Since returning to the Presidency, Pavlovsky said, Putin has “created an artificial situation in which a ‘pathological minority’—the protesters on Bolotnaya Square [two years ago], then Pussy Riot, then the liberal ‘pedophiles’—is held up in contrast to a ‘healthy majority.’ Every time this happens, his ratings go up.” The nightly television broadcasts from Ukraine, so full of wild exaggeration about Ukrainian “fascists” and mass carnage, are a Kremlin-produced “spectacle,” he said, expertly crafted by the heads of the main state networks.
“Now this has become a problem for Putin, because this system cannot be wholly managed,” Pavlovsky said. The news programs have “overheated” public opinion and the collective political imagination.
“How can Putin really manage this?” Pavlovsky went on. “You’d need to be an amazing conductor. Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off this trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and waiting for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”
Frum: Russia Has Become Dangerous Again
The human mind is constituted in such a way that what we don’t wish to believe, we can for a long time disbelieve. “The Cold War is over,” German chancellor Angela Merkel reproached the United States, when the NSA was caught surveilling German communications. But the NSA was surveilling precisely to monitor how deeply Russian espionage had penetrated the German state—because while the Cold War has ended, the security threat from Russia has not.
Eastern Slavic naming customs
A short form exists for almost each name.
Foreign Labor in Russia
During the Putin years, Russia has become the planet’s second-largest magnet for migrant labor, after the United States. The main source of this labor: the Muslim republics of Central Asia. “Putinism has created a huge racially distinct underclass,” Judah writes, made up of Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Chechens, “unprotected by the (ignored) labor code.” In reaction, Putin presents himself as the champion of Russian nationalism, appealing to the Russian people and—not so incidentally—to the European far right, too. Judah shrewdly observes, “As the country became less Russian ethnically, it was becoming more so culturally.”