Is Vladimir Putin really a Communist?

The modern nation of Russia was formally the centre of the Soviet Union, a socialist state founded after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Its collapse was gradual and, some would say, even inevitable.

However, some Westerners still believe that Russia is a communist country, even though the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. In March 2022, a poll conducted by The Economist/YouGov found that 42 percent of Americans thought that Russia was communist. The poll also found that the group most likely to have such a perception about Russia are those who voted for former President Donald Trump, with 56 percent of Trump supporters saying that today’s Russia remains communist.

Because many Westerners, including many Western politicians, know very little about Russia, they assume that today’s Russia and its current leader, Vladimir Putin, are communist. According to Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Ukraine has been invaded “by Soviet dictator Vladimir Putin”. This is so even after the current Russian President having spoken against Communism many times over the years. In fact, the main opposition to Putin’s presidency comes precisely from the Russian Communist Party.

In 2021, during his annual four-hour question-and-answer session, one of the journalists attending that public conversation asked Putin what he thought of Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the first leader of the Soviet Union. Lenin, he said, was “a destroyer of a thousand years of history whose priority was revolution and destruction”. The State he created, Putin said, "had a weak foundation because it was built on violence, not law." Putin went on to argue that the Soviet Union lasted as long as the Communist Party held it together, but it fell apart as soon as the party's control weakened.

Putin, KGB dissident

Putin also made an important point that he was an intelligence officer so he knew “the people in the KGB very well and they were not nice people". Back in the days of working for the KGB in the 1980s, General Karasev, Putin's former mentor in Leningrad, noted that young officers like him knew much more about the system's flaws, thus becoming more critical of the Soviet regime and its need for change and renewal. They understood that the absurdities of the regime were causing immeasurable damage to the country as much as foreign intelligence agencies combined.

By the late 1980s, Putin was rethinking a lot of things, and his supervisor, Sergei Bezrukov, asserted that he was not a communist. There was a sharp contrast between Putin, the secretary of the party cell, who in front of Colonel Matveyev pretended to be a believer, and Putin, the apostate, who in private conversations considered communism as a destructive ideology. By 1987 the last Soviet leader, Mikael Gorbachev, realised that the political system of the Soviet Union had to be changed. The word Perestroyka became firmly associated with his reforms. When it became clear that Gorbachev aimed for more than a mere cosmetic change to the old communist regime, Putin was hopeful. As noted by his biographer Philip Short,

“Putin had been deeply impressed by the private shops and small enterprises which the East German communists allowed to operate alongside the state sector. They were a different world from the grim, unwelcoming state stores at home with their empty shelves bored shops hands and surly cashiers. Private ownership, Putin concluded, was key. If people were to be motivated, they had to be allowed to accumulate property and to pass it on to their children. If the economy was to develop, there had to be competition”.

For the Russians, the 1980s was an extraordinary period, uplifting and disconcerting at the same time. In the Soviet Russia of those days previously unquestioned tenets of communist belief were set aside and people started to think and say things that had been unimaginable only a short time before. But the real “eye-opener” for Putin was when he worked for the KGB in Dresden. He witnessed all the backwardness of the East German communist regime. First expecting to live in a relatively prosperous European state, soon he found himself working in a “harshly totalitarian country, similar to what the Soviet Union had been 30 years earlier … The entire population was under surveillance as though they were still living in Stalin’s time. Perestroika and Glasnost were anathema”. 

Putin's five-year sojourn in Dresden abruptly ended in 1990. When he and his family were forced to return to Leningrad, at first, they had no place to live and not even furniture. There was no way to buy anything until Putin's first salary arrived. They lived for several months among packing boxes with their meagre belongings from Dresden. In the months following their return from Dresden, the decline in Soviet production dramatically accelerated and rationing of the most basic foodstuffs had been imposed. At a time when approximately 80 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, and factories had stopped paying wages, no Western government wanted to talk of a Marshall Plan to save Russia. The George H.W. Bush administration was wary of anything that might make it appear soft toward its former Cold War adversary.

In May 1990, Putin was appointed as an advisor on international affairs by Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg, and a co-author of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Putin’s formal title was Adviser on International Relations, a job aiming to promote Sobchak’s plans to build up Leningrad’s links with the outside world and to affirm Leningrad’s independence from its eternal rival, Moscow. In Leningrad, soon to be renamed St Petersburg, the conflicts within the local legislative council (Lensoviet) between the democratic majority and the communist minority made it almost impossible to administer the city efficiently. Sobchak thus sent Putin to negotiate on his behalf, thus holding meetings with the deputies and winning the support of district administrators for his "very positive role".

