“That little son of a bitch.”
That was how President Harry Truman referred to Joseph Stalin. Truman was right on two counts — that is, on Stalin’s height and his character.
“Stalin was only five foot four inches tall, thin, swarthy and with a pockmarked face,” reported Paul Johnson in his classic Modern Times, adding: “[T]he second and third toes of his left foot were fused together; and in addition an accident as a boy caused his left elbow to be stiff, with a shortening of the arm, the left hand being noticeably thicker than the right.” (READ MORE: Brittney Griner’s Russian Mugging)
Johnson, a close friend of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. and cherished contributor to this magazine for decades, quoted old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, who said of Stalin: “This is a small, vicious man; no, not a man, but a devil.”
Another small, vicious man is Vladimir Putin. Vlad might pose as a big tough guy, bare-chested while shooting wild beasts, or ordering his soldiers to kill Ukrainian civilians, but in truth, he’s a little man — though at 5 feet, 7 inches, he has 3 inches on Stalin (and 2 inches on that little rat Vladimir Lenin).
Very soon, Mad Dog Putin will surpass Stalin in tenure as well as stature. He’s reveling in his 23rd year in power, blowing past post-communist Russia’s constitutionally established limit of two four-year terms for a president. That is sad to see. When President Boris Yeltsin passed the baton to Putin in the year 2000, something wonderfully unprecedented had happened in Russia: for the first time in the nation’s long history, a peaceful succession of power from one democratically elected leader to another. That had never occurred before.
But thanks to Putin, it hasn’t happened again. As he has now configured things, he will be in charge in Russia until at least 2030, if he lives that long — at which point he’ll contrive away to carve out more years at the Kremlin.
The only regional despot to outdo Putin is his Belarusian buddy, Alexander Lukashenko. He has held the presidency of Belarus, a former Soviet republic, since the office was established after the breakup of the USSR. He took the helm in July 1994, making him the longest-serving leader in Europe. In a November 2012 interview with Reuters, Lukashenko actually referred to himself as “the last dictator in Europe.”
So he is, and that was over 10 years ago.
How, well, Soviet-like. Could it be any other way for this politician who rose through the ranks of Komosomol (the Soviet Young Communist League), a collectivist farm, and the Red Army, where he was a “political officer?”
Lukie was a good commie. And now, he’s Putin’s pal. Together, they have blown past elections in their respective countries, ensconced themselves as authoritarians, and now have forged a united front against the Ukraine. More than that, the latest, quite alarmingly, is their coming together on Russian nukes.
At 6 feet, 2 inches and over 200 pounds, Lukashenko might dominate Putin in pictures, with little Vlad almost looking like his puppet boy, but the opposite is true. Mad Dog has Lukashenko licking from his paw. And in a quite scary development, that includes the Putin hand that holds the nuclear codes.
A few months ago, it was disclosed that Vlad and Lukashenko had reached an agreement to deploy Russian nukes in Belarus this summer to counter the “threat” posed by the independent democratic country that Mad Dog roared into with his tanks in February 2022 — that would be Ukraine. Ever since, the Russkies, characteristic of their usual performance in combat, have gotten their tails kicked. I have written here repeatedly that such is hardly a surprise. That is what Russians do in battle; they get their butts kicked.
Unfortunately, in the case of Putin’s Russia, that could portend something actually worse, which I’ve warned about for over a year, namely: that Mad Dog might get so desperate over his military’s predictable failures that he resorts to using nuclear weapons.
But only as a “defensive” measure, you see.
Such is precisely what Putin’s puppet from Belarus said this week.
Lukashenko said on Tuesday that he would “not hesitate” to use nukes against an “aggressor” country, no doubt with the “aggressor” Ukraine in mind. “I believe it is unlikely that anyone would want to wage war against a country that has such weapons,” asserted Lukashenko of his burgeoning nuclear power. “It is a weapon of deterrence…. God forbid if I have to make a decision to use this weapon in modern times. But I won’t hesitate should there be an aggression against us.” No doubt thinking of those “aggressive” “bastards” in Zelensky’s Ukraine, Lukashenko added that he did not want to see “not a single bastard … set foot on Belarusian soil.” Should such “bastards” do so, “the response will be immediate.”
And so, like Mad Dog Putin, Lukashenko is now talking nukes — but only defensively, of course. Should such a prospect of “deterrence” become necessary. Poor Belarus. Poor Russia. How awful to be right next door to that vicious country called Ukraine! Those Nazis!
Where does this leave the world now? We watch and wait, hoping that little Vlad and his big Belarusian buddy don’t use those nukes they’re now coveting together. We shall see. I remain very pessimistic.
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