Putin’s transformation into the new Stalin is now complete

Vladimir Putin will be re-elected today as Russian President. Though the result is a foregone conclusion, he hopes it will prove to the world that his bloody invasion of Ukraine is endorsed by the Russian people.

Having already led Russia for 24 years, he is poised to prolong his grip on power for a further six years, after a three-day election in which the voters effectively have only one choice. 

Talk of “Putin’s popularity” in the West is worse than meaningless: it gives legitimacy to a cynical charade that makes a mockery of democracy. The constitution, which permits only two consecutive presidential terms, has already been amended to allow Putin to remain in power until 2036.

By then, he would be 83 and would have surpassed Catherine the Great, who reigned for 34 years (1762-1796) as Russia’s longest-serving head of state. Already, the Putin era has coincided with five US presidents and seven UK prime ministers.

The best comparison is with Joseph Stalin, who dominated the Soviet Union from the death of Lenin in 1924 to his own death in 1953. But Stalin only wielded sole authority after eliminating his Politburo rivals; his dictatorship really began in 1929 and lasted 24 years. 

Arguably, then, Putin has already equalled Stalin’s record as an autocrat. But he took a break from the presidency from 2008 to 2012, serving a term as prime minister, while his loyal acolyte Dmitry Medvedev kept the seat in the Kremlin warm for him. 

In a quarter of a century, Putin has never debated with a genuine opposition candidate or allowed free and fair elections by international standards. The only serious anti-war candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, was banned last month by the Kremlin-controlled electoral commission, after his campaign gained unexpected momentum. The commission’s head, Ella Pamfilova, has dismissed “Western-style democracy” as inferior to Russia’s version.

Even Putin’s three nominal opponents in practice subscribe to the ruling United Russia party slogan: “If not Putin, then who?” They have barely campaigned at all and most Russians know nothing about them.

Ostensibly, Leonard Slutsky of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democrats, Vladislav Davankov of the New People party and the Communist Nikolai Kharitonov vary in their politics. But they are all handpicked by Putin to play their part in a sinister simulacrum of democracy. When the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg interviewed Kharitonov, he expressed support for Putin.

In order to prove their loyalty, voters in the occupied regions of Ukraine have been “visited” at home. A video circulated by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the ex-oligarch and exiled opposition leader, shows a 98-year-old woman casting her vote. Behind her, a guard is brandishing his Kalashnikov. 

The atmosphere of menace that surrounds the Russian election is shown by a bizarre propaganda TV advert designed to encourage voters to go to the polls. It shows a pregnant woman quizzing her husband about his day while chopping vegetables. When he admits that he hasn’t bothered to vote, the advert abruptly turns into a horror film, with flickering lights and sinister music, as she approaches him with a kitchen knife. 

Then she harangues him: “Do you want to leave our child without maternity payments? And leave us without a family mortgage? And where were you intending to get money for your business? You’ll get by without a subsidised loan, will you?”

The advert ends with the man rushing out to cast his ballot, just before the polls close. Russians watching it would know that Putin has increased subsidies for loans and mortgages as well as maternity pay. The subliminal message, however, is: vote for Putin, or you’ll come to a sticky end.

Digital voting, introduced for the first time, has made it easier to rig the results and harder for observers to detect fraud. Public sector workers and employees of large corporations, for example, are urged to vote online, but these votes will be closely monitored. Typically, Putin is using technology to consign the secret ballot to the dustbin of history.

Thanks to online voting and other tactics, Putin is expected to win at least 80 per cent of the vote. In 2018 he received 77.5 per cent.

A murdered opposition

The man whose name should have been on the ballot paper is, of course, dead. There is widespread belief that Alexei Navalny was almost certainly murdered on Putin’s orders at the Polar Wolf penal colony last month. 

His wife, Yulia Navalnya, lives in exile, like many of the opposition. She has called on Western governments to refuse to recognise Putin’s reelection. Navalnya risks her husband’s fate if she ever returns to Russia – and is threatened even abroad. To reinforce the message, Navalny’s anti-corruption expert, Leonid Volkov, was assaulted in Vilnius by an unknown assailant with a hammer last week.

