In 1945, immediately after the war ended, Joseph Stalin made his famous toast about the “great Russian people”, specially singled out one people from other peoples of the state whose representatives fought in the Soviet army, ”writes Vitaly Portnikov in a column on“ Crimea. Realities.

Historians see in this statement of the dictator a final rejection of decorative " And for a literary critic, the words of Stalin will always be an accurate illustration of the correctness of George Orwell, in his novel Animal Farm, who accurately described totalitarianism as a regime where "

In 2020, Vladimir Putin, with his proposal to introduce words into the Russian constitution about the “state-forming people that are members of the multinational union of equal peoples of the Russian Federation”, decided again to remind contemporaries of Stalin. And about Orwell. Because the peoples are equal, and the " Russian.

And this despite the fact that the Russian Federation is truly an association of various peoples and territories, many of which have never been - and are not yet - part of the so-called Russian world. Russia as a conqueror came to the Volga region, Siberia, the Caucasus. The last of the modern republics of the Russian Federation was annexed by Tuva, just eight years before the birth of Vladimir Putin. And it turns out that the Russian constitution recognizes: the Tatars, Buryats, Tuvans, Chechens and other peoples of the country are just colonized nations under the \?

Vladimir Putin is unlikely to deny it. For him, the words that he proposes to write down in the country's constitution are a political axiom with which no one should argue, a reflection of his own convictions.

It is no coincidence that after the annexation of Crimea, the Russian president entrusted power on the peninsula to the head of the chauvinist party, which before the occupation did not enjoy the support of a few percent of Crimeans. It is no accident in the Crimea - under the constitutional norm on the equal rights of the languages \u200b\u200bof the "

And now Russia itself is turning its ruler into a " Conquest affects the future of conquerors hardest.

Reprinted with permission of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.