Sovietization 2.0
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
Andre Gide
Earlier today, when I was having my morning cup of coffee, I read the following skeet from Kate Starbird: “In the 1980s, the USSR spread a (false) conspiracy theory that the US gov was responsible for the generation & spread of AIDS. But now the Trump gov could make the conspiracy theory come true, by defunding an ongoing drug trial, which could catalyze the spread of drug-resistant HIV in Africa.” It reminded me that KGB created and spread the conspiracy that CIA and Pentagon intentionally created and spread the virus in Africa.
Over the past year I have written a lot about the current events, my thoughts and feelings on the country where I was born and how many of the historic events we have been witnessing are all overlapping and interrelated. No, I am not proposing a new conspiracy theory, though Sarah Kendzior did an astounding job documenting and explaining how the culture of conspiracy keeps our nation complacent. In my previous writings, here and elsewhere, I have consistently expressed my belief that the rise of the far right fascism is the direct result of Vladimir Putin’s ambition to restore the imperial glory to Russia through increased ethnonationalism perfectly blended with “maximum masculinity” of the christofascism variety.
Earlier this week, Alexander Dugin, one of the foundational voices in the Russian enthofascist movement, could not have been happier, when the US Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence.
The same day, a fairly prominent Russia-focused journalist, accused me of poor analysis in the Manchurian Candidate narrative. Yet, not even a couple of days later, Vice President JD Vance said that “Russian interference in Western democracy has been overstated in the U.S. and Europe.” Vance also told European leaders that their biggest security threat was not military aggression from Russia, but their own suppression of free speech, including efforts to block far-right parties. Then he went to meet Alice Weidel, the leader of the Nazi party AfD.
U.S. lawmakers in Munich reportedly handed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a "piece of paper" today that would have granted the US mining rights to half of Ukraine's "future mineral reserves." Zelensky, obviously, refused to agree to yet another blatant extortion by Trump. Maybe the Manchurian Candidate narrative is wrong, but there are entirely too many connections that ultimately lead to Kremlin. Over time, if we survive, we will learn enough to know the truth whether Trump and Elon have been Putin’s marionettes.
The 80’s conspiracy theory I mentioned earlier, Operation Denver, also reminded me of an observation by journalist Philip Gourevitch, “In Moscow in the late ‘80s I met long lost cousins who asked after an uncle in the US & were stunned to hear he was playing tennis after recent triple bypass: “But he must be 60 yrs old, in USSR a life that old isn’t worth the expense of such an operation.” That’s where Trump-Musk are taking us.” I don’t know how many times I have said the same. Yes, there are multiple parallels with the Nazi Germany, however, going back to the first Trump administration, I’ve consistently mused on how the future of the United States resembles the Soviet Union. Now the parallels are even more stark - we are going through a repeat of the Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s with the long term goal to establish a crumbling Brezhnev era’s empire.
Clearly, I am not the only one thinking along these lines:
Are there parallels between the Soviet socialist regime and today’s America?
How Donald Trump's path to power eerily parallels Vladimir Putin's
Russian writer and former editor-in-chief of the independent TV Rain news channel, Mikhail Zygar, does a tremendous job comparing Trump’s onslaught on the democratic norms as following Putin’s playbook. He rightly compares breaking up the news (quite literally on Putin’s end and via gradual takeover by Murdochs and Musks in Trumps case); loyalty over competence, bullshit callbacks to the great history of the past, the invention of the enemy… but there are distinct difference so far as well, unlike Putin, Trump is still very cozy with the oligarchs and at least for now, there is not even an attempt to amend the law, rather a distinct endeavor to simply ignore the existence of such.
Professor Christina Pagel did an incredible job classifying and categorizing a significant number of Trump’s Executive Orders and other actions. Prof. Pagel compares the current fascist coup to a generic authoritarian takeover that follows the classic stages of power consolidation and oppression, such as:
Undermining of the independent institutions such as courts, media, etc.,
Weakening the opposition using legal or bureaucratic means including sham investigations,
Dismantle social protections,
Retreat from international alliances,
Weaponize nationalism by rewriting history, calling dissent unpatriotic, etc.,
Undermine science and objective knowledge.
One could write a book, maybe even multiple books with detailed examples of how the first four weeks (!!!) of Trump 2.0 has been an implementation of the classic authoritarian playbook. Prof. Pagel has shown the way.
