Putin’s foreign policy is a clear continuation of this tsarist-Stalinist line. According to him, after the Revolution, it was the turn of the Bolsheviks to aggrieve Russia: ‘The Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons – may God judge them – added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic makeup of the population, and today these areas form the southeast of Ukraine.’10 In January 2016, Putin again made the same point in his characterisation of Lenin’s greatest mistake: Ruling with your ideas as a guide is correct, but that is only the case when that idea leads to the right results, not like it did with Vladimir Ilyich. In the end that idea led to the ruin of the Soviet Union. There were many of these ideas such as providing regions with autonomy, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia and which would later explode.11 In short, Lenin was guilty of taking seriously the autonomy of the different nations that composed the Russian empire, and thus of questioning Russian hegemony. No wonder we see portraits of Stalin again during Russian military parades and public celebrations, while Lenin is obliterated. In a big opinion poll conducted a couple of years ago, Stalin was voted the third-greatest Russian of all time, while Lenin was nowhere to be seen. Stalin is not celebrated today as a communist, but as the restorer of Russia’s greatness after Lenin’s anti-patriotic ‘deviation’. For Lenin, ‘proletarian internationalism’ goes hand in hand with a defence of the rights of small nations against the big nations: for a ‘great’ nation dominating others, giving full rights to smaller nations is the key indicator of the seriousness of their professed internationalism.

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