Top Quotes: “A Short History of Russia: How the World’s Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin” — Mark Galeotti
Introduction
“Russians are thus themselves a palimpsest people, citizens of a patchwork nation that more than most shows these external influences in every aspect of life. Their language is testament to this. A railway station is called a vokzal, for example, after London’s Vauxhall station, the result of an unfortunate translation mishap when an awestruck Russian delegation was visiting nineteenth-century England. At the time, though, the Russian elite spoke French, so they will nonetheless load their bagazh onto their kushet sleeper car. In Odessa, to the south, streets were named in Italian because that was the common trading language of the Black Sea; in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border, by contrast, the local language is still to this day Yiddish, from when Stalin sought to encourage Soviet Jews to resettle there in the 1930s. In the fortified kremlin of Kazan, there is both an Orthodox cathedral and a Muslim mosque, while shamans bless oil pipelines in the far north.”
“Sometimes this meant adopting ideas and adapting values to fit, from Tsar Peter the Great ordering Russians to shave their chins in European style (or pay a special “beard tax” to the Soviets) to building a whole society on their notion of an ideology that Karl Marx had envisaged applied to Germany and Britain.”
Ancient History
“At around the time Ryurik was settling in Novgorod, two other Viking adventurers, Askold and Dir, had taken their men and seized the southwestern Slavic city of Kiev, using it as the base for an ambitious, if unsuccessful, raid on Constantinople. Others had already tried this, with adventurers from Scandinavia plundering the southern Black Sea coasts perhaps half a century before. The Slavs called these Varangian conquerors the ‘Rus’ (likely from the Finnish Ruotsi, their name for the Swedes) and so the lands of the Rus’ were born.”
“In 1453, Constantinople had finally fallen to the Ottoman Empire. Moscow’s claim to be the “Third Rome,” the last bastion of true Orthodox Christianity, became conviction. Ivan, whose second wife was the Byzantine princess Sophia Paleologue, built from this a claim also to be the political heir of the Eastern Roman Empire. Never a man to suffer much from self-doubt and humility, he became increasingly autocratic. The double-headed eagle of Constantinople was appropriated as Muscovy’s, and Byzantine court etiquette began to creep into use.
Despite overtures from Rome, Ivan slammed the door on any accommodation and the Orthodox Church thrived, with monasteries and cathedrals popping up across the country like mushrooms after rain. With this came a new conservatism. Previously there had been rare examples of women playing serious roles — cosmopolitan Novgorod even had a female mayor, Marfa Boretskaya — but by the sixteenth century, boyars were banishing their sisters, wives and daughters to the seclusion of the term, separate quarters away from the public gaze and the unchaperoned company of men.”
“When he seized Novgorod’s lands, Ivan took the opportunity to create a whole new class of landholding soldiers, the pomeshchiks, to whom he assigned small estates off which they could live, in return for military service. Indeed, this became the model for the whole ruling elite, who became bound into the complex hierarchies of the system called mestnichestvo (there is no real translation: in effect, it means “place-ism”), which linked status to service to the Grand Prince. A mess of separate and often competing noble families was — in theory — turned into a single service aristocracy. Even princes of subject cities were now not considered royal, their territories no longer theirs to bequeath to their heirs. Autocracy had arrived in Russia, and all those inconvenient traditions of local self-rule and princely independence were consigned to history.”
“The rise of the Russian state and the fact that it could contemplate serious military adventures in northern Europe meant that, from being a relatively ignored backwater, it was now considered a serious player and thus a serious threat by some of the heavy-hitting European powers of the age. Ivan had started building an empire and made himself a threat.
The true expansion of Russia at this time was to the east, into the forests and the steppes loosely claimed by the Siberian Khanate but seen by Moscow as ripe for exploitation. This was essentially subcontracted to ambitious adventurers, most notably the wealthy Stroganov family, which funded a series of expeditions to seize land and set up forts in pursuit of “soft gold” — furs — and the profits in taxing and controlling the trade. Just as with the European conquest of the New World, empire, business, exploitation and taxation advanced together, bureaucrats following the adventurers, as the initial need to enforce tax collection would lead to the need somehow to administer this expanding territory. For now, though, this was the open frontier attracting all manner of renegades and fugitives, mercenaries and explorers, privateers and profiteers. Every year over the next century, Russia would grow by an estimated 35,000 square kilometers (13,500 square miles) on average, roughly equivalent to today’s Netherlands or the state of Maryland. Ivan had hoped to find some profit — and found an accidental empire.”
