How Vladimir Putin Lost Interest in the Present

[Uncle Joe]

Last edited Thu Mar 10, 2022, 12:21 PM - Edit history (1)

By Mikhail Zygar

Mr. Zygar is a Russian journalist and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin.”

(snip)

According to people with knowledge of Mr. Putin’s conversations with his aides over the past two years, the president has completely lost interest in the present: The economy, social issues, the coronavirus pandemic, these all annoy him. Instead, he and Mr. Kovalchuk obsess over the past. A French diplomat told me that President Emmanuel Macron of France was astonished when Mr. Putin gave him a lengthy history lecture during one of their talks last month. He shouldn’t have been surprised.

In his mind, Mr. Putin finds himself in a unique historical situation in which he can finally recover for the previous years of humiliation. In the 1990s, when Mr. Putin and Mr. Kovalchuk first met, they were both struggling to find their footing after the fall of the Soviet Union, and so was the country. The West, they believe, took advantage of Russia’s weakness to push NATO as close as possible to the country’s borders. In Mr. Putin’s view, the situation today is the opposite: It is the West that’s weak. The only Western leader that Mr. Putin took seriously was Germany’s previous chancellor, Angela Merkel. Now she is gone and it’s time for Russia to avenge the humiliations of the 1990s.

It seems that there is no one around to tell him otherwise. Mr. Putin no longer meets with his buddies for drinks and barbecues, according to people who know him. In recent years — and especially since the start of the pandemic — he has cut off most contacts with advisers and friends. While he used to look like an emperor who enjoyed playing on the controversies of his subjects, listening to them denounce one another and pitting them against one another, he is now isolated and distant, even from most of his old entourage.

His guards have imposed a strict protocol: No one can see the president without a week’s quarantine — not even Igor Sechin, once his personal secretary, now head of the state-owned oil company Rosneft. Mr. Sechin is said to quarantine for two or three weeks a month, all for the sake of occasional meetings with the president.

(snip)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html

[CanonRay]

1. Simultaneously fascinated and terrified.

[Walleye]

2. Absolute power causes absolute insanity

[Aristus]

3. Shades of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler's confidants wrote that, if you asked Hitler's opinion on any political subject, Hitler was launch into a paralyzingly boring, hours-long monologue on the history of the German-speaking people, their "world-historical" place is the socio-political order, and the Third Reich as an expression of his, and their, time on the global scene.

Hitler would allow for no interjections, questions, or debate of any kind. Albert Speer stated that after such a screed, even Hitler's most obsequious followers would be worn out and exhausted from the single-minded tedium.

[malthaussen]

4. Similar to the "Stab in the Back" theory that led to the rise of Hitler...

... the German people, humiliated by the outcome of WWI and the Versailles Treaty, gave a lot of credence to the claim that they had been "stabbed in the back" by traitorous politicians -- almost all Jews -- and that they would have won the war except for this treason. The NSDAP promised to restore the Reich to its deserved glory and position on the world stage.

The Right in the US circulated a similar tale after Vietnam -- the whole "Will they let us win this time" of the Rambo-wannabes claimed that we were unfairly kept from success in Vietnam by unpatriotic Democrats. This tale didn't get the circulation the "Stab in the Back" story did in Germany, confined mostly to fringe elements and Hollywood producers.

Men with a sense of privilege unfairly denied by a world that conspires against them... all of us have suffered these kind of fools for much too long in world history.

-- Mal

[scipan]

5. So this is how Putin met with airline stewardesses

On 3/8.

[Uncle Joe]

6. I'm curious,

about the 28:30 mark "maximum economic freedom for all the people involved in business, lifting restrictions on entrepreneurship, changes and adjustment in the criminal code, no persecution/prosecution for economic crimes" what does that mean?

One other observation, I viewed the entire 45 minute video but I didn't see anyone take a drink of tea.