4.28.22
Vladimir Putin’s regime has always been authoritarian. But since Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, something has shifted. Putin has completely shut down Russian civil society and criminalized free expression while launching a massive campaign of propaganda and disinformation. Russia is rapidly becoming a totalitarian state. The pieces are all there. As a historian of the Soviet Union, I do not use the term “totalitarian” lightly. But Western policymakers need to understand what they are looking at in Russia in order to come up with effective policies. One of the most perceptive observers of a totalitarian state in the making was the German Jewish scholar Victor Klemperer, who chronicled the rise of Nazi Germany. Klemperer’s diary entries from 1933, as he watched Adolf Hitler’s rise toward becoming the Führer, can help us make sense of what we are now seeing in Russia — the coordination of institutions from above, a sustained propaganda campaign that imparts a sense of inevitability, and the atomization or breakdown of society. Coordination. In Russia we are currently witnessing the regime coordinate all social, political, and cultural institutions to serve its goals. Putin has shut down independent media, banned Western social media, and criminalized all criticism of his policies.
Propaganda and inevitability. Since the start of the war, a national-patriotic ideology, grounded in anti-Westernism and deriving emotional resonance from the memory of World War II, has reached new heights. Russian propaganda falsely depicts Ukraine as an “artificial” state run by Nazis and as a pawn being used by the West to pursue an aggressive agenda. It proclaims a life-or-death struggle with the West and portrays Russia’s victory and Putin’s continued rule as inevitable. The atomization or breakdown of society. Russians who oppose the war have become isolated. The imposition of fines and prison sentences for speaking up, along with the threat of being sacked from one’s job or expelled from school, has led people to recalculate the cost of opposition. Cases of students denouncing teachers who express doubts about the “special military operation” are featured on TV and have a chilling effect. Putin’s Russia differs from 1933 Germany in one critical way: Germany had not yet launched a brutal war of aggression against a neighboring nation, and Putin has. It was a mistake for European leaders to meet with Hitler in the 1930s. Thankfully, President Biden understands that with Putin, appeasement is not an option.
