Putin is Thinking and Talking Like a Soviet: Democracy in Danger in Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s very public lamentations of the collapse of the Soviet Union as THE “catastrophic geopolitical event” of the 20th Century, and his defending the Red Army’s occupation of the Baltics after World War II as being “at the invitation of the Baltic countries themselves” is proof that Russian democracy is backsliding toward a dictatorship.

He is refusing to discuss the fifty-plus year occupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in terms that the people of those nations can relate to. He won’t touch the conduct of Russian Black Beret soldiers who went on a rampage in the Baltics after those nations broke away from the USSR. And he won’t express regret at the misery that the Soviet Union brought to the people of the Baltics.

Putin’s demanding that the United States stop “interfering in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence” is also very troubling. The last time anyone checked, Russia’s sphere of influence is the Russian Federation, not the former Soviet republics. Russia’s control of Russian territory itself is also questionable, given the fact that they can barely control Chechnya.

Putin is a barely-reformed Soviet who will return Russia to neo-communist control and work to re-establish his Soviet Union. Let’s call a spade a spade: NATO is needed to stop Russia from threatening countries like Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Belarus, and other former republics of the USSR that are quite happy to have their independence from Russia.

Democracies rarely go to war against one another; dictators do wage war against each other and against democracies. It’s in Russia’s best interests to have stable democracies on its borders. If Putin is worried about war between Russia and the nations that border it, then he should focus on strengthening Russian democracy and quit cracking down on free markets, on the media and on living up to the promises that he has made to the Russian people.

And he should stop the Cold War rhetoric that has been coming from the Kremlin. It’s making his neighbors nervous.