Stalin And Putin - Different Rulers - Same Tactics
Putin began his war in Ukraine with an attempt to demonstrate Russian mastery of an American-style shock and awe campaign. It was all to be over within days. Kyiv would fall. A new puppet government would be installed.
That was not to be. The Russian Army demonstrated it did not begin to have the ability to follow through on Vlad’s vision. So, now, Putin has fallen back on his roots. He has taken a page from Stalin’s playbook. He is counting on genocide to work.
In the early 1930’s Joseph Stalin was working hard to cement Soviet control over the entire Soviet Union. There was grave concern about Ukrainian nationalism and resistance to Stalin’s iron rule. Stalin employed the most ruthless method of all to crush this resistance. He engineered a famine and let nature take its course.
Stalin and his minions starved over 4 million Ukrainian men, women, and children to death. The event has become known to history as the Holodomor.
“Stalin appears to have been motivated by the goal of transforming the Ukrainian nation into his idea of a modern, proletarian, socialist nation, even if this entailed the physical destruction of broad sections of its population,” says Trevor Erlacher, a historian specializing in modern Ukraine.
Stalin stepped in, seized land, and crushed family farms. When the grain harvest fell precipitously, Stalin seized what was left and withheld it from the population. People wandered the countryside in a vain search for food. They dropped in their tracks and perished amidst the snow drifts in the cruelest winter in history.
Putin has adopted the same mindset. Unable to beat the Ukrainians on the battlefield he is now using his drones, missiles, and artillery to target the power infrastructure in Ukraine. He is turning off the lights and most importantly the heat for the Ukrainian civilian population. He is counting on the cold and dark of the long Ukrainian winter to do the rest.
Waves of Russian missiles are striking Ukraine every day. They are not hitting troop concentrations or military headquarters. They are hitting power plants and other infrastructure connected to the power grid.
All across Ukraine as the deep cold of winter settles in Ukrainians are without electricity. In Lviv, 90% of the population is without power. In Kyiv, 40% are similarly affected. All together in Ukraine, at least nine million people are without power.
Even when there is power it is typically rationed. The power comes on for a few hours and is then off for several hours. People build their schedules around windows in which they can shower or charge their phones. In apartment buildings, people keep water, food, and diapers in elevators in case someone gets stuck inside when the power goes out unexpectedly.
After one wave of attacks recently Internet traffic in Ukraine fell by two-thirds.
Repairs to the electricity infrastructure are difficult and sometimes impossible. Replacement parts are often simply unavailable. Once energy installations are repaired they are often hit again. They are effectively impossible to protect.
Russian attacks hit all parts of the electrical distribution system. They do not just attack power plants. They hit towers, power lines, and substations as well. There are an almost infinite number of points at which the system can be taken down.
“This is not a new tactic for Russia,” said John Spencer, a retired Army officer and chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum. “If you think about what they did in Chechnya, and in Syria, to basically bring the civilian population to such despair that they’re willing to capitulate.”
“Russians are actually now acting very cruel, but also in a very well-thought-through way,” said Andriy Kobolyev, former chief executive officer of Ukraine’s largest national oil and gas company Naftogaz.
In areas where Russian troops have retreated they have taken pains to destroy all critical infrastructure before they leave. This puts Ukrainian forces in the position of having to take responsibility for repairing electrical and water systems. The government of Ukraine is even directing people displaced by the fighting not to return to recaptured areas until critical infrastructure has been repaired.
No power means no heat. It means no light. It means no water. It means every aspect of modern civilization grinds to a halt.
The cruelest months of winter are ahead of us. Millions of Ukrainians are going to go through the coldest part of the year without modern sanitation, heat, or a reliable supply of water. This does not mean inconvenience. This means death.
Putin knows all this. He is doing all this very deliberately. He has taken a page from Stalin’s playbook. In Russia some things are constant.
Different ruler. Same brutality.
Hmmm. This is a rare moment of disagreement. I'll begin with this. Kotkin, that historian Russian guru and Putin biographer, was recently asked about the comparison between Putin and Stalin. He made clear that they were not comparable in any meaningful way. This is not an apologia for Putin, but this is a reminder to you to not let hyperbole get the best of you. What is true is that Putin and Stalin are still both very popular with the Russian people...And of course, Stalin was a monster for much more than just the Holodomor in Ukraine. I personally think the Gulags were his crowning achievement in terms of absolute cruelty.
