President Whoever Of Russia

Well, Dean,

I for one am actually quite comforatable with the way Putin pulls all the strings in modern Russia. That man is the living embodiment of the Sovietskaya vlast — the Soviet power — that so many Russians long for but without the communism upon which it was based, and that crippled Russian culture and all but destroyed Russia’s economy.

I know more than most Americans do about Russia because my wife Stefi reads their language and liturature in the original Cyrillic orthography, and can even make herself understood speaking it. And she spent her formative years living in a south slavic version of the soviet dictatorship. So she instinctually knows exactly what to expect in such a culture.

Russians are less interested in democracy than they are in the certainties of a stable government. That is as culturally derived for them as our Thanksgiving holiday, the Fourth of July and all the rest of our culture are for us.

Russia is in fact one of the great permanent powers, and like the United States in North America, its fiat is sovereign across the whole of northern Eurasia. Our leadership in this country did in fact begin treating them like an “Upper Volta with nuclear weapons”. Which is a seriously wrong attitude of contempt to try using on an independent empire with as much real and potential power as Russia commands under any government whatsoever.

So get used to the idea of a new czar in the Kremlin, pulling the strings of all Russia exactly as he thinks he needs to do, in order to maintain his power. Because that’s the way the game is played in Moscow.

And I suspect that may never change. Because he knows for a fact that this is what the common people of his country want. It makes them feel safer that way. Against the Mongols. Against the Swedes. Against the Poles. Against the Turks. Against the Chechens. Against anybody who threatens the vlast.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI