Putin Takes His Place Among Vlad the Impaler and Atilla the Hun
Vladimir Putin’s cruel conquest of Ukraine is nothing if not an unbroken continuation of the brutality that is rooted and anchored in thousands of years of bloody world history, from the annihilation of the Native Americans, the torture and imprisonment of enslaved African Americans, or the extermination of the Jews, all justified by the conquerers as a need for land and labor.
They are rooted in the historical conquests of Atilla the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Alexander Nevsky, Peter the Great and the untold numbers of other rulers whose reigns were bathed in blood and couched in nationalistic ideologies.
In every situation, the victors are lionized, honored and turned into beloved, folk heroes, whether it be about Gen. George Armstrong Custer whose forces killed Native Americans and who, himself was killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the campaign in post-Soviet Russia to beatify Ivan the Terrible or the first day of winter every year, when Mongolians honor Ghengis Khan.
It remains to be seen if history will look at Putin as the murderer who ordered bombing hospitals and civilian areas or as the great loyalist who sought to protect the motherland and recreate another Soviet Union.
In modern Mongolia today, Genghis Khan is regarded as the nation’s founding father for having unified the nomadic tribes of Northeast Asia. Genghis Khan’s name and likeness are reproduced on products, streets, buildings, and other places. His face is on everything from liquor bottles to candy, and on the largest denominations of 500, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, and 20,000 Mongolian tögrög. Mongolia’s main international airport is named Chinggis Khaan International Airport, and a tall, equestrian statue of Genghis Khan was erected east of the Mongolian capital.
Attila the Hun is recalled in some histories and chronicles as a great and noble king and he plays major roles in the Norse sagas of Atlakviða, Volsunga and Atlamál. In 1812, Ludwig van Beethoven’s plans fell through to write an opera about Attila. In 1846, Giuseppe Verdi wrote an opera, loosely based on episodes in Attila’s invasion of Italy. The Allies referred to the Germans as “Huns” during World War I, based on the praise German Emperor Wilhelm II heaped on Attila the Hun for military prowess.
In modern Hungary and in Turkey, “Attila” and its Turkish variation “Atilla” are common names; in Hungary, several public places are named after Attila, including 10 Attila Streets in Budapest. In honor of Attila’s military conquests, the Turkish Armed Forces named its invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the “The Attila Plan.”
Attila’s memory lives on as a character in Germanic heroic legend, and his genocidal conquests are considered precursors to the later conquests of imperial Mongol and the Nazis, who named a planned military operation after him.
Tyrants like Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great, have been praised as strong leaders who expanded Russia. The Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin called on the great Russian writer Alexei Tolstoy to write a stage version of Ivan the Terrible’s life while the great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein completed a three-part film tribute to Ivan.
The first statue of Ivan the Terrible was officially opened in Oryol, Russia, in 2016 in honor of the 450th anniversary of the founding of Oryol, a Russian city of about 310,000 that was established as a fortress to defend Moscow’s southern borders.
Peter the Great founded and developed the city of Saint Petersburg, which remained the capital of Russia until 1917. If the number of titles is an indication of prestige and power, Peter the Great, had it all. He also was known as the most excellent and great sovereign emperor Pyotr Alekseevich the ruler of all the Russias, of Moscow, of Kiev, of Vladimir, of Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan and Tsar of Siberia, sovereign of Pskov, great prince of Smolensk, of Tver, of Yugorsk, of Perm, of Vyatka, of Bulgaria and others, sovereign and great prince of the Novgorod Lower lands, of Chernigov, of Ryazan, of Rostov, of Yaroslavl, of Belozersk, of Udora, of Kondia and the sovereign of all the northern lands, and the sovereign of the Iverian lands, of the Kartlian and Georgian Kings, of the Kabardin lands, of the Circassian and Mountain princes and many other states and lands.
After the fall of Communism in 1991, Peter the Great’s image was polished for his role in Russian history and his reign is seen as the decisive formative event in the Russian imperial past. Peter has been featured in many histories, novels, plays, films, monuments and paintings.