The 16th-19th Centuries
“In 1604, a pretender claiming to be Dmitry, Fyodor’s half brother — who had actually died in 1591 — led a Polish-backed attempt to seize the throne, and Russians, excited by the thought that maybe the Ryurikid dynasty had survived, flocked to his ranks. “Fake news” was already destabilizing governments in the sixteenth century.”
“The very focus on Peter the Great as one of the defining figures of Romanov Russia is understandable. Much like the statue, he towered over those around him both figuratively and literally. He was a veritable giant, over 2 meters tall (6 foot 8) in an age when the average man was 1.7 meters (5 foot 6). He had a prodigious enthusiasm, forever seeking to learn new skills, from dentistry (his unfortunate courtiers had to let him practice on them) to clock-making. He had a genuine curiosity for the outside world, even traveling across Europe, a first such venture for a Russian ruler. Nonetheless, in many ways Peter was at most a culmination of a process. Many of his reforms were rooted in the practices of his Romanov predecessors, and his policies were often dictated not by his own will but by the circumstances in which he found himself.
Finally, just like the twist in fate, taste and patronage that saw the largest monument to Peter in the city he despised, all this was steeped in paradox. He was a Russian nationalist who ordered his own aristocrats to look more European, who adopted ideas and technologies from all across the West, and yet who in effect codified Asiatic despotism, making service to the state the sole basis of status. The more he tried to cherry-pick the most appealing or useful aspects of Europe for Russia, the more he had to find ways to justify this in terms of a Russian divine mission and special place in the world. This was the greatest fiction of all, that modern European culture at the top of the system could coexist with Eurasian feudalism below, best epitomized by the building of his new capital, St. Petersburg. An airy, modern city designed by French and Italian architects — and built by half a million serfs dragooned from across the country, tens of thousands of whom would die.”
“In 1639, a band of Cossacks even reached the Pacific Coast, while behind them would come stockades, tax collectors, missionaries and smallpox, decimating the thinly scattered indigenous population of Siberia more viciously than any gun or blade.”
“For the curious (and self-indulgent) tsar, it was also an unparalleled opportunity to explore the West, its ways, technologies, vices and virtues. In Holland, he studied shipbuilding and hired the naval architects who would help build his new navy (tellingly, many Russian words relating to shipping and the sea have their roots in Dutch).”
“In 1698, a major restructuring of the army saw it modernized and expanded. Every year, one peasant was conscripted from every 20 peasant households, serving for life, so when a young draftee left to join the ranks, he was sent off with a funeral service.”
“ Russia, so traditionally chauvinist, was about to have to get used to women being on the throne. When Peter died in 1725, he had on the one hand established the principle that a tsar could name his successor (from his family) but on the other failed actually to nominate anyone.
He had previously declared his second wife, Catherine, as tsarina, empress, but it is questionable whether she could have taken power simply on that basis. Instead, she was considered a suitable figurehead by a cabal of figures who had risen under Peter, led by the shrewd but deeply corrupt Prince Alexander Menshikov. Calling on the Guard regiments – who not for the first time would prove kingmakers, or in this case empress-makers – they installed her as Catherine I (I. 1725–7) in a virtual coup d’état, fearing that otherwise traditionalists from the older boyar families would simply return to power.
She had two daughters of her own, but Russia was not ready for a matrilineal descent, and so Catherine had to assent to the naming of the only male-line grandson of Peter I as her heir. When she died in 1727, the 12-year-old Peter II (r. 1727–30) was duly crowned, the ubiquitous Prince Menshikov as his regent. Fate, though, seemed disinclined to let this sexism pass, and he died a mere three years later, leaving no male heirs. The next in line would have to be found from the children of Ivan V, Peter’s co-tsar, and this meant either the eldest, Catherine, or her younger sister, Anna. Like it or not, the Russians were going to have another empress.”
“Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Domburg was born to Prussian German aristocratic stack of considerable connections but relatively little fortune. As was the fate of girls in such circumstances, the expectation was that she would be married off for the good of the family, regardless of her own inclinations. Certainly the choice of her second cousin, Peter of Holstein Cottorp, owed every thing to politics and nothing to affection. Pater’s aunt, Tsarina Elizabeth, was eager to build ties to Prussia, and Sophie’s ambitious, manipulative mother was enthnsed by the prospect of a daughter on the Russian throme and a chance to spy for Frederick I of Prussia (she was eventually banned from the country for that very reason.) At age 15, Sophie traveled to Russia. Peter she found obnoxious, but she neither had much choice in the matter nor was she unaware of the opportumities for an otherwise impecunious young Prussian princess. It hardly hurt that Elizabeth clearly took a shine to her. So in her characteristically enthusiastic style, Sophie threw herself into learning Russian, was baptized into the Orthodox faith with the Russian name Yekaterina-Catherine — and married Peter in 1745.
Peter did not improve on closer acquaintance and the two of them lived largely separate lives, taking lovers and pursuing their own interests. Peter loved to play with both toy soldiers and real ones, putting his servants through an elaborate and demanding drill of a morning. The vivacious and shrewd Catherine, by contrast, actively courted the all-important Guard regiments. When Peter Ill ascended the throne in 1762, he managed in short order to make himself even more unpopular, not least by prematurely withdrawing from the war with Prussia (he was a great admirer of Frederick the Great, even referring to him as “my master”). The irony was that the German Tsarina Catherine seemed more loyal than the Russian-blood Tsar Peter.
Having endured 17 years of marriage to the man, she was clearly prepared to seize the opportunity to rid herself of him, though, and take his place. While he was spending time with his relatives in his country estate, Catherine was back in St. Petersburg, plotting. Resplendent in a guards’ uniform, she visited the Izmailovsky and Semyonovsky regiments and appealed to them for their support. She had the church onside, she had key figures within the government onside, and she had the Guards. Peter was arrested and forced to abdicate, and shortly thereafter was killed, and Catherine II (r. 1762–96) was empress.”
“The French Revolution had unleashed a wave of radicalism in Europe and in due course the rise of Napoleon.”
“Alexander undoubtedly earned his epithet as the “Tsar-Liberator.” He pardoned political prisoners, relaxed censorship, restored the independence of the universities, established independent courts and presided over a major expansion of schools for the poor. The centerpiece of his “Great Reforms” was intended to reshape the country’s agrarian and social base by finally tackling serfdom. After all, 46 million of the tsar’s 60 million subjects were still serfs, and they made poor stewards of the land they did not own and indifferent soldiers for a state they did not respect. In 1861, the Emancipation Decree promised to change all that, freeing the serfs over the next two to five years, depending on their status. What they really wanted, though, was their own land, and there was the rub. Simply allowing them to take over the land they farmed would at a stroke bankrupt most of the landed gentry, so instead the serfs were forced to buy it off them, paying “Redemption Dues” over the next 40 years.
It was a classic case of a compromise that pleased no one. The serfs had for generations dreamed of the day the “little father” in St. Petersburg would finally free them, and initial enthusiasm quickly turned to anger when they realized they would have to pay at prices they often could not afford for the land they felt was morally theirs, earned with their blood and sweat. In 1861 alone, the army had to be called out to put down riots and protests on average more than once a day. Not that the landowners were much happier. Many had been in debt to the state, and the money they were paid for the land often simply went right back to the government. Besides, as the peasants could often not afford to keep up with their payments, even this income dried up.”
The 20th Century
“It was Lenin-the-pragmatist who seized power in 1917. Never mind that Russia hardly seemed ready for socialism, lacking a large and politically mature working class. Never mind that, in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx had warned that trying to force socialism onto a country not yet prepared for it would be counterproductive, leading to a regime with conservative instincts but all the energy of revolution. (And Stalin proved him right.) Never mind all that: Lenin saw an opportunity and tied his ideology into knots to justify seizing it. After all, surely world revolution was just around the corner, and everything would work out?
Not so much. The Bolsheviks first sought to make good on their promise of peace, signing the disastrous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that surrendered swathes of territory to the west and south — including the rich farmlands of Ukraine. However, this also unlocked the army from the frontline, and while many units simply evaporated as soldiers deserted, a collection of disgruntled generals (the so-called “Whites”) began to look toward removing this usurper regime. Meanwhile, elections to a new Constituent Assembly saw the Socialist Revolutionaries, not the Bolsheviks, win a majority. Lenin had not seized power only to hand it to his rural rivals, so in January 1918 Red Guards dissolved it and the Bolshevik-dominated Congress of Soviets became the new seat of government.