The collapse of the USSR

The most remarkable event in the life of every Russian at that time was the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. The communist regime was gone in September 1991. The many monuments to Lenin all over the country were removed and, in that month, the people of Leningrad voted to return the city to its old name, St Petersburg. In the renamed city, every single street that existed in 1917 got its old name back. Sverdlovsk, named after Yakov Sverdlov, Lenin’s right-hand man, regained its pre-revolutionary name.

Putin personally knew that the Soviet Union was held together by brute force alone. His personal understanding was that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had originated in the sins of its founders. In a television interview in February 1992, six weeks after the Soviet flag was lowered in the Kremlin for the last time, Putin laid out his view about the former Soviet regime:

“We need to see history as it was, and this Soviet period cannot be delivered from our history … Communism was harmful because the attempt to put in into practice in our country caused enormous damage… That is the root of the tragedy that we are experiencing today ... It was precisely those people in October 1917 who laid a time bomb under this edifice, the edifice … which was called Russia … At the same time, they destroyed everything that brings together and rallies the peoples of civilised countries, namely they destroyed market relations … they destroyed nascent capitalism. The only thing they had to keep the country within common borders was barbed wire. And as soon as this barbed wire was removed, the country fell apart. I think this is largely the fault of those people [who made the Bolshevik Revolution].”

This was a controversial view, not widely shared by the general population. Still, on 26 March 2000, Putin was popularly elected as the President of Russia. As the new leader, he soon renewed the important debate about the destructive legacy of communism. In “Russia on the Threshold of the New Millennium”, published on 28 December 2000, Putin denounces the “historical futility of the Bolshevik social experiment,” for which Russians had to pay “a scandalous price.” Communism, Putin declared, was a destructive ideology that had condemned Russia to lag behind the more advanced Western countries:

“Russia’s GNP is ten times smaller than the US and five times smaller than China … Labour productivity and real wages are extremely low … Over 70 per cent of our machinery and equipment is over 10 years old … Only five per cent of Russian enterprises are engaged in innovative production. This is the price we have to pay for the economy we inherited from the Soviet Union. But then, what else could we inherit? Today we are reaping the bitter fruit, material and intellectual, of the past decades”.

On the other hand, often quoted is his statement in April 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century". Here Putin was talking about how the Russian population was left across multiple countries, so his complaint is of a nationalistic nature, not a communist one. Indeed, Putin has spoken up against Lenin many times over. There are even interviews of Putin back in 1991 where he says he's not a Marxist-Leninist and is a Russian nationalist, which is confirmed by his later policies and statements. Dima Vorobiev, a former Soviet Propaganda Executive, and by no means a friend of Putin, bitterly complains that he “consistently acted and sounded like a professed adherent of Capitalism”. According to Vorobiev,

“Vladimir Putin was a card-carrying member of the CPSU until it was banned in 1991. But this was almost a requirement for a successful career, so this doesn’t say much about his past convictions. Moreover, he didn’t lift a finger to protect the USSR when ethnic nationalists brought the country down. His best spin masters didn’t manage to cook a story that would explain why he broke his KGB plead of allegiance … From which we can with full certainty conclude is that President Putin is an anti-Communist … [He] is a very commercially-aware politician and a professed anti-Communist.”

Putin clearly manifested his anti-communist views in a major speech in October 2007, during a visit to the Butovo execution site, 15 miles south of Moscow. Butovo was used for mass executions and mass graves during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. At the height of the purge, in 1937 and 1938, more than 20,000 people were killed and buried over there. Those murdered in Butovo included more than 900 Russian Orthodox clerics, executed solely for their beliefs, and countless of other Russian people imprisoned by the NKVD only because they had quotas to fill, regardless of presumed guilt or innocence. “We are gathered here”, Putin said,

“to honour the memory of the victims of political repression … 1937 is considered to be the year that the repression peaked, but it had been well prepared by the brutality of the previous years. It is sufficient to recall the shooting of hostages during the civil war, the destruction of entire social classes, of the clergy, the dekulakisation of the peasants, the destruction of the Cossacks. Such tragedies … happened when ideals which were attractive at first glance but which proved in the end to be empty, were placed higher than fundamental values of human life, human rights and freedoms. Millions of people were destroyed, sent to labour camps, shot and tortured to death. As a rule they were people who had their own views, who were not afraid to speak out. They were the most capable people, the flower of the nation … Much must be done to ensure that this is never forgotten”.