This is utterly lame. For some reason the Brits seem to be utterly unable to understand Russia (Lieven excepted). A few comments:
>From the KGB to cult hero
"Cult hero"? Putin is a cult hero? This makes him sound like he was acting Troma Films. Putin has an 80% approval rating.
-- - two books, Inside Putin's Russia and Putin's Progress, show how Russia's hard-line President has created the cult of Putinism
--- What "cult"? There is no more a cult of Putin than there is a cult of Bush. We can blame these two goofs on the copy editor.
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A serious reader would do well to preface time spent on these Western-friendly books
--- "Western-friendly" = "good reason not to read them."
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The story these books tell is of a man who emerged from relative obscurity, groomed for power first by the communist machine in Leningrad,
-- Huh? Putin returned to Leningrad in 1991. When he was being "groomed for power," it was St. Petersburg as an assistant to Anatoly Sobchak. There was no communist machine. --- and then in Moscow during what Jack calls the 'comedy of errors' presidency of Boris Yeltsin. It is a story of bloody war waged in Chechnya and that of a different battle against a corrupt, Mafia-connected oligarchy (with exceptions for Putin's friends, of course, as demonstrated by Putin's insistence on immunity for his corrupt mentor, former St Petersburg mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and Boris Yeltsin; Putin places loyalty above all other judgments).
--- Sobchak is dead. Declaring immunity for Yeltsin was the condition for Putin getting into power; Yeltsin put him there.
--- There is now a cult of Putin - schoolchildren mark his birthday with laudatory cards and poems; there is a deluge of gifts such as a crystal crocodile from Moldova; youth groups sing hymns to their leader. Putin's favourite judo and ski- wear are advertised as such
--- Gag. This is not orchestrated by the Kremlin. This is what happens when you have an 80% popularity rating.
-- That the man committed to piloting a market economy and opening Russia up to the West is also the man whose idea of the dynamics between power and people echoes the psychology and patriotism of both tsarist and Soviet Russia is a dichotomy few Russians find unnatural
--- Why should the find it unnatural? Where is the contradiction?
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who does not have a chromosome of democratic DNA in his political biology; to whose head power goes like a drug; and who uses an electoral majority as a mandate to do whatever he wishes.
--- What politician doesn't use an electoral majority as a mandate to do whatever he wishes?
--- One could posit that the phenomenon in its latest form began with Margaret Thatcher
--- Note the Britain-a-centric worldview of the writer.
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; a variant would be Silvio Berlusconi; one might consider George Bush or even our Prime Minister - Truscott's old boss - if his megalomania increases further. Truscott's book makes great play of the instinctive friendship between Blair and Putin.
--- Yet more Brit-o-centrism. If there is a friendship between Blair and Putin, who publically mocks him, this is the first I've heard of it.
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'Putin's whole upbringing and background was instinctively focused on the need for a strong state,' writes Truscott. 'As President-to-be, he felt he epitomised the strength and vitality of the state - l'Etat, c'est moi.' --- In other words, he is exactly like every other Russian leader. (HINT: The need for a strong state might just have something to do with geographical enormity.)
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Neither Truscott nor Jack uses the word, but if there is such a thing as 'Putinism', it revolves around the notion of derzhavnost: the concept that the state has some quasi-mystical entity, to which every citizen must be bounden. --- Puh-leeze. What is this, Ancient Egypt? --- This concept, says the Russian writer Sergei Kovalev, 'corresponds to the political thinking of the former KGB agent who became head of state thanks to political intrigues involving the bloody war in Chechnya'.
--- What intrigues? Did Putin bribe Basayev to invade Dagestan or something? The mujaheedin are at the beck and call of Putin? ---
Putin has what Russians call a 'Chekist' mentality (after Stalin's secret service, the Cheka).
--- LENIN'S secret service. --- Chekism does not necessarily seek to control people's private lives, but it does insist on controlling public life. Kovalev asks, simply: 'How did it happen that a country in which millions of people quite recently perished as a result of political repression elected a President who worked for the organisation that carried out that repression?' --- Putin worked for the KGB, not the Cheka. The KGB's primary role was information-gathering, not shooting people. "Quite recently" = the 1930s. Barely in living memory. Anyway as people seem incapable of realizing, Stalin _was not a hated leader_.
Look, the great majority of Russians _want a strong, centralized state_. "Democracy" is a four-letter-word here.
Why the Brits, living in a tiny, unimportant little island country that has lost more power in a shorter period of time than any other country I can think of, get off lecturing people is beyond me.