Yet, I keep coming back to Stalin’s rise to power.
One of the recent Executive Orders signed by Trump appears to set up DOGE (the illegal and fake so-called Department of Government Efficiency) as ostensibly a shadow loyalty based organization across the entire federal government. Each and every federal agency and department will be assigned a DOGE representative, who will work with the Secretary or Director and basically be in charge of all new hiring and firing, in other words loyalty testing. In the Soviet Union such people were called political officers, or simply Kommissars.
Look that up.
People have been saying the Elon is President and that he paid $200B (or whatever). The recent “press conference” in the Oval Office where the kidnapped Elon’s son supposedly told Trump to “shush his mouth” and that he is not the “real president” makes it so much easier to accept that Elon is in charge.
People who say that, people who argue that, do they understand who really holds the power in the Elon-Trump relationship? It’s not the richest person in the world high on ketamine who needs a bunch of Hitler Jurgen incels to do his dirty work. Nope. It’s the person who has control over the DOJ and the FBI, among other powerful organizations. I can see the parallels to Soviet Union in the 1930s, where Elon will become the public example of what “enemies of the people” are capable off with the inevitable need for more power to the Dear Leader, e.g. Trump, to save the nation and restore the past glory. Trumpist erasure of language and the proclamations like the Executive Order on the Patriotic Education is directly relevant to this conversation.
Elon will become the new Trotsky (or Kamenev or Zinoviev) and the repressions will sweep through every level of our society. People like Emil Bove, who “valiantly” tried to force career and political appointee officials at the DOJ to sign the corrupt dismissal of charges against the NYC Mayor Eric Adams, will soon find out what happened to Henrich Yagoda and Kash Patel will become the new Nicklas Yezhov before in turn Kash will learn that there’s always another Lavrentiy Beria in waiting.
It is just as likely that Elon will get assassinated not unlike Sergei Kirov and serve as the catalyst for the repressions. With people who follow the Stalin template anything is possible. How do I know you ask? Well, it all goes back to rewriting history…
When I was a teenager in an elite experimental lyceum during the last gasp of the Soviet empire, I was shocked to learn that for people in power, dissent is unacceptable regardless of who it is coming from. The amazing library that my parents have when I was growing up in the crumbling Soviet empire included the first ever complete edition of Lenin’s work. It consisted of 58 volumes published a couple of months before Lenin’s death in 1924.
When I was writing my junior year HS thesis in history, I wrote a paper on how the process of collectivization was ostensibly a trap from the very beginning, quote Lenin’s essay from 1919 where he explicitly stated that the party needs to give an impression of freedom and ownership to rebuild the agricultural production only to eventually expropriate the lands and the means back to the state. The 14 year old me quickly learned that under Stalin, even Lenin’s legacy was edited to support the cult of the Dear Leader and my history teacher gave me an “F” for “faking” Lenin’s words. Even the literal copy of the book published in 1924 did not convince my history teacher, as she felt it was yet another capitalist plot to discredit Lenin.
This is what I hear and feel and remember when I see Trump’ “patriotic education.” I see my grandfather and millions of others in the GULAGs for betrayal of the party and the people (yes it was always in THAT order) because he “allowed” himself to be captured as a POW during the 1939 Winter War. I see my high school history teacher telling me that as a leader of young communist organization I am a traitor to the cause for questioning the outcome of the Winter War (even though I had copious amounts of eye witness testimony from veterans of the said war). I remember my literature teacher trying to suspend me from school for attempting to (accurately) compare Count Volkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (or is it really War and the World??) to Jesus Christ (because the great Russian writer like Tolstoy could not have been so bloody religious - rrrrright, look up Count Tolstoy and his christofascist misogyny).
RFK Jr’s idea of sending people who are taking antidepressants or ADHD meds to “wellness farms” sounds like a page from Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly while Trump’s announcement of wanting to rip out the Rose Garden to make it into another gaudy Mar-a-Lago type patio seems to be an attempt to recreate Stalin’s Sochi dacha.
This is where and when I wish that I really learned the history of Stalin rather than randomly taking a handful of classes.
What we are going through right now is not just your garden variety authoritarian take over. It’s not even Hitler’s Germany. It’s textbook Stalinism and we better be prepared for what is to come…
“...every human being is... equally unfree, that is, we... create out of freedom, a prison...”
Otto Rank