Putinism Explained: the Power Tool

Here follows an eight part CBC Newsworld documentary "The Putin System," which analyzes the life and politics of Russia's, now Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin.

Specifically those still swooning over 'having looked into his soul' romantics, or transnational idealists harboring otherwise dangerously Utopian One World notions, are strongly advised to watch it closely.

The 'managed democracy' of the 'single economic space' of the reconstituted USSR is the nearest we will ever get in real life to the James Bond antagonist in a number of 007 films, SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Control, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion): total state through a corporation, in this case Gazprom, a gigantic transnational tool for the funneling of public resources to selective private coffers.

As a worthy heir to the manufactured reality that was every day life in the Soviet Union, Putinism proudly includes in its doctrine the contradictions of democracy (or what passes for it) and dictatorship, as well as state and liberalism. The latter is meant strictly nominally, as in "the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

The neotot KGB ship of state is tightly run under the premise that "control is safe, no control is a threat, therefore as many things as possible should be controlled."

The paranoid mass is collectively held together by the Sorelian myths of outside and inside enemies and the lie reaching back to the anti-modernist school of thought, that the individual is insignificant but that the collective is supernaturally powerful. It therefore comes as no surprise that the reversed sequence of events in the Georgian crisis is uncritically lapped up as Smirnoff on the rocks. Some never learn ...

Putinism, as a true total movement, likes 'em young: the Nashi youth organization's growth is prolific!

Whereas the doctrine has dispensed with ideology, it has seamlessly and effortlessly reconstituted all the Soviet trappings. Led by sheer Pragmatism (we unashamedly do whatever is in our interest), what's left is pure, brutal power politics for its own sake.

Those useful idiots in the West who took the communist idealism seriously and who - against all evidence - refused to believe otherwise, could draw some insightful conclusions from this (but they probably won't - as said, some never learn): the essence of the Marxist school of ideology always was a common power-grab and very little else. The core question was, how to get the unwashed to grab power on your behalf?

Putin has come up trumps from his long walk through the nomenklatura. The clever thing is, he's done it almost single-handedly. It is to be hoped that the overplaying of his hand in Georgia will put a number of Western politicians on the highest state of alert.

Now that 'history is back' it may help clear the postmodern, transnational air that can only lead to utter disaster (in fact, the anomaly in international law of Kosovo's unilateral independence has produced the present crisis and can potentially, cause many more besides).

It may well be that the autocrats Russia, China, a number of Muslim countries, and their Third World clients will gang up against the West and Israel. It may also bring about a re-alignment in Euro-American relations and bring them closer together.

If the latter decades of the last century were at times a little boring, developments in the new millennium have already handsomely made up for that. We live in interesting times after all.


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In case of problems the videos can also be accessed from the Vodpod page.

- Filed on Articles in "Rumbling Russia" -