Venäjää hallitsevat Neuvostoliiton kasvatit, jotka näkivät maansa romahtavan.
Tässä artikkelissa pohdiskellaan miten apokalyptisiä tunnelmia Kremlissä on.:
The Opinion Pages
What the West Gets Wrong About Russia
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/o...ts-wrong-about-russia.html?smid=fb-share&_r=2
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"According to Gleb Pavlovsky, Mr. Putin’s former spin doctor extraordinaire, these days the Kremlin is still enigmatic, but no longer strategic. For Mr. Pavlovsky, Kremlin policy is fashioned rather like the music of a jazz group; its continuing improvisation is an attempt to survive the latest crisis.
Mr. Pavlovsky may not be a household name in the West, but he’s worth listening to. An erstwhile Soviet dissident trained as a historian who transformed himself into one of the interior designers of Mr. Putin’s regime, he performed in the Kremlin’s “jazz band” for over a decade. This year he published “The System of the Russian Federation,” which relies heavily on Mr. Kennan’s ideas to offer a timely critique of the West’s assumptions about Mr. Putin’s Russia (for now, it’s available only in Russian).
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr. Pavlovsky insists, after
Mr. Putin took personal responsibility for the annexation of Crimea and won the support of more than 80 percent of the population, he lost interest in day-to-day decision making. He wants to be informed about everything, but is reluctant to play national housekeeper.
Ministers, Mr. Pavlovsky writes, spend endless hours waiting by Mr. Putin’s office to take orders, but in the end he doesn’t order, he only listens.
What runs the Kremlin today is not Mr. Putin’s will but his ambiguity. Wars among different power factions, as a result, have escalated.
In Mr. Pavlovsky’s reading, Russia today is neither an ideological warrior seeking to remake the world order nor a hard-nosed realist desperately defending its sphere of influence. Far from grand strategy, what animates Mr. Putin’s Kremlin is the assertion of its right to break international rules.
In fact, breaking the rules without being punished is the Kremlin’s peculiar definition of being a great power."
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The Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin, concisely summed things up when he explained to international analysts at a private forum in Valdai last year, “There is no Russia today if there is no Putin.”
The Russian political system implicitly functions on the assumption that its president is immortal.
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Deprived of a vision for the future, Russian elites are tempted by conspiracy theories and apocalyptic pronouncements. As Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, a writer and leading voice of Russian imperial nationalists, lamented, the elites know that if they attempt a Perestroika II, they will fail. Better, he said, to provoke another world war than try to dismantle Mr. Putin’s designs.
Reading Mr. Pavlovsky’s book, one realizes that what is totally absent in the Western analyses of today’s Russia is this “end of the world” mentality among Mr. Putin’s political and intellectual elites. In Mr. Pavlovsky’s view,
the experience of the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than geopolitical interests or values, is the key for understanding Russia’s strategic behavior and the inner logic of Mr. Putin’s regime."