So how will Putin end?

[Dogsauce]

It’s not like he’s some kind of end-of-level boss and the whole system collapses when he does. There will be a lot of people invested in his world, this way of running the country, and it will continue. A big swamp to drain, some parts were never drained after the collapse of the USSR.

 

[RD2003]

Russia has never had a democratic change of power. I think people are resigned to being ruled by cunts and crooks, and always have been. There’s a lot of cynicism about this in the population but no belief in an ability to change it, because they probably can’t and know it. And we’re not that far away from this here either, there’s a narrowly acceptable range of viewpoints in politics, just the rosette changes colour, anything outside this gets shut down or ignored.

On the radio the other day I heard a R4 journalist (Rosenberg?) interviewing people celebrating Putin's re-election. A woman claimed that the western media, and westerners in general, assume they have everything right in their own societies and are obsessed by trying to impose their model on a world that largely rejects it. Despite the self-interest that will have been involved, she is, as events keep on proving, undoubtedly correct. Francis Fukuyama couldn't have been more wrong: the world is clearly not converging on a liberal-democratic model. He was, however, correct to say that this liberal world would face the danger of it being too sad and boring for the many (not necessarily the majority, but that doesn't matter) who just want to kick something over. The rise of authoritarians and populists, as well as the continuing respectable performance of remnants of the socialist tradition, in Europe and elsewhere, only prove that this urge is real. He is losing and they are winning.

And he assumed that every other country would bow to US wishes, seemingly forgetting that some of the states which were expected to do so would still possess nuclear weapons.

 

[RD2003]

It’s not like he’s some kind of end-of-level boss and the whole system collapses when he does. There will be a lot of people invested in his world, this way of running the country, and it will continue. A big swamp to drain, some parts were never drained after the collapse of the USSR.

Relatively few Russians, in my estimaton, would recognise the concept of 'draining the swamp.' The existing system is just one variant on how they're used to living.

Simon Jenkins has it right in the above-linked article where he says 'When I asked a Russia expert what he thought would be the true tally of electoral support for Putin’s dictatorship, his view squared with this survey. He suggested it would be about 60%, though lower in Moscow and St Petersburg. This sounded much like my visits to Moscow in the post-communist 1990s. Russians would concede the virtues of western democracy, but they pleaded the more urgent need for order, security and prosperity.'

That chimes with my experience in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Almost everybody a westerner pissing about in Moscow was likely to get to know was the type to recognise that the USSR couldn't go on., but it soon became clear that most didn't really believe that their future could lie with the west, nor that anything in their country could fundamentally change. I soon came to recognise that most didn't really want it to as it was all they knew. And even the most 'liberal' of them were wary of the prospect of societal chaos.

 

[RD2003]

Here's Putin coming closer and closer to that long-predicted 'end' Astounding how he can come up with all this in the midst of his multiple fatal illnesses and general 'madness'....

Putin removes Sergei Shoigu as Russia’s defence minister

Russian president proposes replacing Shoigu, who has been defence minister for years, with Andrei Belousov, an economist

www.theguardian.com

'Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Putin decided to appoint Belousov, a veteran economist, to lead the defence ministry after Russia’s war spending increased to levels reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s.

“It’s very important to put the security economy in line with the economy of the country so that it meets the dynamics of the current moment,” Peskov said.


Peskov added that the Russian president had decided a civilian should head the defence ministry to ensure the department was “open to innovations and advanced ideas”. '

 

[Dogsauce]

Russia’s war spending increased to levels reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s.

I seem to recall that worked out well for them…

 

[tim]

Relatively few Russians, in my estimaton, would recognise the concept of 'draining the swamp.' The existing system is just one variant on how they're used to living.

Simon Jenkins has it right in the above-linked article where he says 'When I asked a Russia expert what he thought would be the true tally of electoral support for Putin’s dictatorship, his view squared with this survey. He suggested it would be about 60%, though lower in Moscow and St Petersburg. This sounded much like my visits to Moscow in the post-communist 1990s. Russians would concede the virtues of western democracy, but they pleaded the more urgent need for order, security and prosperity.'

