David Remnick, The New York editor who was the Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent during the collapse of the Soviet Union, has written a smart piece about Putin for the latest New Yorker. He concludes:
“Putin is not Hitler or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current practitioners.”
Putin is canny enough not to put the West in a position where it has to respond. He will always provide just enough for those who argue for accommodation, for sensitivity to Russia’s view of itself as the rightful regional hegemon. But the brutal assault on Georgia should finally wake Europe, and especially the German left who have been the most consistent advocates of acquiescence to Russia’s actions, up to what Putin’s agenda really is and how dangerous it is to the West.
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan
Comments