But, let’s start with a quiz: what do Putin’s Western anti-communist enemies and Putin’s leftist defenders have in common? The answer is that both perceive Putin’s Russia as a certain “continuation” of the USSR. The first to criticize and condemn it, the second to approve and defend it. However, both count without their host, who in this case is none other than Putin himself. So we found and read his historic speech of February 22, in which he explained “at length and in detail”, for an hour and a half (!), the reasons for the war he declared against Ukraine. And the result of this reading was extremely revealing: what Putin thinks and says is diametrically opposed to everything his Western enemies and left-wing admirers say. Putin hates the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks and, in particular, Vladimir Lenin, more than anything else! So let’s listen to what he says at the beginning of his speech, which he warns will be “long and detailed”:

“So let me start with the fact that modern Ukraine was created entirely by Russia, or more precisely, by Bolshevik and Communist Russia. The process began almost immediately after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his comrades-in-arms did it in a very crude way to Russia itself - by secession, by ripping off parts of its own historical territories.”

And to make it clearer, Putin adds these phrases worthy of a nostalgic of the tsarist regime:

“From the point of view of the historical destiny of Russia and its people, the Leninist principles of state building were not only a mistake, they were, as we say, even worse than a mistake.”

Having said this, Putin takes his “logic” to the end and draws his final conclusion, which is none other than : “Bolshevik policy resulted in the emergence of Soviet Ukraine, which even today can be rightly called”Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine“ . He is the author and architect of it!” Pay attention to this sentence of Putin because what he is saying to his compatriots is that his war against Ukraine is, no more and no less, a war against “Lenin’s creation”! Obviously, neither Putin’s Western anti-communist enemies, nor his left-wing apologists have shown the slightest inclination to highlight this sentence, and have preferred to bury it and pass it under silence so that it remains unknown and does not create problems for them...

So here we are at the heart of the problem, which takes us back a century, to the first years of the Soviet regime established after the victory of the October Revolution of 1917. What Putin himself says when he warns his compatriots that he will “pay special attention to the initial period of the creation of the USSR because I think it is very important for us”, since he believes that, for them to understand the reason for the war against Ukraine, "we will have to go, as they say, from afar ». And right after that, he clarifies what he means:

“Let me remind you that after the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed, the Bolsheviks began to build a new state and there was quite a bit of disagreement among them. Stalin, who in 1922 held the positions of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) and People’s Commissar for Nationalities, proposed to build the country on the principles of autonomization, that is, to give the republics - the future administrative-territorial units - broad powers as they joined the unified state.”

By referring to Stalin and his plan, Putin gets to the heart of the matter, which is none other than Lenin, whom he hates to death. And this is what he says:

“Lenin criticizes this plan and proposes to make concessions to the nationalists, as he called them at the time - the”independents". Lenin’s ideas about an essentially confederative state structure and the right of nations to self-determination up to secession formed the basis of the Soviet state: first in 1922, they were enshrined in the Declaration on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and then, after Lenin’s death, in the Constitution of the USSR of 1924 ».

We fully agree with Putin’s description. Except that we applaud the application of these “Lenin’s ideas” - and more particularly, of this damned right to secession - not only in his time but also now, and even everywhere and always, while Putin hates them viscerally. So, he wonders:

“Many questions immediately arise here. And the first of them, in fact, is the main one: why was it necessary to satisfy the ever-growing nationalist ambitions on the borders of the former empire? (...)”why was it necessary to make such generous gifts that the most ardent nationalists did not even dream of before, and on top of that to give the republics the right to separate from the single state without any conditions? At first sight, it is totally incomprehensible, it is madness".

Simple rhetorical question because Putin already knows the answer:

"But it is only at first sight. There is an explanation. After the revolution, the main task of the Bolsheviks was to retain power, that is, at any cost. For this they went to the very end: to the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Brest, at a time when the Kaiser’s Germany and its allies were in the most difficult military and economic situation, and when the outcome of the First World War was in fact predetermined, and to satisfy all the demands, all the desires of the nationalists within the country ».

Obviously, it is absolutely inconceivable for this war monger that is Putin that the Bolsheviks accepted the “humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk” because they made their revolution to stop and not to continue the First World War butchery. Nor that the so-called... “nationalists” he so despises could be the many nations and ethnic groups oppressed by the absolutist Tsarist state, who claimed their basic right to self-determination and the democratic rights and freedoms of which they had been deprived for centuries. All this is “madness” and “odious and utopian fantasies” for the ultra-reactionary obscurantist and “Great Russian chauvinist” Putin. And that’s why he concludes his return -so revealing and didactic- to the Bolshevik past of Russia, with these so eloquent words» :

“It is very regrettable that the odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution, but absolutely destructive for any normal country, were not quickly expunged from the basic, formally legal foundations on which our whole state was built.”

Conclusion? We have nothing to add when Putin himself is in total disagreement with his Western enemies and his left-wing friends who claim that his Russia is a kind of substitute for the USSR, or that he aims - for example with his war in Ukraine - to revive it! Both the former and the latter are fighting against shadows and telling us lies while making crude propaganda addressed to idiots: there is probably no more sworn anti-communist and more fierce admirer of the tsarist empire than Putin! As for how is it possible that people of the left who call themselves communists and even leninists, manage to transform this inveterate anti-communist and ultra-reactionary oligarchic capitalist that Putin is into a progressive and anti-imperialist head of state, this rather than a “mystery”, is the proof of the long way that remains to be done for the left to become truly radical and therefore credible again...

Yorgos Mitralias