From Vladimir Sorokin:
Yeltsin, who was tired after climbing to the top of the pyramid, left the structure completely undisturbed, but brought an heir along with him: Putin, who immediately informed the population that he viewed the collapse of the USSR as a geopolitical catastrophe. He also quoted the conservative Alexander III, who believed that Russia had only two allies: the army and the navy. The machine of the Russian state moved backward, into the past, becoming more and more Soviet every year.
In my view, this fifteen-year journey back to the USSR under the leadership of a former KGB lieutenant colonel has shown the world the vicious nature and archaic underpinnings of the Russian state’s “vertical power” structure, more than any “great and terrible” Putin….A country such as this cannot have a predictable, stable future….
Unpredictability has always been Russia’s calling card, but since the Ukrainian events, it has grown to unprecedented levels: no one knows what will happen to our country in a month, in a week, or the day after tomorrow. I think that even Putin doesn’t know; he is now hostage to his own strategy of playing “bad guy” to the West…..If you compare the post-Soviet bear to the Soviet one, the only thing they have in common is the imperial roar. However, the post-Soviet bear is teeming with corrupt parasites that infected it during the 1990s, and have multiplied exponentially in the last decade. They are consuming the bear from within. Some might mistake their fevered movement under the bear’s hide for the working of powerful muscles. But in truth, it’s an illusion.
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell.
Read more at Let the Past Collapse on Time! by Vladimir Sorokin | The New York Review of Books.
Perhaps it’s just a Russian to English translation problem, but I imagine for anyone (not just Putin) who spent their formative years in organisations where the end justified the means (such as KGB, Stasi, CIA, Mossad, etc, etc, etc,) it wouldn’t be their strategies that held them captive, it would be their self-worth, which could only remain intact if they are the ones deciding what are the means and what are the ends. The greatest mistake any society can make is to put a military mind in charge of a democratic process. The two simply are incompatible.