In contrast to his gaze on Lenin, Putin Country Email List sees Stalin as a nation builder. And nation-building is something for which Putin has enormous sympathy. He feels that he is dedicated to it. He thinks of his own role as that of the man who is on a Country Email List mission to build a nation after strong upheaval that has produced great erosion and unrest within society. It is in this sense that he admires Stalin. Several scholars have suggested that, on issues Country Email List such as the treatment of Ukraine, Putin traces his perspective back to the time of the 18th- century consolidation of Russian control over those then-Russian lands that are now part of Ukraine.
Simon Montefiore claims that Putin has Country Email List read his book on Catherine the Great and the creation of Great Russia5and that he would like to place himself in the tradition of the Russian nation and empire builders, starting with Peter the Country Email List Great and going through Catherine. I am open to that point of view, but I have not seen any concrete evidence to convince me that this is more important to Putin than the Soviet aspect, which is, after all, closer to him. But it is certainly a quite plausible hypothesis. What aspects of Russian history give us clues to analyze the invasion of Ukraine?
Putin himself has given us a clue in his comments about the historical inseparability of Russia and Ukraine. He considers the origins of the current Ukrainian state to be in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, formed as a founding member of the ussr in the 1920s. This implies that a close relationship with Russia (in Soviet times, the Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of Russia) is embedded in the Ukrainian identity.