The great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, who was the governor and architect of Ukraine, believes the Russian elites need the president as a “stabilizing factor”
A year has passed since the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, a conflict that has changed the world and whose resolution does not seem to be in sight. The war has revealed the hidden face of Vladimir Putin, whom many did not see coming, although his obsession with his country’s imperial past is widely known.
Many of the keys to current warfare can be found in the period of Nikita Khrushchev’s presidency. The historic leader maintained close ties to Ukraine, where he rose through the political ranks to become head of the communist party, married a Ukrainian woman, led the reconstruction of the country devastated by Nazi Germany’s occupation in World War II World War. , and, in 1954 decided to cede Crimea to the Ukrainian state.
Khrushchev was equal parts reformer and repressor. On the one hand, he promoted de-Stalinization and led major social reforms, as well as the cultural opening of the Soviet Union. Despite his initial proposal for peaceful coexistence with the West, Khrushchev’s dark side drew him into Stalin’s purges, brutal repression in Hungary, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the missile crisis with the United States, sealed in the menacing cry, shoe in hand, from the podium of the United Nations: “We will bury you!”
His great-granddaughter Nina Khrushcheva, a US-based author and professor of international relations at the New School in New York, has written about Putin’s Russia and is often seen as a commentator on political TV shows. She is an editor and contributor to the Project Syndicate-Association of Newspapers Around the World, an association that disseminates the views of leaders and referees of international importance through hundreds of print media in 149 countries. Khrushcheva analyzes some aspects of her ancestor, Putin, and the invasion for this newspaper.
– After a year of war, the prospects for peace are virtually non-existent. What do you think would be the conditions for peace?
I don’t see an end in sight. It cannot be foreseen. The situation is at a point where Ukraine is not losing or winning enough to keep talking about a possible victory. And Russia doesn’t win enough and doesn’t lose enough to keep talking about Russian defeat.
– Do you see a scenario of a possible leadership change in Russia?
– There is always a possibility of change, but in general it is an argument from the point of view of what would be desirable in the West. There is actually no evidence that it can happen. And if it did, we wouldn’t know until it happened. It’s a potential scenario.
– Do you think the war has weakened Putin’s position?
– The war has weakened Russia in the world, there is no doubt about it, because it is a war between Putin’s Russia and the West. But Putin has not weakened there, the Russians are still very supportive of him because no one wants to see his country fall, the same thing most people in other countries would do no matter what their governments do. Many may want to see the fall of the government, but not the country. Russia’s strategic defeat is not well received by the public, even if many oppose Putin.
– However, there seems to be concern in the government, a certain nervousness among the leadership.
– What is happening is a problem of disorganization. There is a cacophony; The parliament says one thing, Prigozhim (the leader of the Wagner mercenary group) says another, Interior Minister Kolokoltsev says another, the government another, but that does not mean that Putin is in a weak position. He needs the war because unless a victory is achieved, he insists on continuing the war because he is better protected as a war president. As long as the conflict continues, it will be harder to stop unless the invasion goes horribly wrong. But I wouldn’t say he’s weakened because all the elite clans around him, as you saw during his Federation speech this week, have yet to decide who will be in charge and who will not be when he steps down. Those clans need you as a stabilizing element. For now. So as long as the war continues, he will probably stay in power.
– Nikita Khrushchev, your great-grandfather, was closely associated with Ukraine. He was a leader of the Communist Party, worked there, helped defend and rebuild the country after the destruction of the Nazi occupation. And he supervised the transfer of Crimea.
– My great-grandfather grew up in Russia, but he worked in Ukraine from an early age. At the age of 16, he was a miner in Donbas and later became the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the equivalent of being a governor. The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine is part of the myth, because, as the leader of the communist party, he was attributed to him after Stalin’s death. In fact, it can be seen that the documents were never signed. In 1954, Khrushchev was not yet in power, so it was a collective decision. It is an important clarification, because now Putin is blaming Khrushchev for the handover – someone has to be blamed – when in reality it was a collective government decision.
– Khrushchev loved Ukraine very much. What do you think he would think of this war?
– He thought it was a special nation, a special place. He was a great defender of Ukraine. But he would never have defended the emerging Ukrainian nationalism, although he did support Ukrainian identity as a different identity, independent of Russia. I think he would have been shocked to see the relentless shelling. The land you helped rebuild from the ashes after World War II is now being bombarded to ashes. But he was also a centrist. In the Soviet Union, the Kremlin was the central power and, who knows, if it had believed that the Ukraine was trying to tear itself apart, it might have thought it necessary to take it up again. But I think he would have thought out of conviction to win back Ukraine
– Can we talk about the existence of a Putin doctrine?
– There is no clear definition, Putin is many of the things attributed to him. He has imperial leanings, although he would say he only wants to preserve the Russian character through imperialism. With a part of the KGB because in that entity you always have to win over your enemies and destroy them completely to the end because you should have the absolute right to do so. As a former member, the interest has always been the security and defense of the nation. And when you’re KGB, you see enemies everywhere. There is also a nationalism in the rhetoric. There’s an anti-Western sentiment that’s really strange because it’s a contradiction. In all definitions of itself, Russia is a country that considers itself Western and continues to fight to be so.
When he was a member of the KGB, Vladimir Putin always said that he was an expert in communication. Many analysts pointed out over the past year that the West did not see the autocrat of seductive rhetoric coming.
– Do you share the analysis of this double face of the Russian president?
– Putin was a recruiter in the KGB. He was responsible for attracting people and putting them at his service. To make sure you understand what people were thinking. He used to be incredibly charming, but now after 20 years in power, he just doesn’t care. He was as good as Bill Clinton: he only spoke to the one before him. And he read the audience brilliantly, he knew exactly what the audience was thinking. In the KGB they nicknamed him “the moth,” that dark thing that settles on sweaters; is an apt term for someone who sits in the dark and opens the drawer and the whole sweater is completely devoured.
– While Putin was fooling them, Westerners thought they were fooling him.
– There was a general imagination about Putin, Bush senior was also from the CIA, although it cannot be compared to the KGB. It’s not that the CIA is a benevolent organization, but it doesn’t interfere in people’s lives. Americans don’t have to think about the CIA all day, while people should always be aware of the KGB. So there was a moment about Putin when it was assumed that capitalism, with all its bells and whistles, would swallow him up. I could never have imagined this. I wake up every day and wonder how, after all the horrible things we’ve been through, after the Gorchachev era, we can go back so far and in such a bad way, so unforgivably.
Source: La Verdad
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