years of terrible conflict. By contrast, systematic bombardment of civilians began only days into an unprovoked invasion. Russian missiles and artillery targeted apartment blocks, hospitals, and schools. As Russians occupied Ukrainian
cities and towns, they kidnapped or murdered mayors, local councilors, even a museum director from Meltiopol, spraying bullets and terror randomly on everyone else.37
This follows a particular pattern. As she says. “all of this – the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance about mass murder – is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history.”38
Applebaum continues:
Yet even as these crimes were carried out, in full view of the world, the Russian state successfully hid this tragedy from its own people. As in the past, the use of jargon helped. This was not an invasion; it was a “special military operation.” This was not a mass murder of Ukrainians; it was “protection” for inhabitants of the eastern-Ukrainian territories. This was not genocide; it was defense against the “genocide perpetuated by the Kyiv regime.40
Putin’s tactics, used in language familiar to Russians, were designed to signal and confuse. As broadcast on the state-run RIA Novosti website: “They [Ukrainians] sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their own countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.”41
Applebaum concludes her piece by writing:
There was no reckoning after the Ukrainian famine, or the Gulag, or the Great Terror of 1937-38, no moment when the perpetrators expressed formal, institutional regret. Now we have the result. Aside from the Kravchenkos and Kopelevs, the liberal minority, most Russians have accepted the explanations the state handed them about the past and moved on. They’re not human beings; they’re kulak
trash, they told themselves then. They’re not human beings; they’re Ukrainian Nazis, they tell themselves today.42
These are the same totalitarian tactics Stalin would engage when leading the Soviet Union –
minus the internment/concentration camps. Weaponizing history (Nazism, western aggression against the Motherland, Soviet victory over Germany, etc.), and thinking (attacking common sense, challenging reason, etc.) through such terroristic tactics, Putin uses the invasion of Ukraine to disrupt the political, economic, and cultural foundations of the entire West by threatening everyone’s right to experience human dignity and live a dignified human existence.
And in many respects, Putin has accomplished this by reestablishing Russia and its totalitarian ideology at the center of world attention. People are once again thinking about communism, Nazism, and totalitarianism; they are remembering and fearing political instability and a return to long term world war with the consequences of famine, internment, mass killings, death camps, and nuclear atrocities. Consequently, the West should expect Putin to continue this approach – not only in terms of Ukrainian aggression, but in threats against the western alliance – because it reinvigorates
The world has to give Zelensky credit for focusing the western liberal world on what really matters.
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