Abhi Saini

Putin’s Ukraine invasion emulated many key features of erstwhile Soviet state

In the late 1980s, as then Washington Post reporter David Remnick travelled around the USSR, he found that opinions varied on when and where the old regime died. Uzbeks in Tashkent and Samarkand told him that the exposure in 1988 and 1989 of the haphazard manner in which Moscow had turned all of Central Asia into a vast cotton plantation — “in the process destroying the Aral Sea and nearly every other area of the economy” — was the turning point. In the Baltic states, Remnick says the official “discovery” of the secret protocols to the Nazi-Soviet pact was the key moment. But, as he writes in Lenin’s Tomb, it was in Ukraine that he found the most “unifying event, the absolute metaphor for the explosion of the last empire on earth.” On a trip to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov in 1989, he met with small groups of nationalists who promised that “one day” their republic of over 50 million people, the biggest after Russia, would strike out for independence (that came two years later in August, 1991). Quoting from history, they told Remnick, “’For us’, Lenin once wrote, ‘to lose the Ukraine would be to lose our head’.” In his speech on February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin, justifying his military action in Ukraine, blamed Soviet leaders, especially Lenin, for the disintegration of “historical Russia”.