Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine is not an effort to revive the Soviet Union, contrary to the hyperbole many conservative pundits who paint him as the new Joseph Stalin.
Rather, he is akin to Czar Nicholas I – the ultranationalist czar who ruled Russia from 1825 until 1855 – who combined rabid Russian nationalism, an autocratic style and expansionist foreign policy.
Russia’s borders expanded like never before under Czar Nicholas’s reign, bringing Central Asia and the Caucasus into his empire – stretching from Poland to Alaska.
Like Putin, Nicholas sought to repudiate the idea that Russia had anything in common with the West and prevent the spread of the liberal ideas that came out of the French Revolution. He sought to portray Russia as a sort of moral savior much as Putin has done.
A portrait of Nicholas I hangs in an antechamber to Putin’s presidential office in the Kremlin highlighting the symbolic connection between the two Russian rulers.
Putin’s rule has seen the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church to a position to what it held prior to the Bolshevik Revolution when the nation was referred to as “Holy Russia.”
Nicholas I’s motto of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” is as at home under Vladimir Putin as it was during the late czar’s reign. Putin’s rejection of everything Western echoes the ideas of the Slavophiles of Czar Nicholas’s reign, who thought that everything Western was alien to Russia and emphasized the importance of Russian Orthodoxy in Russian life.
Putin has restored many of the symbols of the old Romanov monarchy. For example, his honor guard wears a uniform similar to that worn by Czar Nicholas II’s imperial guard in 1914. He substituted the old Soviet holiday commemorating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution with one commemorating the accession of the first Romanov czar in 2005. Putin held a major celebration last year commemorating the 400th anniversary of that event last year.
Those who see an attempt to revive the Soviet Union in Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Georgia before it get it wrong.
Putin’s 2004 comment about the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union being the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century gets taken out of context. For Putin the Russian nationalist, it represented the same sort of humiliation that befell Germany in 1919 after the Allies humiliated it in the wake of the First World War.
The Soviet Union represented the pinnacle of the rise of Russian power and prestige that began with Czar Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. It was a nation that made the world tremble. Its collapse marked the humiliation of the Russian people, and it was only a matter of time before a strongman rose to power to fill the vacuum left by the Soviet collapse just like in Germany.
The chaos of Germany in the 1920s resembled that of Russia in the 1990s. Putin certainly is not Hitler, but his transformation of Russia from democracy back into a dictatorship and desire to redeem the Russian nation from humiliation has a similar ring.
The medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus was the cradle of Russian civilization and lies at the heart of Russian nationalist ideas. So likely the recapture of what Russian nationalists derisively call “Little Russia”, aka Ukraine, is necessary to redeem the humiliation the Russian nation suffered in 1991.
Russia’s uncrowned czar has set himself up to follow in Czar Nicholas’s footsteps and find himself in a disastrous battle with the West over Crimea and over his subsequent moves with everything to lose.
Putin’s ascendant new Russian Empire is a threat to global peace, and unlike other nations it has thousands of nuclear weapons it can use to hold the world hostage. We scoff at the Russian bear at our peril.