More to the point, where was the bread? The cities were starving and there was no money to buy grain for them. Facing a military threat from the Whites (aided by British, US, French and even Japanese intervention), nationalist risings from various non-Russian territories, rival challenges from the Socialist Revolutionaries, and a looming collapse of the state and economy, Lenin-the-pragmatist turned to a policy called War Communism — although arguably this was more about war than communism. The democratic structures of the Soviets began to be bypassed by executive orders. Grain was requisitioned by Red Guards at bayonet-point, and when peasants resisted, they were killed. A new secret police was founded, the Cheka, and it increasingly became a central element of Bolshevik rule.
Between 1918 and 1922, the country was racked by a vicious civil war, from which the Bolsheviks would emerge victorious, and regions such as Ukraine and the Caucasus had been reconquered, but only at a terrible cost. As many as 12 million people had died, many from famine and disease. Any traces of Lenin-the-idealist had been burned out of the Communist Party (as the Bolshevik party became known in 1918), which won by being more ruthless, disciplined and united than their numerous enemies. The Party in effect had to become the new state bureaucracy and expanded dramatically, largely by recruiting opportunists, holdovers from the old regime and politically illiterate workers. The whole culture of the Party became a war-fighting one, paranoid and savage.
After the Civil War, the state was formally named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but the struggle would continue. To rebuild the economy, in 1921 Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy that liberalized some grassroots economic activity. It proved rather successful, despite intermittent crises, and meanwhile Soviet Russia also experienced an explosion of cultural, social and artistic experimentation and radical enthusiasm. This was the era of Futurist writers such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, avant-garde artists such as Kazimir Malevich, and social measures such as the 1918 “Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship” that explicitly recognized women as equal partners (either could choose to take the other’s surname) and made divorce easy and free of blame. It was still possible to believe that, despite everything, something truly new and exciting could be built.
However, in 1922, Lenin suffered the first of a series of strokes and was largely out of the political scene. He died in 1924, but not before beginning to show serious concerns about the bureaucratic police state he had created. In particular, Lenin-the-idealist was worried about the rise of losif Djugashvili, known as Stalin. In his testament left to the Bolshevik leadership, he made one unambiguous recommendation: “I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin.” They didn’t listen to him, anxious to avoid a split in the Party, and perhaps even incredulous that Stalin, widely seen as a dull functionary — he was the general secretary of the Party, the job that later would mean leader of the state but at that time just the administrator-in-chief-could be such a threat. They were wrong.
Stalin quickly demonstrated his political skills, piling on the eulogies of Lenin (for whom Petrograd was renamed) to mask the burial of the testament, and outmaneuvering his rivals to left and right. Compared with most of them, who were educated, cosmopolitan, Stalin also represented the rising “Civil War generation” of Party officials, pragmatic, self-interested and often nationalistic to the point of racism. By the late 1920s, he was dominant, and it was clear that Stalin planned to change the country in a truly fundamental way, whatever the cost.”
“Stalin turned the terror against the Communist Party itself, first staging show trials of his rivals — accusing them of being everything from spies to saboteurs — and then systematically purging everyone who could conceivably challenge him. Culminating in an orgy of torture, mass arrests and firing squads in 1937, this saw the Party elite broken: three-quarters of all the representatives elected to the Party Congress in 1934 did not survive until 1939. Even the military high command was decimated. In 1937 alone, 90 percent of all the generals and three of the Red Army’s five marshals were purged. Art, culture, education and ideology all were turned to the glorification of the state and Stalin; Mayakovsky, incidentally, committed suicide in 1930, Malevich was arrested by the secret police in the same year, and the radical social experimentation of early Bolshevism was rolled back, in a new drive to encourage large, stable families (“We need fighters, they build this life. We need people”) and keep women in their place.
How did Stalin get away with it? He understood power at a visceral level, and kept firm control of the political police, in many ways the true heart of his state. The very scale of his ambition and the consequent horrors were also beyond the apprehension of most, until it was too late. He also offered a ruthless, cannibalistic social mobility of sorts, and those willing to play the game could hope to rise very far, very fast. For the rest, alongside the paranoid hunt for spies and saboteurs that created its own hysteria, Stalin maintained a huge propaganda apparatus that tapped into the very same cultural roots as the myth of the “Good Tsar” who was on the side of the people, only misled by his selfish advisers. “Life is getting better, comrades,” he told his subjects, “life is getting brighter” — and many so desperately wanted to believe.”
