolt as the center of power, Moscow, was in turmoil. So it was in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956. “Of course Vladimir Putin is also aware of this,” says Stefan Creuzberger. “And that’s very frightening.” As well as another truth: Putin will not be able to rule forever. Just as Josef Stalin couldn’t.