I'll go on, cuz I think some may benefit from an explication of my moral reasoning. Christopher Hitchens put it best when describing his surprising support for war against Saddam Hussein and the mission to take him out of power. He described how in the field of moral philosophy and ethics there has been a stratification of different kinds of evils. Saddam Hussein and Stalin engaged in the extra level of evil in terms of murderous torture and abuse that seemed to serve itself, and to terrorize the population. Sending videos of daughters being raped or fathers being executed by pistol shot only to be sent a bill for the bullet. Hitchens describes a scene in Baghdad that happened, a man spilled his coffee on the newspaper page with Saddam on the cover, people back away. The police are called, he's taken away.
Putin's not that. What he does have in common is a typical Russian arrogance about the effectiveness of their military.
I am surprised by another aspect of this commentary. This "special military operation" as it was framed in Russia was a limited force with limited goals that they did not achieve. It intentionally did far less civilian damage and infrastructure damage. But the escalation due to Western direct involvement in this war on every level surprised Russia for sure. They thought that actually going to war would convince the West that Russia was serious about never tolerating a nuclear armed NATO allied Ukraine on its border. It had made that clear for 20 years but we didn't listen. And now they are going to fight an unlimited war in Ukraine to take the entire nation and remove the entire Zelensky govt from power. It will make Ukraine a part of the CIS. Unless we want to start WWIII, there is nothing we can do to stop it.
I do have a strategic question for you, cuz this kind of question doesn't seem to be part of your thinking. Did I miss Russia adding 14 nations to the Warsaw pact after the fall of the USSR? Nope, that was the West, which strangely kept NATO in place after victory was achieved. Why did we expand NATO by 14 nations? No lesser a diplomatic/foreign relations guru than George Kennan made clear in 1998 that our NATO expansion would provoke Russia into war someday. There were many at the time who openly spoke about this - you'd think that never happen to hear the press commentary today. Kennan also predicted those who claimed NATO expansion wouldn't provoke the Russians would change their story when the Russians did finally go to war to "the Russians were always going to do this anyway".
Sure, Putin is a political thug of sorts, but he's also a far better strategic thinker than the clowns we have running western nations. He's at least acting in cognizable Russian national interests. Note that Moscow isn't starving, that costs aren't skyrocketing in Russia, that in fact, Putin's efforts to make Russia self-sufficient in many goods is paying off. Whereas I look at the West's regime's citizen hating energy policies and absurd supply chain/trade decisions and ask myself, at what point will this country be like a Mad Max movie? Even more to the point, where does my moral superiority come from to judge Putin so harshly? Our nation is run by a controlled foreign agent of China for God's sake - guys like Putin look better every day to a sane nationalist. Note that Frau Merkel (that insane commie - she led a Leninist/Marxist school in East Germany, she was a true believer) just admitted the purpose of the Minsk agreements were to delay Russia so Ukraine could get stronger, which correlates with Russian complaints about Ukraine never acting in good faith wrt the Minsk agreements.
Last. Uh, what Putin's doing now is forming a several hundred thousand strong army that is going to destroy all resistance in Ukraine, military and civilian. Just as we did in Iraq, they are destroying infrastructure. War is ugly business. But we provoked it and Ukraine made clear it will not negotiate. It's last offer was contingent on the complete withdrawal of Russian forces as a condition for beginning negotiations.
I'm no Russophile or apologist. But I can't for the life of me figure out why in the eff we are stirring up the pot with Russia in eastern Europe? I don't give a crap who runs Ukraine. They are not our ally for very good reasons. Let Russia take it, it matters not a whit to any American. We wouldn't notice a change in our lives at all. And if you are going to try and tell me that the kleptocrats who run Ukraine are better stewards of Ukraine, I'll just have to politely disagree.
Based on competent sources I've been following, that simply isn't true. The military operations were designed to be the opposite of "shock & awe" to achieve limited objectives. Putin, or his advisors, underestimated the extent of U.S. support & Ukrainian resistance. For more on this, you can consult Col. Douglas Macgregor: https://youtu.be/8I0bfEGtHeY. For more, here is an excellent article by the retired Colonel: https://weltwoche.ch/daily/this-war-has-been-lost-a-long-time-ago/. For another explanation from someone pro-Russia, but not a so-called "disinformation" source, Scott Ritter has the expertise & background to be taken seriously: https://www.energyintel.com/00000182-59e8-d3fc-a193-7feee7ca0000
Unfortunately, the justifications for Putin's decision to invade were reasonable & could have been prevented with diplomatic negotiations the Biden & the Neo-Cons could not tolerate: "No, Putin Did Not Start the War in Ukraine". Towards a U.S. War against Russia? - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization.