João J. H. Nobre: Quem é realmente Vladimir Putin?

Na semana em que Putin e o Rússia Unida, voltaram a vencer as eleições na Rússia, com 57,54% dos votos, constato sem surpresas, que no que se diz e escreve por aí sobre o Presidente russo, poucos são aqueles que realmente compreendem o que é Putin e o Putinismo.

A primeira coisa que é preciso perceber sobre Putin, é que ele não é um comunista, mas pensa como um soviético. Entendem?... Passo a explicar melhor: a forma de fazer política, de pensar e de "manobrar" de Putin, toda a sua estrutura e arquétipo mental, são tipicamente soviéticas, todavia, Putin não é de forma alguma um comunista.

A famosa citação de Putin, proferida num discurso em 2005, em que ele afirmou que a queda da União Soviética «foi a maior catástrofe geopolítica do século XX», muitas vezes é retirada de contexto e incompreendida. Putin não estava a defender o regime comunista soviético quando disse isto, mas sim, estava a fazer referência a todas as guerras, conflitos e problemas que a Europa de Leste e o Russkiy Mir (Mundo Russo) enfrentaram após o fim da URSS. No Ocidente, muitos não têm noção disto, mas quando a URSS se desfez no início dos anos 1990, milhões de russos que viviam na Ucrânia, nos Estados Bálticos, na Geórgia, na Moldávia, no Cazaquistão, etc... viram-se de um dia para o outro desprovidos da sua nacionalidade e da sua Pátria. A estes milhões de russos, deram-lhes passaportes dos novos países que então declararam a sua independência, porém, eles nunca se identificaram verdadeiramente como sendo ucranianos, georgianos, cazaques, lituanos, etc... Isto gerou um tremendo problema geopolítico e configurou, simultaneamente, uma brutal humilhação para a Rússia e todo o Russkiy Mir.

Ademais e não podemos ignorar este facto, o Ocidente passou toda a Guerra Fria a diabolizar a Rússia, porque esta era comunista e estava "a espalhar os seus erros pelo Mundo." Por fim, nos anos 1990, os russos finalmente deixaram de ser comunistas, mas mesmo assim o ataque contra a Rússia não parou e até redobrou de força com a expansão da NATO. Isto foi um erro geopolítico brutal que estamos já todos a pagar "com língua de palmo". Se um dia escreverem um livro sobre quais as dez decisões mais estúpidas e consequentes para o futuro, que foram tomadas no século XX, acredito que a expansão da NATO para a Europa de Leste nos anos 1990, sem ter em conta as preocupações de segurança da Rússia, terá de figurar entre as primeiras três, a par da Operação Barbarossa.

Putin responsabiliza e com razão, a União Soviética pelo consequente enfraquecimento do Império Russo e a destruição da Rússia histórica. É um facto que a Revolução Bolchevique provocou graves danos na sociedade russa, que ainda hoje afectam profundamente este Estado-Civilização, que é também o maior País do Mundo. Desde a infâmia vergonhosa que foi o cruel assassinato da família imperial russa dos Romanov, às ordens de Lenine, até ao sistema prisional de Gulag, passando pelas violentas purgas de Estaline, que dizimaram muitos bons oficiais das próprias Forças Armadas da URSS, parece ser um facto que a Rússia ainda tem muitas feridas e traumas que vão levar décadas a sarar. As perseguições movidas pelos comunistas contra a Igreja Ortodoxa Russa e a tentativa de apagar esta através de um ateísmo militante, também não são esquecidas. O trauma que existe na memória colectiva do povo russo, é portanto muito forte e isto, por norma, é o que acontece sempre que se agride e se tenta destruir a identidade nacional de todo um povo, como os bolcheviques tentaram fazer, na sua utópica luta em prol da construção do "homem novo" soviético. É exactamente por este motivo que não se deve confundir a URSS, com o Império Russo, nem este último com a Federação Russa. Estas três entidades circunstanciais podem-se sobrepor e interligar até certo ponto, mas são coisas completamente diferentes, do ponto de vista identitário, espiritual e histórico.

Putin herdou, por conseguinte, todo o caos deixado por Gorbachov e Boris Ieltsin. Quando se tornou Presidente da Federação Russa, aquilo com que Putin se viu a braços de imediato, foi com um País completamente devastado, tomado por oligarcas, com níveis de corrupção assustadores e com níveis de crime, alcoolismo e toxicodependência, que estavam completamente fora de controlo. A Guerra na Chechénia, alimentada desde o início pelo Ocidente, só agravou todo este cenário ainda mais. Aquilo que o analista geopolítico SL Kanthan escreve, dá-nos um bom retrato do estado miserável em que se encontrava o País dos czares nos anos 1990:

«The biggest theft of the century happened in Russia in the 1990s, and the perpetrators were Wall Street shysters who promised miracles of capitalism, but instead dismantled the entire country.

In 1992, the first year of “reforms” introduced by globalists, Russia’s inflation skyrocketed to 2500%. This had a double-whammy effect. One, the price of food and other things went up 25 times. Second, savings of pensioners were wiped out.

[...]

What comes after the devaluation of the currency? Selling Russian assets to American and European investors at a discount. In the name of privatization, Russia was put up for fire sale. Everything you can imagine — oil & gas fields, gold & diamond mines, airlines, media, factories etc. — was sold at an infinitesimal fraction of its fair price. A handful of Russians — future oligarchs carefully selected by the US — ended up with assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In exchange, each Russian got a “share” worth $7. The US taxpayers even subsidized this disgusting racket. It was sheer economic terrorism.

The Mafia in charge of this biggest robbery of the century were known as the Harvard Boys — Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Rubin and others. To make the long story short, Russia experienced the Great Depression for the next eight years. Hyperinflation, 40% drop in GDP, mass unemployment, widespread poverty, soaring suicides… the reforms turned out to be a satanic shock therapy.

Meanwhile, pro-West oligarchs and traitors such as Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich practically became instant billionaires. Americans like Bill Browder — the anti-Putin warrior behind the Magnitsky Act — also enjoyed the spoils of the plunder.

Under this Western heist, thousands of Russian factories were simply shut down. Even Russia’s production of wheat, oil, and gas fell by half, compared to the Soviet era.

To solve this fake economic crisis, America’s vulture capitalists prescribed more illogical and cruel advice: slash government spending, layoff more workers, and raise taxes. This neoliberal “solution” predictably led to only more misery for most Russians.

In the 1990s, many Russian workers often didn’t get paid for months. There were 2 million Russian children who essentially became orphans; suicide rates among men skyrocketed; and the life expectancy of men fell to 58. Between 1991 and 1999, Russia’s population decreased by 8 million.

In 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt to the IMF and Western financiers. Bank interest rates hit 120%, and the stock market collapsed. (The default itself was bogus because the amount was only about $40 billion, which is nothing compared to the trillions of dollars of natural resources that Russia has). Then to “protect” the value of Ruble, Wall Street forced Russia to sell off all its foreign exchange and gold reserves. When all the reserves were gone… the Ruble still fell 80%.

The Russian military was in shambles and was badly losing wars to Islamic terrorists in Chechnya and Dagestan. Oh, these terrorists were the same Mujahideen from Afghanistan and were still armed by the US.

To add insult to the injury, in 1999, the West bombed Serbia — Russia’s staunch ally — and also gave NATO membership to Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic, threatening Russia’s national security.

Who was the clueless leader during those fateful years? Boris Yeltsin, who was surrounded by traitors with allegiance to Washington DC and Wall Street. As Bill Clinton bragged to Tony Blair, he also had tremendous influence over the Russian parliament. And when Boris Yeltsin was about to lose in the 1996 election, Bill Clinton arranged an IMF loan that went into Yeltsin’s campaign coffer; and U.S. campaign experts flew into Russia and engineered a resounding victory for Yeltsin. The U.S. media gloated about the American meddling in Russian politics with titles, “Yanks to the Rescue!” and “Rescuing Boris.”»

Este era o "estado da arte" em Moscovo, quando Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin, então com 47 anos de idade, chegou ao Kremlin no dia 31 de Dezembro de 1999, nas vésperas do novo Milénio. Nesta altura, ninguém julgava que Putin fosse sequer sobreviver muito tempo na política e nada, nem ninguém, conseguiu prever o que se iria seguir nas décadas seguintes. Como é que Putin conseguiu então levantar um Estado-Civilização, que estava em 1999 completamente falido, espoliado, humilhado, derrotado e à beira do abismo? É só continuarem a ler SL Kanthan, isto aqui, se tivéssemos juízo em Portugal, poderia ser exemplo e levar-nos a aprender alguma coisa:

«He started by removing corrupt oligarchs and taking control of the country. Putin improved Russia in a holistic, 360-degree way — improving the economy, turbocharging industrial production, bolstering the military, fostering mutually beneficial relations with Europe, cementing strategic partnership with China, re-establishing Russia as a great power, and making Russians proud again. This is why the US hates him so much.

Under Putin, Russian GDP grew whopping tenfold — from $200 billion in 1999 to over $2 trillion by 2013 — when Russia became the 5th largest economy in the world (by PPP GDP). This is why the globalists orchestrated the Maidan Coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then started to wage vicious hybrid wars against Russia.

