From the Kremlin’s point of view, western power in Europe rests on two platforms. There is the global American hegemony, and then there is Germany, which has emerged as America’s sub-hegemon in Europe. Putin thinks that the Germans aren’t wise enough to rule Europe well, strong enough to rule it by force, or rich enough to rule it through economics and that Washington doesn’t understand that or, if it does, that Washington itself is too distracted or too weak to care. Either way, from Putin’s point of view, Germany’s position is much, much weaker than either Berlin or Washington understands.
.. The key to Putin’s thinking is that he is betting less on Russian strength than on German and therefore Western weakness. In opposing the consolidation of a German Europe, he is betting on German failure more than he is betting on Russian success. The goal of Russian policy in Ukraine, for example, is not to create a new Ukraine in Russia’s image. It is not to conquer Ukraine–but to demonstrate that the East is indigestible.
.. Putin doesn’t see his job as one of building up a powerful force to counter a rising Germany. He sees his job as being able to take advantage of the coming failures and catastrophes of what he believes to be the grandiose and unsustainable Western project in Europe.
.. With Merkel in Napoleon’s place, Putin may see Europe today looking much as Alexander I must have seen it as Napoleon retreated from Moscow.
Inside Putin’s Information War
At one end of the table sat one of the country’s most famous political TV presenters. He was small and spoke fast, with a smoky voice: “We all know there will be no real politics,” he said. “But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained.”
“So what should we play with?” he asked. “Shall we attack oligarchs? Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like a movie!”.. In a country covering nine time zones and one-sixth of the world’s land mass, stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic, from the Arctic to the Central Asian deserts, from near-medieval villages where people still draw water from wooden wells by hand, through single-factory towns and back to the blue glass and steel skyscrapers of the new Moscow—TV is the only force that can unify, rule and bind the people.
.. The 21st century Kremlin might be controlling the media just as it did in the Soviet era, but there’s one mistake today’s Russian will never repeat: It will never let television become dull.
.. When the entertainment network TNT, for example, made the Russian version of The Apprentice, the show flopped. The premise of the show is to reward the self-confident and self-assertive business mind. But in Russia, it is the grey apparatchik who is celebrated, while the independent, bright entrepreneurs end up in prison or exiled
.. NTV, for example, one of the country’s biggest networks, doesn’t try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the “strong hand” of the Kremlin for protection.
Can an exiled oligarch persuade Russia that Putin must go?
“It wouldn’t be interesting for me to be President of the country when the country is developing normally,” Khodorkovsky said. “But if the issue becomes that the country needs to overcome a crisis and undergo constitutional reforms, the main aspect of which is the redistribution of Presidential power to the courts, parliament, and civil society, that part of the job I would be willing to do.”
.. The Russian authorities estimate that nearly two hundred thousand people have left the country in the past year, a record for Putin’s Russia. The figure does not include the unofficial émigrés escaping the increasingly authoritarian atmosphere of Moscow and the deepening economic crisis.
Russia: Hostage Taking is Back
Oleg’s greatest crime is, of course, that he is Navalny’s brother. Even the prosecution had actually sought a lesser punishment for him (8 to Alexei’s 10), so his more serious sentence is hard to interpret as anything but an attempt to use him as a hostage. This is unlikely to work on previous experience, but it will also be a worrying signal to the Russian elite. Up to now, after all, while it has been no secret that the “law” is used as an instrument of political control and business rivalry, “noncombatants” have generally been considered exempt. Whether or not the Kremlin wanted to signal more generally that this is no longer the case, there will inevitably be wider concerns. I wonder how many oligarchs, minigarchs and the like will be revisiting plans to relocate family members abroad, a kind of “human flight” to mirror the rampant capital flight visible as they try to get their assets out of the Kremlin’s and their rivals’ reach…