“Stalin’s crude, brutal industrialization had built a war-fighting economy, and factories relocated away from the frontlines would soon be churning out the guns, planes and tanks needed. Stalin was also pragmatic: generals who had previously been sent to the Gulags as traitors were hurriedly recalled to arms, and churches that had been closed by the aggressively secular regime were reopened to enlist Orthodoxy in the struggle. The Soviets would also demonstrate once again an extraordinary will to defend the Motherland (although honesty demands that we note that this was often backed by a fear of a ruthless state). More died in the siege of Leningrad alone than the total British and American casualties of the entire war, for example.
No wonder the Russians still call this the Great Patriotic War. It is impossible to understate its importance. More than 20 million died in the war, and everybody suffered. Yet by the end, the pariah nation had become a superpower, Stalin sitting down with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in 1945 to carve up the postwar world, with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia directly incorporated into the USSR, and East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania destined to become its vassals. It seemed to have confirmed the terrible necessity of Stalin’s industrialization, and the Party would be able to point to the shared experience of the war as a basis for its legitimacy.
Stalin ruled until his death in 1953, presiding over the ruthless consolidation of his puppet regimes in Central Europe and the reconstruction of the country.”
“Ordinary Soviet citizens got an improving quality of life, their political quiescence bought with laxer discipline and new consumer goods: between 1964 and 1975, the average wage increased by almost two-thirds. Even the West was offered a less confrontational stance, and a new era of detente and coexistence.
So far, so good, but the very strengths of the Brezhnev order were to be its downfall, not least because all these developments depended on ample funds to buy everyone off. By the mid-1970s, problems that had previously been buried in avalanches of rubles were beginning to surface. Massive economic ventures such as the opening up of new areas to farming had failed to deliver on their promises. A new global industrial revolution based on computing was beginning, and the USSR was falling behind. Corruption and black marketeering were eating the heart out of the official economy. A vastly expensive arms race with the West had begun. This was a slow-burning crisis that needed urgent, decisive action, but that is precisely what the aging, cautious Brezhnev couldn’t and wouldn’t provide. He lacked the temperament, political authority or ideas. So instead, he just survived: a metaphor for the Soviet state, becoming less capable, less healthy, more senile by the year.”
“The economy was stagnant, food supplies were increasingly rationed and the population was not so much rebellious as apathetic and depressed: “They pretend to pay us,” went the common refrain, “and we pretend to work.” Stalin’s crash industrialization and the technocratic management of later years had turned peasant Russia into a Soviet nation of cities and railways, engineers and doctors, readers and writers: in 1917, only 17 percent of the population lived in cities, but this was 67 percent by 1989, and literacy rates rose from around 30 percent to near enough 100 percent. But what price such progress when your newspapers were full of lies, your leaders spoke of egalitarianism while living a privileged life such as you could not dream of enjoying, and you had to stand in line for a loaf of bread?”
“Gorbachev was encountering resistance and losing control. The Party bosses resented his attempts to reform. National minorities began to use new freedoms to agitate for freedom. Glasnost acquired a momentum of its own and all the bloody skeletons in the Party’s closet began to be discovered, from corruption in the nomenklatura to Stalin’s crimes. Instead of retreating, though, he became more radical, and in 1989 created a new constitutional basis for the country, with an elected president. Why did the general secretary of the Communist Party also need to be president? Because Gorbachev had come to realize that the Party was actually the greatest obstacle to reform and he needed an independent power base to try and force it to change.
It didn’t work, though. The hardliners simply became more entrenched, and as the economy worsened, new political forces began to emerge, taking advantage of his democratization. Nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltic states began mobilizing for independence, others in Armenia and Azerbaijan began reopening old territorial disputes. Most dangerously, a former local Party boss whom Gorbachev had first promoted and then sacked, Boris Yeltsin, was rising, in due course being elected president of the Russian part of the Soviet Union. The winter of 1990–1 was a hard one, with massive miners’ strikes, and Gorbachev wobbled, contemplating an alliance with the hardliners to restore order. He refused to give in to this temptation, though, and again emerged more radical than ever. He began negotiating with the elected presidents of the various constituent republics of the USSR, to agree to a new Union Treaty that would totally reshape the state, turning it from a Muscovite empire in all but name to a genuine federation of voluntary members.
