The Agent in His Labyrinth
Roger Cohen, NYT
MARCH 13, 2014
LONDON — The dream flickered briefly after the end of the Cold War: a shared space from Lisbon to Vladivostok, Russia gathered into a close association with NATO, or even becoming an alliance member, and the European Union working in cooperation with Moscow on the modernization of the country.
It was a nice idea, like the end of history, and as with many nice ideas, it did not come to pass.
Vladimir Putin, a former K.G.B. agent obsessed with the loss of the Soviet imperium, had a different idea: to define himself and the motherland against the West by casting it as promiscuous and devious, a power lacking true virility and cloaking its interests in empty talk of human rights, advancing to the very gates of Russia through deception and intrigue.
The Russian president’s vision of a revived imperium developed around four pillars. The first was military (the liquidation of Grozny, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and now the drive to annex Crimea). The second was political (drawing the countries of the former Soviet Union into an autocratic Eurasian Union). The third was economic (Russian gas as a tool of coercion and oligarchs’ money as suasion from Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm to London’s Knightsbridge). The fourth was cultural (a heady blend of Orthodoxy and autocracy as expressions of Russian purity and strength against the nihilistic decadence of Europe and the United States).
(More here.)
MARCH 13, 2014
LONDON — The dream flickered briefly after the end of the Cold War: a shared space from Lisbon to Vladivostok, Russia gathered into a close association with NATO, or even becoming an alliance member, and the European Union working in cooperation with Moscow on the modernization of the country.
It was a nice idea, like the end of history, and as with many nice ideas, it did not come to pass.
Vladimir Putin, a former K.G.B. agent obsessed with the loss of the Soviet imperium, had a different idea: to define himself and the motherland against the West by casting it as promiscuous and devious, a power lacking true virility and cloaking its interests in empty talk of human rights, advancing to the very gates of Russia through deception and intrigue.
The Russian president’s vision of a revived imperium developed around four pillars. The first was military (the liquidation of Grozny, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and now the drive to annex Crimea). The second was political (drawing the countries of the former Soviet Union into an autocratic Eurasian Union). The third was economic (Russian gas as a tool of coercion and oligarchs’ money as suasion from Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm to London’s Knightsbridge). The fourth was cultural (a heady blend of Orthodoxy and autocracy as expressions of Russian purity and strength against the nihilistic decadence of Europe and the United States).
(More here.)
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