That chimes with my experience in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Almost everybody a westerner pissing about in Moscow was likely to get to know was the type to recognise that the USSR couldn't go on., but it soon became clear that most didn't really believe that their future could lie with the west, nor that anything in their country could fundamentally change. I soon came to recognise that most didn't really want it to as it was all they knew. And even the most 'liberal' of them were wary of the prospect of societal chaos.

More reminisces about those evenings down the boozer in Murmansk in 1987.

 

[krtek a houby]

 

[Idris2002]

More reminisces about those evenings down the boozer in Murmansk in 1987.

He's not wrong though. One of my Russian colleagues had a one-year contract in. . . let's just say in a major Western country back in the 1990s. He told me that it was only then he realised that there was no way Russia was every going to be like that major Western country.

 

[RD2003]

I seem to recall that worked out well for them…

Don't know why you're quoting me with a line from a Guardian article.

 

[RD2003]

He's not wrong though. One of my Russian colleagues had a one-year contract in. . . let's just say in a major Western country back in the 1990s. He told me that it was only then he realised that there was no way Russia was every going to be like that major Western country.

Whatever else you can say about him, John Gray turned out to be right on this matter.


'The meltdown of the Soviet Union had little to do with the spread of liberal values. More than any other factors, it was nationalism and religion that destroyed the U.S.S.R. and its empire. Demoralizing military failure at the hands of Western-armed jihadists in Afghanistan, loss of control to the Church and to the Solidarity movement in Poland, and national rebellions in the Baltic states — these defeats, together with the destabilizing effects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and the challenge posed by Star Wars, Ronald Reagan’s missile-defense program, were what brought the Cold War to a close. The notion that the fall of Communism was a decisive victory for Western ideas and values — “the end of history” — is the reverse of the truth.

The Cold War was a quarrel between two Western creeds — liberalism and Communism. From beginning to end, the Soviet Union was a westernizing regime that aimed to wrench Russia from its Eurasian and Orthodox past. The collapse of Communism was a defeat for this project. If the Soviet legacy was a military-industrial rust belt, environmental devastation, and tens of millions of ruined lives, then post-Communist Russia suffered the effects of another Western ideology when neoliberal “shock therapy” was imposed in the early Nineties: a catastrophic depression, a dramatic fall in life expectancy, and the mafia capitalism of the Boris Yeltsin era. Against this background, the idea that Russia would further westernize was wishful thinking. Instead, the country has returned, politically, to its historically ambiguous position between Europe and Asia.

The rise of Putin has often been described as a return to tsarist traditions of authoritarian rule, but in some respects the state he has built is extremely modern. At its core is a reborn version of the KGB security agency, a quintessentially Soviet institution, which Putin uses to coordinate policy on multiple fronts. Russia is economically weak and will become weaker; its resource-based model, which depends on high oil prices, is not sustainable. Putin may well be acting on the suspicion that he has only a few years to avert a cataclysmic decline in Russia’s world standing. He has undertaken a type of hybrid warfare, sometimes called nonlinear, that uses disinformation and deceptive diplomacy, along with the threat of military force — most recently to annex Crimea from Ukraine and to destabilize the Kiev government.

For Putin the loss of Ukraine from the Russian orbit posed an existential threat.'

Under Western Eyes, by John Gray

harpers.org

 

[Wookey]

There's no hammer in the head option.

 

[Sasaferrato]

I read yesterday that he threatening to go to war with NATO if Ukraine is given longer range missiles. Surely even Putin couldn't be that stupid?

 

[RD2003]

I read yesterday that he threatening to go to war with NATO if Ukraine is given longer range missiles. Surely even Putin couldn't be that stupid?

A nuclear exchange was always going to take place sometime...

Western leaders staked their reputations on a Ukraine victory, and know they're going to look foolish when Russia walks away from any peace deal with chunks of Ukraine. Knowing that Ukraine can't win on the battlefront, it looks like they're now preparing to gamble, after sensibly not taking the risks so far (refusal of the requested 'no-fly zone etc). Similarly, Putin can't afford to be seen to back down.

Placed within the ongoing global conflict between neo-liberal capitalism, fuelled by a mentality that, amazingly after the military and economic disasters of last 30 years, still deludes western leaders into thinking that they preside over the political and economic template that humanity must follow, and the perceived project of a 'multi-polar' world, it's more vanity than stupidity.