For as often as she references Russian history in her hasty new article, “The Once and Future President,” Professor Irina Filatova seems wont to forget its lessons. According to her logic, because Putin has “has done everything to strengthen his personal power and to organise institutions to serve it, not the other way round,” that he has created an unprecedented, pattern-shattering brand of personal power that will follow him everywhere, from the presidency to the premiership – and even beyond. It can be fun to write these kinds of exaggerated, scary articles about Russian politics, but the arguments are wearing thin. Chock full of commonly held myths (Medvedev is only a figurehead, Putin “tamed” private business, and there’s nothing unusual about the rise of the siloviki), Filatova’s piece overlooks the fact that Putin, like all other mortal politicians, is still bound to the immutable laws of political physics in Russia – what goes up, must come down.
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One Comment
I’m not sure I understand your point. Stalin, to be sure, came down as the result of his mortality, but not before he had murdered millions of Russians. Are you suggesting it was worthwhile to simply wait for history to liquidate him?And though Stalin fell, and the USSR followed him, we now see Russia governed by a proud KGB spy. As Russia is a mere shadow of the USSR, it may well be that several decades from now Putin’s Russia will collapse and be replaced by an even paler shadow, or no country at all, but rather a new China. Are you suggesting we should simply wait for that to happen?I believe this Russian author is suggesting we shouldn’t, that we should seek to break Russia out of its vicious historical cycle of self-destruction, for the good the Russian people, before it is too late.It seems to me you are adopting more or less the same attitude towards her analysis that you criticize in her analysis of today’s Russia, and that hardly gets us anywhere.