Russia vs. Europe
By BILL KELLER, NYT
The world needs Nelson Mandelas. Instead, it gets Vladimir Putins. As the South African hero was being sung to his grave last week, the Russian president was bullying neighboring Ukraine into a new customs union that is starting to look a bit like Soviet Union Lite, and consolidating his control of state-run media by creating a new Kremlin news agency under a nationalistic and homophobic hard-liner.
Putin’s moves were not isolated events. They fit into a pattern of behavior over the past couple of years that deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West: laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as “foreign agents,” expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.
What’s going on is more complicated and more dangerous than just Putin flexing his political pecs. He is trying to draw the line against Europe, to deepen division on a continent that has twice in living memory been the birthplace of world wars. It seems clearer than ever that Putin is not just tweaking the West to rouse his base or nipping domestic opposition in the bud. He is also attempting to turn back 25 years of history.
The motivation of Vladimir Putin has long been a subject of journalistic and scholarly speculation, resulting in several overlapping theories: He is the boy tormented in the rough courtyards of postwar Leningrad, who put on a KGB uniform to get even and never took it off. He is the cynical, calculating master of realpolitik, who sees the world in conspiracies and responds in kind. He is a tortured Russian soul out of Dostoevsky, distressed by godlessness, permissiveness and moral decline. He is Soviet Man, still fighting the Cold War. He is a classic narcissist, best understood by his penchant for being photographed bare-chested on horseback.
(More here.)
The world needs Nelson Mandelas. Instead, it gets Vladimir Putins. As the South African hero was being sung to his grave last week, the Russian president was bullying neighboring Ukraine into a new customs union that is starting to look a bit like Soviet Union Lite, and consolidating his control of state-run media by creating a new Kremlin news agency under a nationalistic and homophobic hard-liner.
Putin’s moves were not isolated events. They fit into a pattern of behavior over the past couple of years that deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West: laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as “foreign agents,” expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.
What’s going on is more complicated and more dangerous than just Putin flexing his political pecs. He is trying to draw the line against Europe, to deepen division on a continent that has twice in living memory been the birthplace of world wars. It seems clearer than ever that Putin is not just tweaking the West to rouse his base or nipping domestic opposition in the bud. He is also attempting to turn back 25 years of history.
The motivation of Vladimir Putin has long been a subject of journalistic and scholarly speculation, resulting in several overlapping theories: He is the boy tormented in the rough courtyards of postwar Leningrad, who put on a KGB uniform to get even and never took it off. He is the cynical, calculating master of realpolitik, who sees the world in conspiracies and responds in kind. He is a tortured Russian soul out of Dostoevsky, distressed by godlessness, permissiveness and moral decline. He is Soviet Man, still fighting the Cold War. He is a classic narcissist, best understood by his penchant for being photographed bare-chested on horseback.
(More here.)
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