Russian question

Andrei Piontkovsky / www.grani.ru (excerpt from the article)

The problem of Putin in Russia is not that he is standing “one foot in Russia’s cold war past.” His problem is that he got bogged down with his both feet and both hands in the thievery of his hangers-on, unprecedented even by Russia’s historical standards.

Quite the opposite, these accusations of adherence to the old cold war philosophy and the neo-imperialist stance only lend our national leader the strategic respectability, give him status of a great statesman and prolong the decay of the regime of anti-national kleptocracy that has no future. He is thirsting for these accusations; he provokes them and revels in them.

The same applies to our “political elite” – the golden company of businessmen-bureaucrats. Without their anti-americanism and anti-westernism they would be ordinary thieves. By using these slogans they have a chance to dramatically change the agenda – explaining on TV to tens of millions of fellow countrymen from the lips of their spin-doctors that they are leaders of a Great Nation getting off its knees.

It is not only a matter of political expediency. Stanislav Belkovsky, the indisputable founder of the national scientific school of kleptoputinistics, simplifies the matter in some way by boiling down the motivation of the National Leader and his entourage exclusively to securing the stability of financial flows.

What about the soul? What about hang-ups and passions raging in the hearts of former petty bureaucrats and KGB officers? What about the demonstration of grievances and humiliations felt by these great oil and gas traders that failed to make it into the company of genuine capitalists?

It is believed to be a grand patriotic style these days to pour forth the same standard verbiage “unipolar world, ABM treaty, NATO expansion, NATO encroachment НАТО, NATO encirclement” in various western audiences.
This is their continuously repeated Munich speech that this time was heard in the entourage of the Russian caftan, caviar and samovar. Only balalaika was missing and president Medvedev played the role of a tame bear.

The traditional existential question of the Russian political elite “Do you respect me?” is directed not to a random drinking pal, but to the skies of the eternally alluring and eternally cursed West. A question never to be asked by a self-respecting individual. That may be the reason why it so often asked in Russia.

As far as Grandeur is concerned, they are content with Grandeur-light. With having a “zone of privileged interests in the post-soviet space.” They are genuinely convinced that all the problems in this Zone stem from U.S. meddling in this realm of Russia’s influence.

They have hard time understanding that we have problems not with America and not even with our neighbors fleeing from us as if from the plague (they have been in this Zone already) but with ourselves. That the thievish and mediocre, arrogant and cowardly Russia is not wanted in the post-soviet space in the role of a teacher and the centre of gravity.

source:grani.ru