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Politics
Ukraine, an Imperial Playground for Putin, Is Battling the Repeat Performance of Soviet Era Ideology
Disguising and tampering with the past by the Kremlin continue to disrupt not only Ukraine’s present but also Russia’s.
Putin’s elements lie in the “twisted historical roots that produce the evil flower of violence, seeded again and again” — words by Nadine Gordimer to describe the nature of fanaticism in a book named, ‘How to Cure a Fanatic’ by Amos Oz. They seemed very apt for Putin, so I borrowed them.
The foundation of the despotic one-party state in Russia was laid by Lenin in 1917. Though it was a replacement for the aristocracy that existed in pre-revolutionary Russia, it did not substitute the system with what most consider the greatest, at least compared to other systems of governing — democracy. He rather turned it into an anticompetitive and conformist-rewarding machine, suspicious of all other institutions, including the press, judiciary, and civil service. Not even for pretension did Lenin allow even little opposition from anywhere. Other one-party states of the same nature in other parts of Europe at least allowed some symbolic existence of the then ongoing oppositions.