This was too much for the hardliners, so in August 1991 they staged a coup, confining Gorbachev to his mansion in Crimea and declaring that an “Emergency Committee” was now in charge. They had anticipated that a cowed and docile Soviet population would simply accept their decrees. They were wrong. People began coming out onto the streets in protest, in Moscow and across the country. Had the “Emergency Committee” been as ruthless as so many previous Russian usurpers, they might have still won the day, but at that fateful moment they were not willing or able to use force. Emboldened, hundreds of protesters became thousands, and Yeltsin — whom the plotters had not even thought to have arrested — emerged as their champion.
After just three days, the coup collapsed and Gorbachev was back in Moscow, but the whole calculus of power had shifted. Yeltsin had gone along with the idea of a new Union Treaty reluctantly, largely because the risk was that otherwise the hardliners would take over. They had tried and failed, though, and Yeltsin could now indulge his deep grudge against Gorbachev. He outlawed the Communist Party and refused to sign the Union Treaty. The Baltic States declared their independence; the Ukrainians demanded theirs. Recognizing the realities of the situation, for his final duty as president of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev decreed that it would be dissolved at midnight on 31 December 1991.”
“In a wholesale plunder of the country, entire industries were privatized, for kopeks on the ruble, into the back pockets of selected crooks and cronies. This was the Yeltsin who played the spoons on the head of the president of fellow ex-Soviet state Kyrgyzstan in 1992, who slept through a state visit to Dublin in 1994, and whom the US Secret Service found drunk, in his underwear, looking for pizza on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1995.”
“He set about making it clear that the years of drift were over. The oligarchs were faced with a simple choice: accept that they no longer could dictate politics and enjoy their wealth, or pick a fight with the Kremlin and lose. Some left Russia, but the richest oil magnate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, dared to back opposition candidates and complain about corruption. In 2003, he was arrested, charged with fraud and tax evasion and sent to prison, not least as an effective warning to the rest. The Chechens were subdued in a brutal campaign that saw their capital city, Grozny, leveled and a thuggish new local regime imposed. The Kremlin was back in business.
Putin was lucky. The Russian people were desperate for an end to the misery of the 1990s and now they had a leader who was not only sharp and energetic, he had the resources to begin to rebuild the country. The 2000s were marked by dramatic economic recovery: oil and gas accounted for almost three-quarters of Russia’s exports and about half the state budget, and prices were high through the decade. Putin had the money to invest in rebuilding the country’s military, to turn a blind eye to the embezzlement of his own cronies, and enough to spare for ordinary Russians, who got to enjoy an unprecedented level of comfort and security. In essence, he offered a new social contract: keep quiet and stay out of politics and I will guarantee you a steadily improving quality of life. After the shabby decay and spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union and the “wild Nineties,” this was a deal most were willing to accept.
That said, Putin would not rely on his subjects’ gratitude. Russian democracy, never robust, increasingly became political theater, fake opposition parties and leaders playing their roles without hope or expectation of victory, just to keep up appearances. In Soviet times, the mass media and artists alike had been considered “engineers of the human soul,” as Stalin put it: agents of the Party there to condition the masses into ideological correctness.
Under Putin, instead of engineers, the media became the Kremlin’s advertising executives. TV in particular (almost all eventually state-controlled or state-dominated) became the shouty, glitzy, tabloid cheerleader for his regime. In 2004, he romped home with 71 percent of the vote, and although the constitution barred him from a third consecutive term, in 2008 he simply set up his pliant prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, as his proxy president.
Putin moved from the presidential offices in the Kremlin to the prime minister’s in the so-called White House, but real power moved there with him. When Medvedev’s term was nearing its end, he dutifully endorsed Putin for president again and in 2012 the two men swapped offices.”
“Meanwhile, Putin’s relationship with the West had been changing. He was always an avowed Russian patriot who believed great power status was his country’s birthright. At first, though, he was willing to be a partner, thinking that so long as he encouraged foreign business into Russia, and backed the USA’s “Global War on Terror,” then the West would treat Russia as a serious player and turn a blind eye to what went on within its borders. Soon, though, he would come to feel betrayed on both counts, and in 2007 delivered a blistering attack on Western policy in Munich, criticizing the emergence of a “unipolar” — US-dominated — world order.”
“Of all the countries Russia borders, Norway is the only one with which it has not fought a war — yet).”
“When Russians are polled about what they want for their future, their country’s great power status and fear for its security come far down the list. Instead, they crave not just a decent life, but freedoms to speak, organize and protest, an end to corruption and a chance to feel they can have some meaningful impact on how their society is organized.”