The death and destruction now being visited upon the country by the war have only rendered the regime more despotic. The “Tsar’s all-seeing eye” is more ubiquitous than ever. And the murder of Navalny has reminded all Russians of the price of integrity.

As well as the knout, or stick, Putin can offer a financial carrot. In the short term, Russia’s switch to a war economy has provided a stimulus. A recent IMF report claimed that Russia’s GDP growth in 2023 was 1.1 per cent and in 2024 will be more than 2.5 per cent, surpassing any other G7 nation.

Thanks to huge state subsidies, the domestic mortgage market has roared ahead, with a 34.5 per cent increase in loans. Sanctions are being evaded wholesale by channelling imports through Russia’s neighbours such as Belarus, Turkey, China and Central Asia. 

As long as living standards are propped up and Russians are insulated from the full impact of war and Western sanctions, Putin can keep up a facade of normality. Putin’s Russia has become a gigantic Potemkin village.

This election also serves the purpose of a secularised coronation. Putin apparently believes that, like the Tsars, he rules by divine right.

Last week, he quoted a military hero of the 17th century who served the Empress Anna: “Field Marshal Münnich said that Russia is a country that is directly ruled by God. Because if it is not, it is hard to understand how it exists at all.”

Empire dreams

What lies behind Putin’s cryptic maunderings is a nostalgia for empire which still resonates in the Russian national consciousness. He yearns to restore the empire built by Peter and Catherine the Great in the 18th century, that was extended across Asia in the 19th, and reinvented under Stalin in the 20th.

That, ultimately, is why he lays claim to Kyiv, as the original seat of Kyivan (or Kievan) Rus, the ninth-century state seen as their ancestral homeland by both Russians and Ukrainians. 

In Stalin’s favourite film, Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece Ivan the Terrible, after the first autocrat of Russia is crowned he informs the assembled boyars that he will reclaim the “erstwhile lands” that once belonged to his ancestors. This is a reference to the Kyivan Rus. 

But Ivan’s Muscovy had never ruled over what we now call Ukraine. The conflation of the two nations, of Kyiv and Moscow, has bedevilled the history of both ever since. In our time, Putin has adopted this imperial narrative, with catastrophic results.

The statue of St Volodymyr (or Vladimir: both Zelensky and Putin are named after him) the Great in London’s Holland Park, half a mile from the Russian embassy in Notting Hill, is a defiant symbol of Ukraine. This statue of the sainted Grand Duke, whose conversion to Christianity in 987 changed the course of European history, reminds us that although Ukraine has only been an independent state since 1991, its roots go back more than a millennium.

For Putin, such historical facts are inconvenient and are therefore denied. The restoration of the Russian Empire requires the wholesale destruction of Ukrainian identity, no matter how much bloodshed and cruelty that costs.

The shadow of Uncle Joe

In this respect, of course, Putin’s record has a long way to go before it matches that of Stalin. Josif Vissarionovich Djugashvili (his original Georgian name) was responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million Soviet citizens. 

The Soviet collectivisation and the Ukrainian terror-famine of 1930-33, now known as the Holodomor, alone cost more lives than the First World War. Stalin’s purge of 1936-38 remains the model for all subsequent totalitarian regimes. Many more millions suffered and died in the gulag; the terror continued until his death in 1953, aged 74.

The late Robert Conquest, a British historian, was the first to tell the full story of these crimes in his books The Great Terror (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986). Until Conquest provided chapter and verse, many intellectuals in the West, especially on the Left, still made excuses for Stalin.  

Putin has always had an admiration for Stalin and under his rule, statues of the tyrant have been reappearing at a gathering pace. There are now more than a hundred of them across Russia. Although Stalingrad, now Volgograd, has yet to revert to its wartime name, last year a statue was erected to commemorate the Soviet victory there in 1943 – and to mark the visit of President Putin.

