From the USSR of the ideological empire to the myth of Putin’s Russia

The Eurasian Empire in the shadow of Kremlin it has always been record-breaking, from the spiritual legacy to the birth of authoritarianism, from decadence to the new contemporary season of Vladimir Putin’s muscular and unscrupulous power. The great mother Russia, first Tsarist and then Bolshevik, then the Soviet Union and again Russia with the colorless parenthesis of the Community of Independent States (CIS) which still saw it as the leader.

L’The USSR was officially born on 30 December 1922in the wake of the civil war and local wars, but forcibly correcting the painful mutilations of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk accepted upon imposition of the central empires in order to save Lenin’s revolution from internal and external enemies, promising however to resolve the outstanding issues at a later stage. It was the first socialist country in the world, and it achieved many records, some of which survived its dissolution.

The recognition of Mussolini’s Italy and the secret rearmament of Germany

Compared to the Tsarist Empire in 1922, Poland, Finland and the Baltic States were missing, but by choice or thanks toRed Army 15 republics were part of it, without any foreign military presence that had supported the counter-revolutionary armies. The Soviet regime, having set aside the utopia of the revolution in capitalist Europe, worked to consolidate the leading country of socialism while waiting to export the system.

The direct and indirect ostracism, which was also expressed by the lack of international recognition of the new state reality, was suddenly broken by fascist Italy on 7 February 1924: precisely thanks to Benito Mussolinithe former socialist revolutionary whom Lenin had initially greeted with hope and then repudiated, having preferred that of bourgeois reaction to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

On the other hand theSoviet Unionprecisely because of its isolation and impenetrability, it had secretly hosted German military bases and industries to evade all the prohibitions imposed on Germany with the Peace of Versailles, from which Moscow drew experience to overcome technological backwardness, in particular on land and naval armaments. The recognition of the Kingdom of Italy opened the way for other nations, but did not ease the climate of suspicion, especially with Stalin’s seizure of power and his bloody management of power.

From the New Economic Policy (NEP) of Lenin to the five-year plans of StalinRussia and the other republics of the red empire proceeded with forced industrialization at all costs and at all prices, casually passing over the starvation deaths of the scientific famine applied to Ukraine (Holodomor), the systematic elimination of opponents also based on suspicions and paranoia of the supreme leader with summary shootings or show trials, forced mass movements and replacement of populations, deportations to the archipelago of Siberian and Asian gulags, use of slave labor in the construction of the great works that glorified the regime and propagated abroad the superiority of communism over capitalism.

Stalin, the expansion of borders and hegemony in half of Europe

In the Second World War none had as many civilian and military deaths as the USSR: from 18 to 27 million, according to estimates. The conflict began, however, with Stalin on the side of Hitler (Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact for the partition of Eastern Europe) to whose war machine he regularly ensured the indispensable supplies until 22 June 1941, when the German attack caused the siding with the Allies and the creation of the myth of the “Great Patriotic War”.

Once Nazism was defeated, Stalin brought the Soviet Union to its maximum expansion, incorporating Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, annexing eastern Poland, canceling the consequences of the Peace of Riga in 1921, and forcibly pulling Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and even half of Germany, the one occupied in the rush to Berlin and Sovietised, into the communist system.

Finland, despite territorial losses, had managed to remain independent but under strict “neutralizing” protection, like Austria, whose eagle was symbolically equipped with a hammer and sickle clutched in its claws. The first recognition of the newborn State of Israel came from Moscain 1949, because it was instrumental to his geopolitical and hegemonic designs.

The opposition to the Western world will be militarily consecrated with the birth of Warsaw Pact (1955) which would have intervened in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, when Moscow was already imposing economic and commercial conditions on its satellites based on its needs with Comecon, established in 1949 in opposition to the Marshall Plan.

The struggle with the West through the Cold War and the space race

Precisely in the name of this race to excel, after having eliminated the American monopoly on the atomic bomb with the support of German and Italian scientists, the USSR launched itself into the conquest of space. He arrived before the Americans to send a living being into orbit around the Earth: the dog Lajka, lost in infinity together with Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957.

The first cosmonaut, the legendary Yurij Gagarin, was Soviet on 12 April 1961 on Vostok 1 and the first spacewalk with Aleksej Leonov on 18 March 1965 on Voskhod 5, but the Americans landed on the moon on 20 July 1969 with Apollo 11, opening a new era. And twenty years after Gagarin’s feat, the Space Shuttle mission, on 12 April 1981, showed the world the technological superiority of the USA.

I know it Cold War was played like a chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer which broke a dominance considered unbreakable, the Soviet military doctrine was systematically defeated in local wars in Africa, the Middle East and the Third World. President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” project forced the USSR, already structurally undermined by the policy of Mikhail Gorbacevcollapsing, which from economic and ideological became institutional after the collapse of Berlin Wall of 1989 and the attacks on the entire Solidarność system in Poland. An implosion in all sectors, which followed the humiliating military retreat from invaded Afghanistan and that from all the former Warsaw Pact countries that had left it with the affirmation of democracies.

The collapse of the system and Putin’s expansionist re-foundation

The CIS was the fig leaf to hide that the USSR superpower that had frightened the world no longer existed. Everything was for sale in the era of Boris Yeltsin, from the Khalasnikovs on the market stalls to the submarines adapted for habitation, up to the savage depredation of state industries by former exponents of the CPSU who knew how it would end and the aggressive turbo-capitalists of the latest generation who would constitute the caste of oligarchs organic to the new power.

Vladimir Putina communist official and colonel of the infamous KGB, had gained power by succeeding Yeltsin and would hold it Machiavellianly, bringing Russia back to the pride of the past, the generals to the myth of the superpower and the memory of Stalin to the altars of the past and revived homeland. By deceiving the Westerners and hiding his designs, he recalibrated the hegemony in the former empire with the intervention in Georgia and between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and then by attacking Ukraine to bring Russia where the Russians were with the bloody deception of the Special Military Operation under the pretext of eradicating the new Nazism. The rest is recent history, which as always feeds on the past.