Putin’s Stalin cosplay threatens Central Europe and the Baltics

If one wants to learn about “ten centuries of Polish Russophobia”, they can now visit a special exhibition in Russia. Aside from the topic itself, the most bizarre thing about it is the location – the Katyn forest memorial near the city of Smolensk.

There, the remains of more than 40,000 Polish officers, priests and intellectuals are buried in a mass grave – among them my distant relative Boleslaw Skapski. They were captured when Stalin and Hitler crushed Poland in 1939. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, executed them in 1940. Until 1990, the USSR refused to admit to this atrocity and blamed it on the Nazis.

The burial site is a hallowed ground for the Polish people. The exhibition, initiated by Vladimir Putin’s advisor and one–time Ukraine negotiator Vladimir Medinsky, is the Kremlin’s deliberate and cruel slap in the face for Poland.  

Authorities in the Siberian city of Tomsk destroyed monuments erected to honour the victims of the Communist terror as well as mass deportations from the Baltic States in the 1940s. Simultaneously, Putin signed a decree conferring on the Academy of his secret police, the FSB, the name of Felix Dzerzhinsky – founder of VChK, the precursor to the FSB and NKVD. After the Communist revolution of 1917 Dzerzhinsky unleashed on Lenin’s orders the horrendous “red terror”.  

Creeping rehabilitation of the Communist regime – especially Stalin’s rule – started after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. It is now a full-scale glorification.

Invocations of “the great Soviet past” become all the more hysterical as news of the frontline in Ukraine grows more dire and Russian cities feel less safe from Ukrainian drones. Many Russians have by now understood that the war against Ukraine is unwinnable. Even censored official polls show marked preference for a vague notion of “peace” among the population.

But nothing is further from Putin’s thoughts. He intends to continue with “his” war and wishes to cement political control and ideological uniformity to ensure nothing gets in the way. Resurrecting ghosts of the past will, he hopes, convince people that Russia’s struggle is always existential and historic, that it faces the same enemies it always did, but especially in the last century.

To this end, old Soviet tropes are constantly repeated by propagandists and Putin himself to draw parallels with today. Soviet deportations and terror in this version of history appear as a way of vanquishing the “enemy within”. Logically, war against Ukraine also justifies suppressing any “traitorous” disagreements with government policy. The message to Russians is clear: this fight will go on for as long as Putin deems necessary. They must submit and obey orders, or face swift punishment.

But this is also a message to the EU and NATO. By deliberately choosing symbolic sites like Katyn and Baltic deportation memorials, the Russian regime clearly targets Central Europe and the Baltic States. It firmly believes – as it did ten or twenty years ago – that Western European and American allies still treat these countries as “second tier” and won’t get involved in case Russia seriously threatens them.

This betrays the Kremlin’s grave misunderstanding of political changes that have and are still taking place in Europe in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion. But such misconceptions are dangerous, especially with Putin now consumed by cosplaying “Stalin at war”. To prove that NATO is a “paper tiger”, as Donald Trump infamously said, Putin could order a “limited” cross-border raid involving brief capture of the territory of one of the Baltic States.

In April the State Duma ominously expanded the official list of reasons for military operations abroad to include “protection of unfairly persecuted Russian citizens” – which could mean anything.

It may be just a usual act of information warfare. But taken together with the Duma vote, the “Polish Russophobia” exhibition and monument demolitions, I wouldn’t be so sure.