th<\/sup> 2023<\/i><\/p>\nwww.zeppscommentaries.online<\/i><\/p>\n
Despite having had seven years to consolidate his power, Joseph Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich) was feeling uneasy. Despite the propagandistic success of his \u201ccult of personality\u201d leadership (since emulated by Hitler, Mao, and Trump) and ongoing purges of party leadership in show trials for the previous five years, it was already becoming clear that his plans to collectivize the entire agricultural sector was becoming a major social and economic disaster. Millions had already died as a result of the Holodomor<\/i>, or Great Famine, which struck principally in the bread basket of the USSR, the Ukraine. Millions more starved to death in Russia proper and in the Kazakh regions. Abroad, Hitler had taken power in Germany, openly proclaiming his intent to invade and subjugate \u201cthe Slavic regions\u201d which included the USSR. At home, talk of revolution became more open, and in his personal life, Stalin\u2019s wife committed suicide and his eldest son attempted the same. His oldest daughter had massive mental problems.<\/p>\n
Stalin\u2019s response was \u201cthe Great Purge\u201d which by 1938 was called \u201cthe Great Terror.\u201d Some 750,000 people were executed, and tens of millions thrown into the Gulags.<\/p>\n
Incredibly, and American right wingers emulate this cult of personality leadership model, Stalin remained fantastically popular. Even the bloody and wasteful way in which he fought Hitler (somewhat akin to a pitcher wearing out the opposing baseball team by making them run around the bases all day) didn\u2019t put a dent in that popularity, and one of the most striking passages in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn\u2019s \u201cGulag Archipelago\u201d is the fulsome and utterly unfeigned grief shown by people imprisoned by Stalin for decades for trival or non-existent offenses upon the news of Stalin\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
So why am I comparing 2023 Russia to 1934 USSR, Putin to Stalin? Both were feeling cornered by political, military, economic and personal pressures, most self-inflicted. Both had a triggering crisis that sent them off an operative and subjective precipice.<\/p>\n
In 1934, Stalin obsessed over his exiled rival for Soviet power, Leon Trotsky. Exiled since 1922, Trotsky had shifted from nation to nation, and, by then in an unhappy relationship with France, was rumored to be considering a return to the Soviet Union. Stalin feared Trotsky\u2019s influence and possible restoration to power, and that triggered the Great Purge. The biggest of the show trials, in 1936, resulted in executions of Soviet political powers for \u201cTrotskyist\u2013Zinovievist” activities. At that point, the Soviet bloodbath became a result of political calculation, rather than just incompetence and misplaced idealism.<\/p>\n
Everyone knows that something very strange happened this past week. Following months of rumors of increasing strife between Vladimir Putin\u2019s Red Army and Ministry of Defence, and Yevgeny Prigozhin\u2019s powerful and vicious mercenaries, the Wagner Group. Prigozhin announced that the Red Army had killed \u201chuge numbers\u201d of mercenaries in what was portrayed as a deliberate attack. Wagner seized control of military facilities in the southern Russian cities of Rostov-on-Don and Voronezhand announced a march on Moscow, a threat the Kremlin took seriously enough to order the capital on lockdown. Then, less than 24 hours later, Prigozhin announced \u201cWe turning our columns around and going back in the other direction toward our field camps, in accordance with the plan.\u201d Some kind of agreement permitted the mercenaries to abandon the march on Moscow, unmolested and unpunished for what Putin just hours earlier had called treason and \u201cterrorist acts.\u201d Prigozhin himself left in a cloud of adulation for Belarus, where the country\u2019s brutal dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has offered him sanctuary. Given that Putin is Lukashenko\u2019s only ally, it\u2019s not clear to anyone why he offered a negotiated out to Prigozhin, although if I were Prigozhin, I would avoid going up stairs in buildings that have windows, odd men with bowlers and umbrellas, and cuppa teas with dusty surfaces. I\u2019m guessing that Lukashenko\u2019s real offer of protection was made to Putin, not Prigozhin, and Putin wants Prigozhin dead or vanished. Prigozhin probably realized that by effectively declaring war on Russia, he bit off more than he could chew. He has since said he was just trying to protect his \u2018troops\u2019 and not overthrow Russia. Oh, dear me, no. Just a misunderstanding. Tut tut.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t expect to see Prigozhin still alive by the end of this year. Similarly, Putin took a huge black eye politically, and he\u2019ll either be out of office by then, or Russia will be embroiled in another Great Purge or possibly a revolution.<\/p>\n
While nobody has much love for Putin, Prigozhin or Lukashenko, the situation is very worrisome, given that Russia still has more nukes than any other country, and nobody knows who will control those nukes or what they will do with them by year\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
For the Ukraine, all this is a golden opportunity to drive the Russians out of their eastern regions, and quite possibly Crimea itself. But remember that will only exacerbate the crisis in Russia and make things even more unstable.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s why I think Putin in 2023 so resembles the position of Stalin in 1934.<\/p>\n
This situation hasn\u2019t ended. It may well just be beginning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bryan Zepp Jamieson June 26th 2023 www.zeppscommentaries.online Despite having had seven years to consolidate his power, Joseph Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich) was feeling uneasy. Despite the propagandistic success of his \u201ccult of personality\u201d leadership (since emulated by Hitler, Mao, and Trump) and ongoing purges of party leadership in show trials for the previous five years, it … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “What Just Happened in Russia? — It feels like 1934, and the start of the Great Purge”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,617],"tags":[1677,1678,1667,1674,349,955,335,1675,1676,1666],"class_list":["post-1441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-affairs","category-history","tag-great-purge","tag-holodomor","tag-mercenaries","tag-prigozhen","tag-putin","tag-revolt","tag-russia","tag-stalin","tag-trotsky","tag-wagner-group"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Just Happened in Russia? -- It feels like 1934, and the start of the Great Purge · Zepp's Commentaries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/zeppscommentaries.online\/?p=1441\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Just Happened in Russia? -- It feels like 1934, and the start of the Great Purge · Zepp's Commentaries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Bryan Zepp Jamieson June 26th 2023 www.zeppscommentaries.online Despite having had seven years to consolidate his power, Joseph Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich) was feeling uneasy. 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