The past and Putin

Nov. 7, 1990. The headlines in Pravda and other Russian newspapers glorified the massive military parade held on Red Square in Moscow. Tanks, rocket launchers, and goose-stepping soldiers paraded for hours in front of General Secretary Gorbachev. It was the annual demonstration of the might of the Soviet Union, held on the day that Lenin’s armed coup had imposed communism over 70 years earlier.

It was the last such parade.

The Soviet colossus was undermined by a combination of Reagan’s western alliance, a ridiculous but dangerous ideology, bankrupt governments, and the aspiration of freedom from its captive peoples. It disintegrated just a few months later. Eastern Europe’s governments reclaimed their autonomy and, in some cases, such as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, old countries came back into existence after being subsumed by the USSR.

2025 marks 35 years since that final Soviet parade. That last parade continues to be symbolic, both in terms of the past and for what it represents today.

Communism was brutal and expansionist. It could never win an election, so it used revolutionary slogans and brutal violence to impose its will, from Europe to Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Cuba, Cambodia, China, North Korea, and elsewhere. But by November 1990, most of Eastern Europe had thrown off communism. Not a single public voted to retain their Soviet overlords. So much for so-called “democratic peoples’ republics.”

By November 1990 the world stage was evolving, and while the Soviet Union was collapsing internally, the United States had to make decisions about the possibilities of a new security architecture. The vigilance of the Reagan-Bush era allowed President George H.W. Bush to successfully manage, from a position of strength but without hostility, the demise of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Europe.

This was America’s third liberation of Europe in the 20th century. It is noteworthy that some of our strongest allies today, strategically and culturally, are among those Eastern Europeans liberated from Soviet communism: Czechia, the Baltic states, Romania, and, especially, Poland.

Those who remember November 1990 will recall that headlines were dominated by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It was in November that the United States led the UN Security Council in its decision to authorize force against Saddam Hussein. That decision would transform Desert Shield (1990) into Desert Storm (1991) and the successful liberation of Kuwait.

What is noteworthy is that all that firepower from Moscow’s Nov. 7, 1990, parade was absolutely useless in providing regional security for the Persian Gulf and ousting Iraq from Kuwait. It was useless, in part, because the societal, political, and economic resources necessary to participate simply did not exist. The Soviet Union, and its proxies, were a dying, corrupt civilization that had nothing to contribute to world peace and security. Indeed, at the time, the Soviets could not even pay all of their soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

Again, so much for the Marx-Lenin-Mao slogans of solidarity, brotherhood, and world peace.

Sadly, on this 35th anniversary of the final Soviet military parade, our headlines are once again dominated by Moscow’s belligerence. Over the past decade Putin’s Russia has been a destabilizing, aggressive force in Syria, Central Asia, Africa, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Whether it is Wagner mercenaries, Russian conscripts, North Korean recruits, or the regular Russian military, the track record of destruction—especially in Ukraine—is notorious.

What is worse, Putin romanticizes the Soviet Union. He has overseen the installation of plaques honoring Yuri Andropov, head of the dreaded secret policy (KGB). A new memorial to dictator Joseph Stalin went up earlier this year in a busy Moscow metro station. Putin’s regime has returned to the old tools of Soviet thuggery: assassination, disappearance, show trials, and cruel prison conditions.

In short, perhaps Nov. 7, 1990, was not the last gasp of the old Soviet Union. The current regime praises and mimics the totalitarian spirit of the past.

With routine violations of NATO’s sovereignty, explicit threats to our close allies, and aggressive competition in areas such as energy and technology security, today’s Moscow is a threat to the United States and to world peace. Putin’s embrace of the Soviet past is not just nostalgia, but a calculated effort to turn back the clock to the “glory days” before Nov. 7, 1990.

The West should be steely-eyed in meeting this threat, and understanding that the true history of the powerful Soviet Union was not one that made people’s lives better, but was a police state characterized by torture, gulags (concentration camps), armed belligerence, and the smashing of individual spirit.