Spanish – The Communist Party is banned in Ukraine, and Poland prohibits flying the hammer and sickle flag because of the massacres and famines perpetrated in the name of communist ideology. But in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, communist flags are hoisted in honor of the 150th birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin. Despite Lenin’s bloody legacy, his birthday is celebrated on April 22, as Putin seeks to resurrect the Bolshevik leader as a hero.
It is not a minor detail that Putin was a member of the KGB, the political police of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and that he also served as a member of the Stasi, the East German secret police. So, his complicity with socialism has been going on for decades, and in the Americas, we have seen clear evidence of his links with Cuba and Venezuela, so much so that the United States asserted that “the real support for Nicolas Maduro’s regime is coming from Russia.”
The political left, particularly the Trotskyist camp (Trotsky, leader of the Red Army and lover of Frida Kahlo, was assassinated as per Stalin’s orders during one of his purges), commonly seeks to dissociate itself from Stalin because of his bloodthirsty record and to elevate Lenin as the true Bolshevik. But the truth is that the only thing that makes one more bloodthirsty than the other is the number of years each was in power.
Cuando las fuerzas zaristas dispararon a cientos de trabajadores y a sus familias en 1905, Lenin prácticamente lo celebró: «El que ha sido azotado vale por dos que no lo han sido»
Hoy Rusia lo recuerda en su 150 cumpleaños. Y se resiste a enterrarlo. https://t.co/dcNtwP2n9U
— xaviercolas (@xaviercolas) April 22, 2020
Since the first socialist government in 1920, Lenin, as leader of the Bolsheviks, ordered that the peasants be denied access to food because of their alleged complicity in the war against the Red Army, founded and led by Trotsky.
Between 1921 and 1922 alone, about five million people died of hunger, and not only did they practice cannibalism, but they also traded in human organs. Lenin died in 1924, so he could not match Stalin’s death toll. The latter was in power for 28 years and killed at least 20 million people. Lenin was much more lethal in proportion to the years he ruled.
Putin has been in power for 20 years. In this period, he has forged a “strongly conservative populist nationalism,” as stated by Spain’s La Razón, which also points out that this new Russian nationalism is based on the interpretation of the country’s history as the manifestation of a collective impulse and a clear destiny: Mother Russia.
However, it amalgamates contradictory concepts. Firstly, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was not nationalist. It was Lenin himself who ordered the Russian proletariat to fight against Russian nationalism. He took Karl Marx’s class struggle and moved it into countries where he divided them into “oppressed nations,” and Russia was the “oppressor nation,” under the power of the czars.
https://t.co/4jA7sYLxBg
En Alemania no hay estatuas de Hitler, pero en Rusia siguen inaugurando estatuas de Lenin, creador de la Cheka, autor del primer genocidio ucraniano e iniciador de los campos de concentración copiados por Hitler. El comunismo es una pandemia cultural.— Daniel Pérez (@DanielP66324741) April 22, 2020
As the name suggests, the USSR was a union of republics because socialism is internationalist at its core. It united at least 15 nations under one flag and 15 more behind what became known as the Iron Curtain.
Under Putin’s government, Russia annexed Crimea, a region that had belonged to Ukraine for decades. In fact, it was there that Stalin perpetrated one of his many famines of ethnic cleansing, killing seven million people through starvation.
When the territory was expanded to several nations, it was Moscow’s duty to ensure the “redistribution of wealth,” as socialism demands. Since Ukraine was the area that produced the most food, it was the civic duty of Ukrainian farmers to hand over their harvest and their land to the state. But they refused. The punishment was brutal, and they were forced to hand over their harvest without economic compensation. Ukrainians who dared to consume the food they produced paid for their crime by facing a firing squad.
Moreover, Soviet soldiers killed the birds and all hunting animals in the region to prevent Ukrainians from eating. This increased the plundering because every Ukrainian body handed over to the state had a reward: each soldier was given grain equal to the weight of the dead Ukrainian’s body.
Is Putin a conservative?
Regarding Putin’s alleged conservatism, Lenin was the first leader in the world to establish legal abortion as a state policy. And this is precisely one of the most important issues in conservatism. One of the traditions the ideology seeks to conserve (as its name suggests) is respect for life from conception. Therefore, it is paradoxical to attribute the term conservative to a leader who not only glorifies Lenin but who has been unable to reverse this policy that kills one-third of unborn Russians.
Despite pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin has not dismantled this policy. On the contrary, in 2018 alone, 1.6 million births were reported versus 661,045 abortions.
Are Christianity and communism comparable?
Putin has even dared to equate devotion to the saints with the cult that exists around the figure of Lenin, whose body is embalmed. In January 2018, Putin said that Lenin’s mummy was no different “from the relics of the saints for the Orthodox (Christians),” claiming that Christianity and communism have values in common.
But the truth is that Christianity was persecuted in the Soviet Union, so much so that there are now three martyrs who have been canonized for confronting communism. The last one is Saint Gabriel Urgebadze, who was brutally beaten and left for dead after he burned a portrait of Stalin and Lenin when the communist army hung the portrait from the cathedral, trying to replace religion with the cult of the state. The saint managed to survive this incident.
Marx’s goal: to dethrone God and destroy capitalism
Marx himself said the following: “My aim in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” It is no accident that the first law of the Bolshevik revolution, led by Lenin, was the redistribution of land, where the Orthodox Church was expropriated.
However, since Putin incorporated marriage between a man and a woman, a legal figure that has prevailed since ancient Rome, as part of the constitution, and prohibited the public promotion of homosexuality, especially to children, not sexual preference per se, many wrongly call him a conservative. It should be noted that this is a relative advance over the Soviet Union, where homosexuality (among males) was a federal crime. Because, as in Cuba, during the years of the revolution, individual desire was considered an obstacle to the work of the soldier.
The truth is that Putin’s project is a fusion of factions, which elevates both Czar Nicholas II, who was brutally massacred along with the Czarina and their young children per orders by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and Stalin himself.
Putin shows as many contradictions in his speech as Lenin, whom he seeks to celebrate today as part of the ideology that claims the glory of the past.
La pandemia en el mundo ? | El Partido Comunista de Rusia celebrará el 150 aniversario del líder de la revolución bolchevique https://t.co/zgTBy7yr3u
— La Voz de Galicia (@lavozdegalicia) April 21, 2020
Many have praised President Putin’s work in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. But the reality is that today, amid the outbreak, he has allowed not only the celebration of the birth of a tyrant but the conglomeration of people to do so. This casts doubt on the alleged precautions he has taken. So much so that doctors’ unions claim that the government has covered up the data of cases of atypical pneumonia.
Today, he is using the celebration of a bloodthirsty tyrant as a distraction to remove the focus from an uncertain present with the memory of a supposedly glorious past. Putin believes that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest political catastrophe of the century.”