By Brian Whitmore
Anniversaries play an outsized political role in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and much of the former Soviet space.
Back in 2015, the Kremlin attempted to leverage the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II as a vehicle for patriotic consolidation. Two years later, in 2017, the Putin regime bent over backwards to downplay the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution, lest the restive part of the Russian population get any ideas. The first color revolution, after all, was neither rose nor orange, it was red and it happened in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg. And for obvious reasons, the Kremlin also largely ignored both the 80th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 2019 and the 30th anniversary of the breakup of the Soviet Union last December.
But one big anniversary is coming this year that dovetails with the prevailing political zeitgeist in Moscow and is bound to be exploited: the centenary of the founding of the Soviet Union. As Robert Coalson wrote recently for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “on December 30, 1922, representatives of the Soviet governments of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Republic took to the stage of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to proclaim the formation of a new country that within less than two generations would become a global superpower: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
Coalson continued that “with the 20/20 hindsight of a century’s distance, 1922 emerges as a fateful year for the peoples of Russia and its neighborhood,” adding, “in terms of politics, foreign affairs and culture, events transpired and decisions were made that laid the rails for decades of institutionalized totalitarian oppression.”
Is 2022 shaping up to be a similarly fateful year? In addition to being cognizant of the symbolic power of anniversaries, with the West divided and distracted and the United States largely preoccupied with the threat from China, Putin also appears to see an opportunity at the moment to establish hegemony over some of the former Soviet space.