At the same time, Putin brought down inflation, which was wildly out of control in the 1990s — from 2000% in the early 1990s to 120% in 1998 to 2.4% in 2019. Now, even after the extraordinary US/EU sanctions since 2022, Russia’s economy has kept growing and has surpassed Germany as Europe’s largest economy (in PPP GDP).

While the US debt-to-GDP grew from 56% to 125% between 1999 and 2023, Putin did the opposite: he reduced Russia’s debt from 100% to 15% of GDP. There are now 160 countries in the world that have higher debt-GDP ratios than Russia. This is a phenomenal achievement.

Remember that Russia had virtually no foreign exchange reserves and very little gold reserves when Putin took office. He replenished the coffer and made the Russian economy quite immune to downturns and attacks from Wall Street shysters. Russia now has the 6th largest foreign exchange reserves as well as the 6th largest gold reserves in the world.

[...]

Under Putin, Russia’s oil production quickly doubled from 1999 to 2015. Russia has also set records in grain production and has become #1 in export of wheat, which again is quite an accomplishment considering where Russia was in 2000 (see chart below from Bloomberg). Putin has also smartly rejected GMO and wants to make Russia the premier exporter of natural and organic food.

When it came to national security and military, Putin did the impossible. He defeated the CIA-armed jihadists in Chechnya and stabilized Russia. Then he quickly rebuilt the Russian military, which soon produced world-class weapons and even surpassed the US in hypersonic missile technology. Russia’s new fighter jets, tanks and missile defense systems are arguably better than the American counterparts. When the US tried to destroy Syria, Putin intervened and destroyed the NATO-funded terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Similarly, in Africa, many countries are aligning with Russia and kicking out American and French militaries.

In Ukraine, of course, the Russian military has been singlehandedly facing the entire might of American and NATO weapons, intelligence, spies and mercenaries. This is simply astounding, given that the collective annual military spending of the West is 20-fold bigger than that of Russia.»

Entretanto, no meio de tudo isto, o que fez Putin em relação ao pesado legado comunista? Putin não o podia obviamente apagar, pois o mesmo faz parte da história da Rússia. Todavia, Putin tem largamente ignorado o passado soviético e a prova disso mesmo, foi a forma como destratou o centenário da Revolução Russa em 2017. Ao contrário daquilo que muitos esperavam, não houve quaisquer eventos públicos, exposições ou comemorações dos 100 anos da Revolução Comunista na Rússia, que tivessem sido patrocinados oficialmente pelo Estado Russo. Putin fez "tábua rasa" do centenário da Revolução Russa e ainda lançou algumas ferozes farpas contra a figura de Lenine, que Putin responsabiliza pelo actual desastre na Ucrânia. Sim, a Revolução Bolchevique foi há muitos anos, mas aquilo que Lenine fez quando desenhou o mapa da URSS, foi um completo crime contra a história da Rússia.

O Marxismo-Leninismo levou a que territórios que sempre foram historicamente russos, fossem anexados à Rússia e incluídos no novo mapa da Ucrânia criado pelos soviéticos. Foi assim que os ucranianos ficaram com o Donbass e com cidades como Odessa, que foi fundada pela Imperatriz Catarina, a Grande em 1794. Mais tarde, estes erros fatais cometidos por Lenine, aquando do desenho das fronteiras da República Socialista Soviética da Ucrânia, foram agravados ainda mais por Khruschov, que decidiu em 1954 redesenhar de novo as fronteiras da Ucrânia e incluir nestas a Crimeia, uma região que também nunca foi ucraniana e pela qual os russos já tinham pago um pesado preço de sangue, durante a Guerra da Crimeia contra os turcos, franceses e britânicos.

Portanto, não. Putin não é de forma alguma "um comunista", nem quer "restaurar a URSS" como muitos no ocidente julgam. O que Putin quer, isto sim e acima de tudo, é o regresso da Rússia histórica, da sua identidade e espiritualidade e quer também, que o Ocidente respeite o Russkiy Mir e reconheça a Federação Russa como a natural guardiã do mesmo.

