Dictator week!

Voters in Venezuela say no to Hugo Chávez's bid to become president for life, fueling speculation if the one time military coupster will bypass the ballot box next time and simply go the more traditional route to seizing unlimited power.

On the other end of the spectrum, Pakistan's military strongman Pervez Musharraf has stepped down from his military position, hoping to hang on in what's sure to be an insanely rigged election in January. Trading on the political unpopularity of his opponents won't hurt, either.

And lest he think we've forgotten about him, Vladimir Putin has secured his efforts to keep running Russia behind the scenes after his term as president ends. Czarism, anyone?

And yes, I'm back! It's been a busy couple of weeks for me, but everything has settled down. 2008 promises to be every bit the golden age for dictators that 2007 has been, and DotW will be here to enjoy every second of it.

Putin gone wild!

And now, because of overwhelming demand by Dictators of the World readers, here's a photo of Russia's authoritarian president Vladimir Putin on vacation in Siberia stripped down to the waist. Here, dear readers, is the dictator beefcake you've all been craving.

Wait, nobody wanted to see that? Goddamnit, you readers can be so mercurial, sometimes.

Anyway, there is still actual news about Vladimir Putin, most notably because of a bizarre paid advertising supplement seeking stronger "national branding" for Russia in the Washington Post (viewable here). In addition to the predictable blurbs about borscht and Sputnik, are bizarre pro-Putin articles like "When a little paranoia is good for you" and an article about Putin's political opponents titled "The opposition's disarray is lucky for some". The overall message of the supplement? Toss away your old tired preconceptionss of a gray, totalitarian Soviet Russia and instead, acquaint yourself with fresh new realities about a dynamic and exciting post-Soviet authoritarian Russia!

Jack Shafer at Slate astutely notes that Putin's Kremlin has the same ham handed touch with political propaganda as his Soviet predecessors did, laying it on so thick that American readers come away from it suspecting that the terrified authors probably wrote the piece from a gulag. This is an unfortunate byproduct of authoritarian regimes, and some dictators have learned how to bypass awkward obvious propaganda by hiring American public relations firms to do their dirty work, but apparently, Vladimir Putin insisted on letting a hometown team write this mess. One wonders if his recent shirtless photo ops are part two of his ridiculous attempts at a charm offensive? I don't know, but I will say this: if Robert Mugabe starts baring some skin to get attention, I'm hanging up this blog for good.

Putin gives Stalin some love

Just how many millions of his countrymen does a dictator have to murder these days before he's reviled by his subjects? The late Soviet strongman Josef Stalin would doubtlessly be tickled to know that the Russian government is putting a new shine on Uncle Joe's reign of terror by giving him an image makeover in high school history textbooks. According to the latest textbooks, Stalin's rule was "strong" if a bit "cruel", but it's OK! After all, Stalin was merely using his indomitable will to strengthen the Soviet state. Why, that's just like Peter the Great, right? Or even Vladimir Putin! So really, what's all the fuss about, anyway?

Stalin's image makeover coincides with Putin's saber rattling with Georgia, land of Stalin's birth. Doubtlessly, Stalin would heartily approve of a strong, if cruel, leader looking to hold Russia together ... even if it just happens to mean swallowing up independent countries entirely. That's just what "strong" leaders do, right?

Welcome to Stalinworld!

Russia has recently declassified documents from the reign of Josef Stalin to allow access to the records of people arrested, jailed, tortured, exiled to the GULAG or executed by family members of the victims.

From the years of 1920 - 1950, nearly 30 million Soviet citizens were "repressed" (to use the official term) by Stalin's security services, with anywhere from 10 to 15 million of them dying either from execution or exposure and starvation in a prison camp. Today, the modern ancestor of Stalin's NKVD (the FSB) is the agency taking the lid off the histories of people who, for all intents and purposes, had simply disappeared.

So is there a catch? Yes. Access to the archives is only provided to surviving relatives of the politically repressed, and will not be made available to the public. While this is certainly a boon to the families of victims, it must be remembered that most of the surviving relatives who were small children during Stalin's bloodiest are now starting to get quite old. Why aren't the Russians releasing the information to journalists and historians? Perhaps they are, and just want the families to have first crack at them, although the current trends under current Russian president Vladimir Putin suggest that these records will head back under lock and key once the "healing period" is over.

I wondered: is it too much to hope that the Russians will opt for total disclosure, as the Germans have with regards to Nazi atrocities? The quick answer is, "yes, of course it is". Since the end of World War 2, no other country on earth has undergone as much self-analysis and self-criticism as Germany has. Russia, by way of contrast, will have none of it. Would you believe that Stalin, even today, remains popular in Russia? Where German schools have spared no details on the nature of Nazi atrocities, most Russians don't learn the extent of Stalin's bloodbaths at home or abroad until they leave Russia.

You know, why dwell on the negative all the time, anyway?

The dissident and the autocrat

Who's that shaggy old hobo shaking hands with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin? Why it's none other than Russia's most famous political dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You may remember Solzhenitsyn as the author who did hard time in a Soviet gulag for the crime of saying something not entirely positive about Josef Stalin. Solzhenitsyn's stay in the gulag provided him with the fodder for an explosive little book called One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella that blew the lid off the entire Soviet prison camp system. While certainly revolutionary by Soviet standards, the publication of Ivan Denisovich only saw the light of day because Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's eagerness to "de-stalinize" the Communist Party. In the Soviet Union, even dissidence acquired a role as being nothing more than a tool for the Party's internal power struggles, leaving the actual machinery of totalitarianism more or less unscathed.