Vlad the Impaler is often considered one of the most important rulers in Wallachian history and a national hero of Romania. Books describing Vlad’s cruel acts were among the first bestsellers in the German-speaking territories. In Russia, popular stories suggested that Vlad was able to strengthen his central government only through applying brutal punishments, and a similar view was adopted by most Romanian historians in the 19th century.
Attila the Hun was the ruler of the Huns from 434 until his death in March 453. He was the leader of a tribal empire consisting of Huns, Ostrogoths, Alans and Bulgars, among others, in Central and Eastern Europe and is considered one of the most powerful rulers in world history. During his conquests, his army plundered and murdered thousands, using archery and javelin throwing as the main military techniques along with battering rams and rolling siege towers.
The Huns laid waste to the cities of Illyricum and forts on the river, including Viminacium, a city of Moesia. Ultimately, Attila fell at the hand and blade of his wife, though this account is considered more likely hearsay.
Ghengis Khan lived from May 1, 1162 to Aug. 25, 1227, and was the founder and the first Great Khan or emperor of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death. Historians of medieval times describe Genghis Khan’s conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale, causing great demographic changes and a drastic decline of population as a result of mass exterminations and famine. A conservative estimate is that about four million civilians (whereas other figures range from forty to sixty million) died as a consequence of Genghis Khan’s military campaigns. Buddhist Uyghurs of the kingdom of Qocho, viewed Genghis Khan as a liberator. He also was portrayed positively for his spread of culture, technology and ideas along the Silk Road under the Mongol Empire. By the end of the his life, the Mongol Empire occupied a substantial portion of Central Asia and China.
Vlad III is commonly known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula, which refers to “Vlad Dragon” in medieval Romanian, while in modern Romanian, dracul means “the devil.”
He ruled Wallachia, a section of what is now Romania, three times between 1448 and his death in 1476. At one point, the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, ordered Vlad to pay homage to him personally, but Vlad had the Sultan’s two envoys captured and impaled. In February 1462, he attacked Ottoman territory, massacring tens of thousands of Turks and Bulgarians. At the start of his reign, hundreds of thousands of people were executed by impalement, Vlad’s favorite form of execution, although he also would boil and freeze his victims. Invading Ottomans once discovered a “forest of the impaled,” thousands of stakes with the carcasses of executed men, women and children. According to one story, Vlad had two monks impaled to assist them to go to heaven and then ordered impalement of their donkey impaled after it began braying after its master’s death.
The invention of movable type printing contributed to the popularity of the stories about Vlad, making them one of the first “bestsellers” in Europe.
Most Romanian artists have regarded Vlad as a just ruler and a realistic tyrant who punished criminals and executed unpatriotic boyars to strengthen the central government. The great Romanian poet, Mihai Eminescu, dedicated a historic ballad to the princes of Wallachia, including Vlad and urged Vlad to return from the grave to annihilate the enemies of the Romanian nation.
Peter the Great was a monarch of the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 1682 until his death in 1725. Under his reign, Russia was modernised and grew into a European power. He led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernised and based on the Enlightenment.
In 1868, Peter was forced to rush home to crush a rebellion of the Streltsy. The Tsar acted ruthlessly and more than 1,200 of the rebels were tortured and executed. Historians refer to Peter in contradictory ways, as a God/Antichrist; educator/ignoramus; architect of Russia’s greatness/destroyer of national culture; and father of his country/scourge of the common man.
Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky, who died in 1263, was Prince of Novgorod, Grand Prince of Kiev and Grand Prince of Vladimir and is considered a key figure in medieval Russia, defeating German and Swedish invaders. Alexander preserved Russian statehood and Russian Orthodoxy, and was canonized as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547.
Alexander Nevsky’s fame has spread beyond the borders of Russia, and numerous cathedrals and churches are dedicated to him, including the Patriarchal Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria; the Cathedral church in Tallinn, Estonia; the Cathedral church in Łódź, Poland. In December 2008, he was voted the greatest Russian in the Name of Russia television poll.