The truth is that Russia has never entirely recovered from the trauma of Stalinism. Putin, the former KGB officer, is the living embodiment of that trauma. His mission, whether he acknowledges it or not, is to return Russians and their neighbours to the unfinished business of the Stalin era. 

Putin has now been in office, either as president or as prime minister, for twice as long as the 12 years of Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich”. Only Stalin changed the course of the 20th century as much, or even more, than Hitler – largely due to his longevity in power. 

Putin, now 71, looks likely to outlive Stalin and his legacy may be at least as enduring. Yet Vladimir Vladimirovich cannot escape the impression that he is merely a poor imitation of the original.

Perhaps the most vivid description of what Stalin was like comes from the greatest novelist of the era, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In The First Circle, first published in the West in 1968 but set in 1949, he depicts the elderly Generalissimo in his night office, plotting his latest purge with Abukamov, his venal, ruthless minister of state security. 

Stalin, Solzhenitsyn writes, mistrusted everyone, starting with his mother and God (he was a failed priest). “He had trusted one person, one only… That man was Adolf Hitler.” Ignoring all the warnings, “he had believed Hitler. It had almost – but not quite – cost him his neck.”

Sure enough, when the minister begs him to reinstate the death penalty so that executions could be processed more efficiently, Stalin asks him: “Aren’t you afraid you’ll be the first one we shoot?” At the end of this deeply sinister conversation, Stalin tells his by-now terrified minister: “You will have a great deal of work soon, Abakumov. We are going to carry out the same measures as in 1937. Before a big war a big purge is necessary.”

Alone again, “Stalin noticed in himself a predisposition not only towards Orthodoxy but towards other elements and words associated with the old world – that world from which he had come and which, as a matter of duty, he had been destroying for 40 years.”

For Stalin “had come to like the Russian people very much – this people which never betrayed him, which went hungry for so many years, for as long as it was necessary, which had calmly gone forth to war, to the camps, into all kinds of hardship, and had never rebelled.”

Solzhenitsyn might have been describing Putin here, from the use of the Orthodox Church and the “old” pre-Soviet world for propaganda, to the chilling connection between war and purges. Like Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, the epitaph of Putin, too, could be: “Mistrust was his world view.”

Exploiting Western divisions

Stalin had assumed that he would sooner or later have to fight the West, but died before he could turn the Cold War into a hot one. Putin, too, has a habit of making scarcely veiled threats about nuclear war, but it is clear that he is encouraged to do so by signs of weakness and disunity in the free world.

One such sign is the interview given by Viktor Orban, the Hungarian PM, after speaking to Donald Trump last week at Mar-a-Lago: “[Trump] says… he will not give a penny for the Russo-Ukrainian war. That’s why the war will end, because it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own two feet.”

Orban added that “if the Americans don’t give money, then the Europeans won’t be able to fund this war alone. And then the war will end.”

It is a scandalous fact that Trump, though not the elected President, is in effect exercising a veto in the US Congress over the $60 billion military aid package that was promised to Ukraine last year. Although there is probably a majority for the measure in both houses, pro-Trump Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is refusing to allow a vote. 

The deadlock may yet be broken. A majority of representatives could overrule the Speaker and force a vote. But nobody in Washington is holding their breath. As the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, Putin “sees Capitol Hill as the shortest route to Kyiv”.

Putin is clearly relying on the scenario described by Orban coming to pass by next year, but he is hedging his bets, given that Biden will still be President at least until next January. In a pre-election interview on Russian TV, he played down the risk of nuclear war, because Biden was “a politician of the old school” of realpolitik: “For us, [Ukraine] is a matter of life and death, whereas for them it’s a question of improving their tactical position.”

Putin again makes it clear that he is not interested in genuine negotiations, only in a Ukrainian surrender. Unfortunately, when he claims that Kyiv is running out of ammunition, he is not entirely wrong. 

The US has sent very little for the past six months and the results are beginning to show on the battlefield. The new Ukrainian commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrskii, warned last week: “There is a threat of enemy units advancing deep into our battle formations.”

