WASHINGTON — The speech Russian president Vladimir Putin made on Wednesday bore the hallmarks of unapologetic authoritarianism, Russia experts and observers said.
“We are well post-1934,” said Nina Khruscheva, a professor of international relations at the New School in New York City, referencing the year when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin began his murderous purge. Putin is an unabashed admirer of Stalin and has worked — successfully, in Russia — to rehabilitate his image, which suffered for years after a posthumous denunciation in 1956 by Khruscheva’s grandfather Nikita Khruschev, then the Soviet leader.
In his unsettling remarks , Putin lashed out at “national traitors” he blamed for undermining the war he launched against Ukraine.
“Putin really wants to take Russia back to Stalin days,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, wrote on Twitter. “He has always emulated Stalin, and this speech is definitely angrier and stronger than previous speeches.”
President Biden said on Wednesday that Putin was a “war criminal,” and the rhetoric the Russian leader used was strikingly similar to the language authoritarians have deployed to demonize, persecute and kill ethnic minorities and political opposition groups.
Even as Western efforts at diplomacy continue, the Kremlin remains in the grip of profound geopolitical grievance, which could make a peace settlement difficult. Putin said true Russians would “always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors,” presumably a reference to Russians who have protested his invasion of Ukraine in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thousands with the means to do so have left Russia, which is facing widespread cultural and economic isolation.
Russia “will simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth, spit them onto the pavement,” Putin said of Russians “fifth columnists” with Western sympathies.
“This is very, very scary,” American investor Bill Browder, who has become a nemesis of Putin after exposing corruption in the Kremlin, said on Twitter. “The language is unbelievable.”
“The whole speech was pure Dr. Strangelove — bodily fluids, purification and what not,” New School professor Khruscheva told Yahoo News, referencing Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 satire about nuclear war. “Very Hollywood, only it’s happening to us, not on screen,” she wrote in an email.
Putin clearly sees Russia as the victim, denouncing the “economic blitzkrieg” of Western sanctions in Wednesday’s remarks, a reference to Adolf Hitler’s favored mode of sudden, overwhelming attack. “I want to be as direct as possible: hostile geopolitical designs lie behind the hypocritical talk and recent actions by the so-called collective West,” he said, according to an English-language transcript of his remarks provided by the Kremlin. “They have no use – simply no use – for a strong and sovereign Russia, and they will not forgive us for our independent policy or for standing up for our national interests.”
Putin has maintained that he needed to invade Ukraine to “de-Nazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine, but he also fears that the Western sphere of influence is growing too close to Russia’s borders.
Wednesday’s virtual meeting was billed by the Kremlin as a discussion between Putin and regional leaders about “socioeconomic support” but it was a brief section of Putin’s comments from his introduction that caught the attention of social media users, with millions having viewed a short clip in which Putin caustically pointed his finger at Russians who have grown rich during his tenure but are now abandoning the country as it becomes an international pariah.
“I do not in the least condemn those who have villas in Miami or the French Riviera, who cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or gender freedom as they call it. That is not the problem, not at all,” Putin said, referencing the elevated standard of living Russians have enjoyed since he stabilized the economy after an acutely chaotic period of gangster capitalism in the 1990s.
He also played on longstanding Russian feelings of inferiority relative to the West, reminding supposedly disloyal critics of his Ukrainian campaign that they would never be allowed into “the superior caste, the superior race” of Western society. The West, he suggested, sees Russians not as equals but rates as “expendable raw material” to be exploited and thus “inflict maximum damage on our people.”
The speech left Lautman, the Ukraine expert, stunned. “Everyone soon will be fifth columnists as Putin gets more enraged,” she told Yahoo News in a text message. “There will be a purge from his agencies, military, and everyday citizens. It was really such a dark speech.”
