Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters
During Russia’s blood-stained spring of 1919, about ten months after the Cheka executed the tsarist Romanov family in a grubby basement, Vladimir Lenin assembled fifteen Bolsheviks and ordered them to sanitize the mess. They did such a poor job of sweeping up the dirt that Lenin the following year persuaded 425,000 volunteers to participate in what the Kremlin soon after enshrined as the subbotnik, the annual Saturday spring cleaning of Russia.
Vladimir Putin is keen on autocratic traditions and enthusiastic about keeping his Kremlin spic and span. But with so much crap piled up inside his fortress after invading Ukraine, arresting critics and assassinating political foes, the one day of traditional spring cleaning from the beginning of Putin’s reign is no longer enough.
Spring 2023 is here and it’s time to look at what Putin has to clean up. He’s ignited a dumpster fire kindled with more than 200,000 deceased Russian soldiers, whose death march on Ukraine doubled the size of his border with NATO, torched his profitable global energy markets, and recycled him as a Chinese subordinate.