Sitting at a cafe overlooking the Patriarch’s Ponds in one of the toniest areas of central Moscow, Pyotr Tolstoy, a deputy chairman of the State Duma and a direct descendant of the great novelist Leo Tolstoy, exuded confidence as a moneyed crowd ate large crab claws and other delicacies.
When I asked him how Russia proposed to pay for a prolonged war effort, he shot back: “We pay for it all from our sales of oil to Europe via India.”
This was bravado, but it had some truth to it. Russia has rapidly adjusted to the loss of European markets with oil sales to Asia — and India has sold some of it on to Europe in refined form.
“Our values are different,” Mr. Tolstoy said. “For Russians, freedom and economic factors are secondary to the integrity of our state and the safeguarding of the Russian world.”
Mr. Putin’s rule is all about the reconstitution of this imagined Russian world, or “Russkiy mir,” a revanchist myth built around the idea of an eternal Russian cultural and imperial sphere of which Ukraine — its decision to become an independent state never forgiven — is an integral part.
As for the future, Mr. Putin has very little to say, leaving people guessing.
Rarely in Moscow or elsewhere in Russia is Mr. Putin’s image visible, other than on television, even if
he has ventured out a little more of late. He governs from the shadows, unlike Stalin, whose portrait was everywhere. There is no cult of the leader of the kind Fascist systems favored. Yet mystery has its own magnetism. The reach of Mr. Putin’s power touches all.
It is evident in the bodyguards bursting into upscale Moscow restaurants to make room for some capo or oligarch of a system where great wealth comes only at the price of unwavering loyalty to the president.
Above all, it is in the fear that causes people to lower voices and hesitate before uttering that treacherous word of Mr. Putin’s double-think — “war.”
The Kremlinology of the Cold War has been replaced by the equally arduous pursuit of trying to penetrate the utter opacity of the Kremlin to read the mind of a new czar, Mr. Putin, now in the autumn of his rule.
The State of the War
Repression has become fierce and the war Mr. Putin started in Ukraine has been waged with near total unconcern for the consequences of his decision, a human trait that John le Carré once described as “a primary qualification for psychopathy.”
Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families, ferocious attacks on a “unipolar” American world with revived Russian imperialist aggression — all held together by the ruthless suppression of dissident voices and recourse to violence when necessary.
en.wikipedia.org
