Vladimir Putin has been extremely explicit and vocal in condemning the Bolsheviks’ policy of national self-determination and their policy for Ukraine in particular. Condemnation of the Bolsheviks is central to his absurd argument that there is essentially no Ukrainian nation, that it is a somehow an artificial construction.
As has been widely noted, Putin regrets the collapse of the USSR. But it is the Russian empire the Stalinist USSR represented, not “communism” and certainly not the Russian revolution, that he views positively.
For the obvious reasons, Putin is against workers' struggle and revolutionary movements seeking to challenge autocracies. This is how he described the Bolsheviks at a nationalist youth event in 2014:
"Some were shaking Russia from within, and shook it to the point that Russia as a state collapsed and declared itself defeated..."
The Russian revolutionaries were responsible for the "betrayal of the Russian national interests" and "wished to see their fatherland defeated while Russian heroic soldiers and officers shed blood on the fronts of the First World War."
Moreover, Putin specifically objects to the fact that the Russian revolution broke up the Czarist empire and for a few years allowed self-determination and free national development to its former subject peoples.
He has doubled down on this theme during the recent crisis. In a speech on 21 February this year, he said:
“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia – by separating, severing what is historically Russian land.”
Putin condemned this as “worse than a mistake” – and of course from his Great Russian imperialist point of view he is right.
He much prefers Stalin, his fellow Russian nationalist and chauvinist, whose regime restored the oppression of Ukraine that the Russian revolution had overturned. But he laments that the Stalinists only abolished the right to national self-determination in / from the USSR in practice, and not in theory – supposedly preparing the way for what Putin regards as the disaster of countries including Ukraine seceding as the Soviet Union collapsed.
In recent years, commented Putin “humorously”, the Ukrainians whose nationality was supposedly invented by Lenin, “the grateful progeny”, have “overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine” (this is part of a right-wing Ukrainian nationalist campaign).
“That is what they call decommunisation”, continued the Russian dictator. “Do you want decommunisation? Well that suits us fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunisation would mean for Ukraine” - ie its resubordination to Russia.
Isn’t this remarkable?