Let us examine how Leites defined the key elements of the Bolshevik Code and how Putin’s behavior and actions fit the Code:
Thus, Lenin’s formula of who-whom (kto-kogo)---the
destruction of the enemy ---is necessary not only for victory but also
for the survival of the Communist Party. The interest of the Party and
the enemy are so incompatible that their coexistence is
unstable. In 1919, Lenin wrote, ”if the Party does not use
violence against it enemies it lays itself open to violence from them;
the question is only who will destroy whom.”
The doctrine of who-whom was exemplified
in Stalin’s mass terrorism and purges, and Brezhnev
and Andropov’s selective repression of “enemies of the
people” by placing them in psychiatric institutions. Who will destroy
whom continues through Putin’s brand of selective repression.
Perseverance, guile and opportunism are keys to conduct in the
Bolshevik Code. “The Party leadership,” according to Leites,
“need not be concerned with consistency in its public
statements. Again, only effectiveness is important.”
Under Putin, just as under the Soviet system, when the
communist leadership declared a new reality all the
forces of the government, police , military and propaganda
coordinated their efforts to create a new political
line. Putin’s justification for the invasion of Crimea and
eastern Ukraine fits this pattern as do the words and actions
of his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
In fact, the falsification of reality has an
honored tradition in Soviet rule and even before
the Soviets. It is doubtful that Putin,
in his studies at the KGB’s Higher School Number 1 in
Leningrad in the 1970s, ever read Sociologist Margaret Mead’s 1951
study of Soviet character, but it is worth noting. Mead
wrote:
“In Tsarist Russia there were attempts to give an appearance of reality and solidity to matters of dubious truth, as in the insistence on written confessions as early as the seventeenth century or in the Potemkin villages…In Bolshevik doctrine, what the leadership decides shall be done is what history has already ordained is going to happen (although it is also what needs the utmost effort to make it happen)…Nevertheless a great variety of falsifications and theatrical enactments of the ardently desired or the deeply feared do occur.”
As a good student of Lenin, Putin follows
Lenin’s definition of compromise as an act which
can be exploited as part of a tactical moment and deception
to weaken the opposition and create a new favorable reality.
Any agreement can be canceled if the balance of forces
changes to allow Russian advantage. There are no rules for
agreed procedures, only pressure to gain immediate
goals. Putin’s scenario for
the Russian invasion and seizure of
Crimea follow the Bolshevik Code. The
invasion of Russian forces (“ little green men in unmarked
uniforms and masks”) was denied despite concrete evidence to
the contrary. The cease fire of February 15, 2015 is
continually being violated.
When it comes to negotiating style the Russians, according to Leites,
“strive to push to the limits of their strength, using verbal assaults
as one of their means and trying hard and long for all their
objectives, whether big or small. They fiercely resist
anything which seems to be a concession unless a
condition of duress requires them to retreat—then, perhaps, quite
substantially.”
The readiness to falsify reality is the keystone of the
Bolshevik Code. In 1968, under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet press
portrayed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as
an attempt to suppress “counterrevolution” and “German
revanchism,” code phrases for the revival of German
influence. In actuality the liberal government of Czech
President Alexander Dubcek was advocating “ socialism with a
human face,” an attempt to reconcile communism with
modernization.
The readiness to falsify reality to justify
repressive actions is an essential element of
Russian behavior in extreme situations. Witness Boris
Yeltsin’s public insistence in December 1994 that the bombing
of the Chechen capital of Grozny had stopped even
though the rest of the world was watching television footage
of Soviet aircraft firing rockets at civilian
targets in Grozny.
In September 1999 a series of bombings of apartment houses in
Moscow, and other cities killed 300
people and wounded hundreds of others spreading a wave of
fear across Russia. A similar explosive device was found
and defused in the city of Ryazan on September 22. The next
day Putin, then Prime Minister of Russia, praised the vigilance of the
inhabitants of Ryazan and ordered the bombing of Grozny which
marked the beginning of the Second Chechen War and Putin’s
rise to the presidency, succeeding Boris Yeltsin.
In Ryazan, the three Federal Security Service (FSB)
agents who had planted the explosive device were arrested by
the local police. The incident was publicly characterized as a training
exercise. However, suspicions were raised
that the bombings were a “false flag”
attack perpetrated by the FSB in order to legitimize the
resumption of military activities in Chechnya and bring Putin to power.
There has never been a satisfactory public examination
of who was responsible for planning and executing
the bombings. Putin denied he had any part in the bombings
which aroused strong public anger and support for
retaliation against Chechnya. The Russian people’s reaction
to the bombings have been compared to the terrorist
attack on the New York City World Trade Center in 2001.
In March 2014 Putin ordered the annexation of
Crimea, Ukraine’s internationally
recognized territory, with Russian troops
and heavy weapons.
For a year Putin and his Foreign Minister continued to
vigorously deny the presence of Russian troops and
heavy weapons in Crimea despite photographic and
intercepted signals evidence to the contrary. Only In March 2015, a
year later, in a Russian TV documentary titled, Crimea: The
Road Back Home, did Putin admit what had
been obvious for months. Threatening more force,
Putin even said he was willing to arm nuclear weapons if
necessary. Read the Bolshevik Code: More force is
better than less force.
In the view of human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky,
”Compromise is a bad word in the Soviet Union. In this, ideology
reinforced cultural traditions. The traditional view of how a
person should be is principled, strong, honest.
Ideology reinforces this with the notion of no
compromise with the class enemy. To the Soviet to call
something a principled, uncompromising position is a
compliment. In the West, it would be called rigid.
There is a belief in Russia that there is one Truth, and that you are
supposed to try and achieve it, not compromise it.
This is reinforced by Marxism/ Leninism.”
The coup to oust Gorbachev in 1991 that led to the fall of the Soviet
Union and Putin’s revival of the Bolshevik Code
have brought forth new contradictions of income inequality in
Russia between the broad masses and Putin’s allies who have
amassed huge fortunes. Russians still claim moral
superiority for their system over the evils of capitalism,
but the return of the Bolshevik Code under Putin
has forced living standards for the average Russian to
deteriorate. Putin’s best defense has been to blame
it all on the United States. In his March TV documentary
Putin openly described the Ukrainian revolution to
oust Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014 as an armed coup
“masterminded by our American friends.” Putin has retreated
to the cover of attacking the United States while
defending Mother Russia and its historical destiny to defend
and recover Crimea and the former Soviet naval base at Sevastopol.
Putin’s new Russian authoritarianism has revived the Hegelian
dialectic that posits all events in an ever changing cycle of thesis,
antithesis and synthesis. What was agreed upon by diplomatic
consensus can be changed by the new objective reality of
invasion by force to defeat an enemy who cannot be permitted to strike
first--- kto-kogo- who-whom. Kill or be killed----
expanding the rule of the
Bolshevik Code.
Jerrold L. Schecter is an independent
Cold War historian and the author and co-author of
nine books including Russian Negotiating Behavior, Continuity and
Transition, United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, 1998