Perspective: Staged referendums are an attempt to discipline Ukrainians into accepting Putin’s rule, not to provide democratic legitimacy.
have claimed. Instead, they reflect a much more aggressive and intrusive attempt to discipline citizens of the occupied territories — teaching them how they must behave under Putin. This move comes straight from the playbook of Joseph Stalin.The Soviet Union under Stalin deployed this type of “education” campaign — including voting in sham elections — to subjugate and teach people in Poland and the Baltic states how to speak the language of the Communist Party.
Many historians have assumed that these elections aimed to feign democracy and legality. But that is not true. The Kremlin was implementing a crucial element of Marxist-Leninist thinking. Essentially, the Soviet leadership saw people as being blinded by a bourgeois “false consciousness.” Only through reeducation in Communist thinking and ways could they be liberated.For this reeducation to be successful, a firm hand was needed.
The Soviets boasted of the superiority of these single party elections over liberal democratic pluralist ones, blaming the latter for being inherently skewed by financial interest or akin to a lottery, where the people’s future was left to random chance rather than to the realization of the inevitability of socialist progress.
By means of discipline and punishment, Moscow maintained its hegemony over the Baltic states for the next half-century, but given the ease by which the Balts threw off the Soviet order from their shoulders in the early 1990s, the waves of purges and the steady diet of forcible reeducation had a very limited long-term impact.While Putin is not a communist, the former KGB officer embraces a similar philosophy toward society as the Soviets.
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