Wednesday
As I watch Vladimir Putin seek to reboot the Soviet empire while suppressing internal dissent, I’ve been struggling to find a literary equivalent. I thought for a while of Macbeth, but Macbeth has a conscience, even though he does everything in his power to override it. While I see signs of Macbeth’s paranoia in Putin, I don’t see the latter having any qualms about what he’s doing.
Since it appears that Putin’s model is Josef Stalin, I have instead chosen a character who was modeled on the Soviet dictator. Which is to say, I have chosen Napoleon from George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945).
I owe the Putin-Stalin connection to columns in Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. In the first, journalist Kristaps Andrejsons notes the Stalin references in Putin’s speech on Monday. Characterizing the talk as “a messy, incoherent, angry rant” that “put forward a dark vision of renewed national glory,” Andrejsons writes that Putin contrasted Stalin’s vision of Ukraine with Lenin’s. Whereas Lenin (in Putin’s version of events) surrendered to Ukrainian nationalists and allowed them the right to self-determination within the Soviet Union, Stalin wanted to grant Ukraine only “limited autonomy within a national framework” (emphasis on “limited”). In his speech, Putin didn’t mention how Stalin bent Ukraine to his will, both through a manufactured famine that killed millions and by deporting 200,000 Crimeans, whom he replaced with Russians. This large Russian population became Putin’s rationale for seizing Crimea in 2014.
In his Washington Post column, David Von Drehle observes that “the only thing more dangerous than a nut with nukes is a nut with nukes who idolizes Joseph Stalin.” He points to how Putin, in addition to plunging Europe into war, has
also been busy purging Russia of honest historians. In December, a puppet court in northern Russia extended the prison sentence of Yuri Dmitriev to 15 long years on trumped-up charges. His real offense? Documenting a few of Stalin’s countless crimes against humanity. Putin’s government then outlawed the academic movement called Memorial, which supported Dmitriev’s work and that of other scholars
Stalin’s countless crimes against humanity are on full display in Animal Farm, albeit in allegorical form. He shows up in the figure of Napoleon, whom we are informed is “a large, rather fierce-looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, not much of a talker, but with a reputation for getting his own way.” In the course of the novel, we see Napoleon shedding his socialist beliefs and becoming increasingly tyrannical—which, it so happens, is a trajectory Putin has traveled as well. A key moment occurs when Napoleon unleashes specially bred dogs—once used by the tyrannical farmer—against his rival Snowball (modeled on Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s major opponent):
At this there was a terrible baying sound outside, and nine enormous dogs wearing brass-studded collars came bounding into the barn. They dashed straight for Snowball, who only sprang from his place just in time to escape their snapping jaws. In a moment he was out of the door and they were after him.
We learn that the dogs
were the puppies whom Napoleon had taken away from their mothers and reared privately. Though not yet full-grown, they were huge dogs, and as fierce-looking as wolves. They kept close to Napoleon. It was noticed that they wagged their tails to him in the same way as the other dogs had been used to do to Mr. Jones.
Napoleon—like Stalin and Putin—then proceeds to make a mockery of democratic rule:
Napoleon, with the dogs following him, now mounted on to the raised portion of the floor where Major [a Marx/Lenin composite] had previously stood to deliver his speech. He announced that from now on the Sunday-morning Meetings would come to an end. They were unnecessary, he said, and wasted time. In future all questions relating to the working of the farm would be settled by a special committee of pigs, presided over by himself. These would meet in private and afterwards communicate their decisions to the others. The animals would still assemble on Sunday mornings to salute the flag, sing “Beasts of England,” and receive their orders for the week; but there would be no more debates.
“Deep, menacing growls” issue from the dogs the moment anyone objects.
Like Stalin and Putin, Napoleon is constantly rewriting history, including history that the animals have witnessed with their own eyes. He also has a way of rewriting what is happening to them in real time. These include a famine–probably an allusion to the Ukrainian famine—that is brought about by Napoleon’s own mismanagement. Whatever goes wrong invariably gets blamed on Snowball, who supposedly is always lurking in the shadows.
By the end of the novel, Napoleon, like Stalin and Putin, has created a cult of personality, which has also benefited him financially. He hobnobs with, and has become indistinguishable from, the capitalist millionaires he once fought against.
In other words, Putin is Napoleon II—which brings to mind what Victor Hugo and Karl Marx said about another Napoleon. Not the Napoleon but his nephew, Napoleon III, who staged a successful coup in 1851 after his tenure as president ran out. Hugo called him “Napoleon the Small” (as contrasted with Napoleon the Great), and Marx famously said of him that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Compared to Stalin, Putin too is a farce with his imperial ambitions. Unfortunately, even as a farce he’s still dangerous.