Putin Decides Stalin’s Victims Were Guilty After All

Leon Aron: “Authorities in Moscow once exonerated people who were tortured, imprisoned, and killed during the Soviet era. The current president wants to undo that.”

“To most people outside Putin’s Russia, the resentencing of deceased political prisoners will appear ludicrous. Why go to all this trouble? In fact, these cases reveal something important about how his regime operates. From 2000 to about 2010, rapid economic growth was the key source of Putin’s popularity and his regime’s legitimacy. But that phase petered out. Since then, Putin has sought instead to rally the public to the defense of a motherland besieged by the perfidious and cunning West. Hoping to present an appealing vision of the future, he has declared his Kremlin an heir to an idealized version of the Soviet Union—a mighty and benign superpower, the bane of Nazis, a moral and military counterweight to America.”

“Putin, a former KGB agent, believes that the Soviet era was glorious and wants his subjects to feel inspired by it. And if that means relitigating decades-old cases to justify Stalin’s terror against his own people, Putin is happy to do it.”