Our bitter national experience can yet help us in a possible repeat of unstable social conditions. It will forewarn and protect us from destructive breakdowns

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

However, Soviet "tolerance" - even used cynically - only went so far. When the Soviet authorities broke into Solzhenitsyn's house and seized the manuscript for his masterwork The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn knew that once again, he was on the official Soviet shitlist. When Solzhenitsyn unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, the Soviets forbade him to travel to Sweden to pick up the award. By 1974, he was finally allowed to go into exile, settling first in West Germany before a moving on to a long stint as a virtual recluse in Vermont. It was only some time after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1994, that the man once hailed as the conscience of his people returned to Russia.

So you can imagine my surprise when I'd read that Solzhenitsyn had accepted the "State Prize" on Russia Day from autocrat Vladimir Putin, who may not be Josef Stalin, but is certainly not anything resembling a bonafide democratic leader, either. In fact, Putin has taken a decidedly Stalinist "destroy them all" line when it comes to high profile political dissidents, an irony that appears to be lost on Solzhenitsyn. The worst part of it is that Solzhenitsyn's photo-op with Putin was likely cynically planned by Putin to establish his bonafides as a kinder and more gentle ruler. After all, any friend of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn can't be all that nasty, right?

Well, no. Not really. Solzhenitsyn is 88 years old, wheelchair bound and reportedly in poor health. It's hard to say whether or not he appreciates the irony of his decision to help legitimize, even if just a little bit, the regressive path Putin has laid out for Russia. Perhaps he knows and doesn't care, or cares and doesn't know, at this point, I can't even guess. However, when Solzhenitsyn is dead and buried, it's a good bet that Putin's authoritarian pseudo-democracy will stay in place, validated just a little bit by a lousy photo op.

Estonia's persistence of memory

The ordinarily sedate city of Tallinn, Estonia was rocked by rioting this weekend as ethnic Russians in Estonia looted stores, smashed windows and lit fires as part of a protest by the Estonian government to relocate a Soviet era statue (and mass grave) commemorating the Red Army soldiers who died liberating Estonia from Nazi Germany in 1944.

Actually, we need to back up a bit here.

Before the Soviet Union "liberated" Estonia, it had conquered Estonia with Adolf Hitler's full consent. You see, before Hitler and Josef Stalin went to war with each other, they agreed on a division of Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", and codified it in a treaty - the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once absorbed into Stalinist Russia, Estonia suffered the full brunt of the "glorious socialist brotherhood" that nearly wiped out dozens of non-Russian Soviet republics, including mass deportations to Siberia, mass executions, torture as well as religious and political repression by the NKVD.

In 1941, Hitler doublecrossed Stalin. Hitler's plan for assaulting the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, smashed through Soviet defenses in Poland, and quickly reached the Baltic countries, including Estonia. Estonians were initially overjoyed to see the wehrmacht chasing the Soviets out. After all, how could it get any worse than being ruled by Stalin? Their hopes were dashed by the heavy hand of the Nazi occupation, yet thousands of Estonians willingly joined the wehrmacht when it became clear that the Soviets would retake Estonia. Estonians knew they were deep trouble when the Nazis looked like the lesser of two evils. To make a long story short, the Soviets recaptured Estonia in 1944, and quickly picked up where they left off, liquidating all "traitors to the motherland", as well as their families including minor children, the elderly and infirm. Estonians had to be wondering - who's liberating us from whom?

When Estonia finally broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonians had made it clear that Estonia was a decidedly unwilling participant in the Soviet experiment. Estonia even joined NATO as soon as possible to safeguard its hard won independence from Russia. However, Soviet "Russification" policies meant that ethnic Russians made up nearly one third of Estonia's population, and what's more, a third of the population that neither spoke Estonian, nor wanted to give up the privileges they had enjoyed under Soviet rule. Estonia wanted Russians who decided to stay in Estonia to learn how to speak Estonian, and integrate into Estonian society. Many of these Russians (who were not made citizens of Estonia after independence, incidentally) wanted to keep speaking Russian, and they've demanded that their Estonian "little brothers" show the proper love and gratitude to Russia, especially an appreciation of Stalin's "liberation" of Estonia from the Nazis.

You can see where this was heading, can't you?

For years, a statue erected by the Soviets to commemorate the war in Estonia (known as the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn) had a double meaning. For Russians, it symbolized the shedding of Russian blood to liberate Russia from the Nazis. For Estonians, it represents a symbol of bloodthirsty Stalinist colonialist imperialism. Estonians wanted the statue gone. Russians wanted it to stay. Finally, the Estonian government decided to relocate the statue and the Soviet soldiers buried underneath it - and that's when all hell broke loose.

Estonia's ethnic Russians began rioting, incensed that Estonia would dare disrespect the Soviet war effort. Russia itself began to chime in, sending a "fact finding mission" to Estonia, and demanding that the Estonian government resign en masse. In Moscow, hostile crowds began assaulting the Estonian embassy and threatening Estonia's diplomatic corp, an astonishing abrogation of Russia's duties to defend foreign embassies from violence. Russia claims it is "powerless" to protect the Estonian embassy. Estonians claim that the Russian police look pretty good at crowd control when it involves Russians protesting against Vladimir Putin. Russia is making oblique threats to break diplomatic ties with Estonia. Rumors of an armed ethnic Russian insurgency being organized inside Estonia are even circulating.

All of this over a statue? World War II ended over 60 years ago, but the current battle over history and memory is still being fought in Estonia. I can't help but think that somewhere, Josef Stalin is having a hearty laugh about all of this.