The general did not elaborate, but experts warn that the Ukrainian front line is more fragile than it looks. The Czechs have raised money for 300,000 shells to resupply Kyiv’s artillery and hope to find another 500,000, while the British are spending £160 million on another 10,000 drones. 

But the present war of attrition favours Russia. Not only is Moscow receiving more munitions from North Korea and Iran than from the whole of Nato, but the most powerful countries in Europe are dragging their feet.

In Berlin, Olaf Scholz appears to have ruled out the Taurus long-range missile system, having dithered for months. Even an offer from the UK to swap missiles in order to keep German troops out of Ukraine has failed to budge an increasingly dysfunctional coalition in Berlin. The German Chancellor’s indecision is final. 

As for France: the hyperactive Emmanuel Macron, having initiated a discussion about sending Nato forces to Ukraine, is still doing little of a practical nature to meet Kyiv’s urgent needs. 

Nuclear threats

Rather than loose talk about troops on the ground, it would be more useful for the two European nuclear powers to make it clear to Putin that Nato’s security guarantees do not only depend on who occupies the White House. If Trump and isolationism win over Biden and Atlanticism in November, the UK and France may perforce have to offer such reassurance to our allies.

This is why Putin keeps talking about the “nuclear triad”: the ability to deliver nuclear weapons by land, sea and air. Because only Russia and the US have this capability, he is dismissive of the British and French deterrents.

On paper the economic comparison between Europe and Russia is almost absurdly unequal. Europe has a GDP of some $20 trillion, compared to Russia’s $2 trillion. Nato’s European members will this year spend $380 billion on defence, compared to Russia’s $140 billion. 

Admittedly, the Russian defence budget has grown by 29 per cent since 2023 and is now at its highest since the Cold War. Putin is now spending more on the military than on health and social services. Among Nato members, only Poland and the Baltic states are stepping up their defence in a comparable way. 

Here, this month’s Budget ignored defence, despite urgent appeals from the British top brass and former defence secretaries to raise spending to 2.5 per cent immediately.

What could persuade the European members of Nato, many of whom are far from the minimum 2 per cent, to take the Russian threat seriously? Boris Pistorius, Berlin’s redoubtable Defence Minister, says that Germany will finally reach that threshold this year. But is it too little, too late?

Ukraine itself has taken a battering, not just from Russian drones and missiles, but from critics abroad. This month Pope Francis even called on Kyiv to hoist the white flag – thereby turning his back on a millennium and a half of Catholic doctrine on the “just war”.

Volodymyr Zelensky has seen worse. He gave the lie last week to idle speculation about a military coup led by General Zaluzhny, the sacked army chief, by announcing that Zaluzhny would be his new ambassador to Britain at the Court of St James. 

In reality, Ukrainian morale has held up remarkably well, helped by spectacular military successes. In the past few weeks alone, their forces have crippled several oil refineries, sunk more warships of the Black Sea Fleet and inflicted heavy losses on the Russian air force.

Even more remarkable has been the ability of Russian “democratic” volunteers to launch a major cross-border incursion into the Belgorod and Kursk regions of Russia. This operation was carefully planned to coincide with the election, demonstrating to Russians both that Putin was not capable of protecting them and that armed opposition to his regime does exist.

Meanwhile, Russian casualties in Ukraine are estimated by British intelligence to have risen to almost 1,000 men a day last month. Over the past two years, Putin’s war of conquest has cost Russia more than 350,000 killed and wounded. 

Even if the West fails to support Zelensky, the Ukrainians will never surrender. For them, this is a question of survival. The prospect is, rather, for an apocalyptic conflict of unlimited duration, in which both countries are devastated and the old Russian strategy of “scorched earth”, which was so successful against Napoleon, is turned against Putin’s occupiers. 

Today is a red-letter day for Vladimir Putin, but not just because of his grotesque pretence of a free election. It is red in honour of the Stalinist past that looms over the present, but also because every day he continues in office, the nation he leads is steeped in blood.