Putin is definitely trying to revive the old Soviet Union, this time with an Orthodox and Russian nationalist doctrine rather than communist:
Soviet flags keep rising over Russian-occupied Ukraine
In captured city after city, Russian authorities or their local proxies are removing Ukrainian flags and hoisting Soviet victory flags. In their view, and certainly that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, their presence in Ukraine is the revenge of history and the restoration of a union with Moscow sundered by the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the emergence of an independent Ukraine whose very existence the Kremlin struggles to accept.
Putin sees himself in the mold of Catherine the Great and Nicholas I, says the WaPo article. But flying the old Soviet flag is more in the mold (both meanings intended) of Stalin. In particular, he is trying to reproduce Stalin’s victory in the Great Patriotic War:
For Putin, the Soviet era is most important for the memory of triumph and sacrifice in World War II, which he and his allies revive constantly in their rhetoric. That’s why according to Putin, the Ukrainians, including their Jewish president, must be “Nazis.”
Stalin was fighting a competitor, Hitler, who betrayed Stalin before Stalin could betray him. Putin is fighting democracies who just want to be free of Russia. In raising the old Soviet flag over the parts of Ukraine he is (for now) occupying, he is trying not just to rewrite history but to erase it.
But 2022 is not 1944.
“Putin is flailing against the history of modern economic development,” noted political economist Nicholas Eberstadt in the opinion pages of The Washington Post. “The wealth of modern nations is overwhelmingly generated by human beings and their capabilities. Natural resources (land, energy and all the rest) have accounted for a shrinking share of global output for the past two centuries, with no end in sight.”
The Russian president’s warmongering and “nuclear saber-rattling is the tactic of a leader playing a weakening hand,” Eberstadt contended.
Another Soviet legacy hangs over Putin’s gambit in Ukraine. The longer the war drags out — and the more difficult it becomes to obscure the failure and tragedy of it from the Russian public — the more likely that many Russians will begin to doubt the wisdom and competence of their government’s actions.
In short, raising the Soviet flag in Ukraine is not an act of victory but of desperation.
[I’m on vacation in the Balkans — Sarajevo at the moment — and dislocated my shoulder in Kotor, so my ability to monitor and respond is going to be limited. But this story caught my eye and I felt it important to open the discussion here.]
Monday, May 2, 2022 · 2:22:41 PM +00:00 · Dan K
More details: in Kherson, as reported by Newsweek, Russian soldiers raised a copy of the Soviet Union “victory flag” which is a copy of the flag the Soviet army raised over Berlin in 1945. It’s NOT the one at the top of the story; it’s a Soviet flag (hammer-and-sickle) with writing on it proclaiming the 150th rifle battalion (or something similar) for occupying Berlin. Here is a tweet of the video:
Newsweek has a photo of this flag as part of the May 9, 2015, parade in Moscow. Putin must really be stretching for something to brag about at this year’s May 9 parade. It also furthers his propaganda effort to make Ukrainians into Nazis.
This isn’t all new news, it seems, but it went under the radar until WaPo picked it up. The Newsweek story is about 10 days old. And here is a report from March 9:
Russian military vehicles are flying Soviet hammer and sickle flags in Ukraine
The past seems to be present as new footage posted to social media appears to show a Russian armored personnel carrier flying the red banner of the Soviet Union during the invasion of Ukraine.
The minute-long video, attributed to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, shows a column of tanks, armored personnel carriers, mobile missile launchers, and jeeps moving on a rural road in Ukraine. One BMP-2, an infantry fighting vehicle, seen early in the clip flies the scarlet red banner of the Soviet Union, the continent-spanning state that collapsed under political and economic unrest in 1991 and gave way to the modern-day Russian Federation.