One of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook is the subtle theft of the people’s sovereignty, grafting the rights of citizens onto a regime of personal power. Cuba’s Fidel Castro was and is the grandmaster of this tactic – firmly uniting himself, his name, his family, and his Revolution, and the country.  If you go against Fidel, this means you are going against the Revolution and against the national interests.  It’s all inseparable, you see?  There’s no shortage of contemporary examples, ranging from the rhetorical artistry of Hugo Chavez to the skillful disaggregation of African opposition by Robert Mugabe.

It’s the same in Russia.  Whenever someone criticizes Vladimir Putin, the party, the siloviki, or government policy, this individual is instantly cast as a deranged “anti-Russian” whose hate and fear of the entire Russian people has led him/her to assume their opinion.  From my recent trips to Washington DC, I regret to report that the high amount of pro-Putin puffery I heard indicates that the trend is being rapidly exported across the Atlantic.  It is the realists that have latched onto this same idea, except for them all we ever hear about is “respecting Russia.”  But whom exactly, I think we should ask, are we really “respecting” when we listen to the realists?