Talvez a melhor forma de perceberem o Putinismo e a Rússia que temos hoje, é leram o fabuloso texto autobiográfico de Andrei Raevsky (The Saker), que foi publicado em 2017 no Russia Insider. Raevsky é ele próprio oriundo de uma família de "russos brancos", que foi perseguida pelo regime soviético e teve de fugir para o exílio. Odiavam visceralmente o sistema comunista, eram cristãos ortodoxos muito devotos, nunca compactuaram com o regime soviético e estavam até proibidos de entrar na URSS, pois eram considerados «perigosos activistas anti-soviéticos». Apenas após o fim do Comunismo em 1991, é que Andrei Raevsky conseguiu voltar a entrar na Rússia e ele, melhor do que ninguém, explica porque é que passou a apoiar Putin "de alma e coração", depois de tudo aquilo a que assistiu na década de 1990. Se entenderem isto que Andrei Raevsky escreveu e a profundidade subjacente ao texto do mesmo, vão conseguir entender quem é realmente Vladimir Putin e em que consiste, concreta e efectivamente, o Putinismo, a Rússia do século XXI e todo o espírito conservador e ortodoxo, que vive em torno deste fenómeno político-social, único no Mundo:

«The Soviet authorities had long listed me, and my entire family, as dangerous anti-Soviet activists and I, therefore, could not travel to Russia until the fall of Communism in 1991 when I immediately caught the first available flight and got to Moscow while the barricades built against the GKChP coup were still standing.

Truly, by this fateful month of August 1991, I was a perfect anti-Soviet activist and an anti-Communist hardliner. I even took a photo of myself standing next to the collapsed statue of Felix Derzhinsky (the founder of the ChK – the first Soviet Secret police) with my boot pressed on his iron throat. That day I felt that my victory was total. It was also short-lived.

Instead of bringing the long-suffering Russian people freedom, peace, and prosperity, the end of Communism in Russia only brought chaos, poverty, violence, and abject exploitation by the worst class of scum the defunct Soviet system had produced. I was horrified. Unlike so many other anti-Soviet activists who were also Russophobes, I never conflated my people and the regime which oppressed them. So, while I rejoiced at the end of one horror, I was also appalled to see that another one had taken its place.

Even worse, it was undeniable that the West played an active role in every and all forms of anti-Russian activities, from the total protection of Russian mobsters, on to the support of the Wahabi insurgents in Chechnya, and ending with the financing of a propaganda machine which tried to turn the Russian people into mindless consumers to the presence of western “advisors” (yeah, right!) in all the key ministries.

The oligarchs were plundering Russia and causing immeasurable suffering, and the entire West, the so-called “free world” not only did nothing to help but helped all the enemies of Russia with every resource it had. Soon the NATO forces attacked Serbia, a historical ally of Russia, in total violation of the most sacred principles of international law.

East Germany was not only reunified but instantly incorporated into West Germany and NATO pushed as far East as possible. I could not pretend that all this could be explained by some fear of the Soviet military or by a reaction to the Communist theory of world revolution. In truth, it became clear to me that the western elites did not hate the Soviet system or ideology, but that they hated Russian people themselves and the culture and civilization which they had created.

By the time the war against the Serbian nation in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo broke out, I was in a unique situation: all day long I could read classified UNPROFOR and military reports about what was taking place in that region and, after work, I could read the counter-factual anti-Serbian propaganda the western corporate Ziomedia was spewing out every day.

I was horrified to see that literally everything the media was saying was a total lie. Then came the false flags, first in Sarajevo, but later also in Kosovo. My illusions about “Free World” and the “West” were crumbling. Fast.

Fate brought me to Russia in 1993 when I saw the carnage of meted out by the “democratic” Eltsin regime against thousands of Russians in Moscow (many more than what the official press reported). I also saw the Red Flags and Stalin portraits around the parliament building. My disgust by then was total. And when the Eltsin regime decided to bring Dudaev’s Chechnia to heel triggering yet another needless bloodbath, that disgust turned into despair. Then came the stolen elections of 1996 and the murder of General Lebed. At that point, I remember thinking “Russia is dead.”

So, when the entourage of Eltsin suddenly appointed an unknown nobody to acting President of Russia, I was rather dubious, to put it mildly. The new guy was not a drunk or an arrogant oligarch, but he looked rather unimpressive. He was also ex-KGB which was interesting: on one hand, the KGB had been my lifelong enemy but on the other hand, I knew that the part of the KGB which dealt with foreign intelligence was staffed by the brightest of the brightest and that they had nothing to do with political repression, Gulags and all the rest of the ugly stuff another Directorate of the KGB (the 5th) was tasked with (that department had been abolished in 1989).

Putin came from the First Main Directorate of the KGB, the “PGU KGB.” Still, my sympathies were more with the (far less political) military intelligence service (GRU) than the very political PGU which, I was quite sure by then, had a thick dossier on my family and me.

Then, two crucial things happened in parallel: both the “Free world” and Putin showed their true faces: the “Free world” as an AngloZionist Empire hell-bent on aggression and oppression, and Vladimir Putin as a real patriot of Russia.