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Thursday, May 17, 2018

Politics

Vladimir Putin has turned Russia into an unapologetic autocracy. What's his end game?

Vladimir Putin has turned Russia into an unapologetic autocracy. What's his end game?
...When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Western eyes saw a communist dictatorship collapse. But Russian eyes saw something else: a loss of empire. The Soviet Union had been monumentally successful in completing a Russian expansion that had been unfolding for centuries into an empire stretching from Central Asia to Central Europe. Overnight, that was all lost. What Putin called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" was not the end of communism but of empire.

His response has been to start rebuilding it. His agenda of ideas is meant to drive that purpose and secure his position in history as the czar who set the job in motion.

The Putin ideology starts from a vision that goes by the name of "Eurasia." In that vision, "Russia" is a spiritual empire of historical-religious origin, an empire of virtue. The geographic empire may have collapsed, but its spiritual legitimacy survives irrespective of transitory national borders. The Ukraine cannot be independent and European, for instance, because that is simply not what it is; it is Eurasian and inescapably a part of spiritual Russia.

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