Why putin is evil

The Russian opposition has largely ignored these war crimes, he says, in which thousands have died. Where is the source of this evil? Putin spent the late cold war as a junior KGB officer in the city of Dresden. The Soviet Union and its East German counterpart both carried out clandestine operations in the s and s but also tried to observe legal technicalities, Lebedev says.

These days, he argues, the Putin regime behaves with shameless impunity. Dad came back with a suitcase full of Agatha Christies and other detective novels. Growing up, Lebedev immersed himself in an eight-volume translation of Sherlock Holmes.

As a professional geologist Lebedev roamed around Russia, visiting the far north, with its reindeer herders and frozen tundra, as well as Kazakhstan. He spent 14 years working as a journalist in Moscow on an education newspaper, ending up as its deputy editor in chief. Since he has written full time; poems and novels. I ask Lebedev about the state of modern letters in his homeland. He is unimpressed. In the 19th and 20th centuries Russian authors engaged with the great issues of the day.

By way of example, he mentions a list of the best Russian books of the 21st century, compiled by the Moscow literary journal Polka. I can clearly see the gaps. Lebedev finished Untraceable before a group of secret operatives poisoned Navalny last summer in Siberia. The undercover hit squad worked for the FSB, the spy agency that Putin ran before he became PM and president-for-life.

He collapsed on a flight to Moscow. Navalny survived only because a quick-thinking pilot made an emergency landing in Omsk. Last week a court jailed the opposition leader for two years and eight months. What will happen? I can only wish him stamina, health and resilience. The great disruption, the sea change, far presaged the rise or fall of the Soviet Union. That genuflection to the West—reorganizing the army, imposing new styles and codes of conduct on the aristocracy, liberalizing universities—may have been right, but it was also brutal and bloody, and it spawned a crisis of confidence, and a questioning or ambivalence about what Russia ought to be that has existed ever since.

For the next three centuries, this questioning, very roughly, pitted Slavophiles those who believed in the inherent goodness of the old Russia against Westernizers, who wanted to transform the empire into Europe: liberal, less insular, more secular. Russia lacked a clearly defined identity, always veering between its oriental and occidental selves—bifurcated, fragmented, unsure of what it was meant to be. A radical consciousness opened up.

It had been imported from Europe, but, in Russia, as always, it acquired a new ferocity. What had been a desire for polite and incremental reform morphed into a violent nihilism. Change, whatever had been meant by that, would no longer suffice. Now, the only option was to blow it all up and start over. Dostoevsky, who traveled widely in Europe but was suspicious of it, despised passionately the revolutionaries and their desired revolution.

His four most important works Crime and Punishment , The Idiot , Devils , and The Brothers Karamazov are not simply novels, but rather dystopian warnings about what would happen if Russia did not return to its pre-Petrine origins.

Dostoevsky foresaw Russia destroying itself with the clandestine, or not so clandestine, support of the West. The clearest illustration of this self-destruction comes in The Brothers Karamazov.

The novel, the longest whodunit ever written, revolves around the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. It is Ivan, full of his newfangled Western ideas, who tears apart his family and, metaphorically, Russia , and it is the last remaining legitimate Karamazov son, Lyosha, who is left to rebuild it. Not incidentally, Lyosha is the youngest, most religious, and most self-effacing of the Karamazov clan.

The way forward is actually the way backward—all the way to the ancient, Russian sobornost , the spiritual community that, in the Slavophile mind, used to bind Russia together.

Russia spent the s devouring itself—selling off its biggest oil assets, handing over its elections to the C. The yawning chasm in this logic, of course, is Vladimir Putin, who bears zero resemblance to the fictional Lyosha. Putin, indeed, betrays few signs of being especially deep. The glue that seems to hold the regime together is loyalty to Putin.

The result is a further weakening of the regime. Undoubtedly frustrated by his inability to exercise proper control over a country that is going through turbulent times—the pandemic; a weakening economy; mounting environmental catastrophes; growing internal discontent with his inaction in addressing the systemic failures in the country; and loss of influence over countries that were part of the Soviet Union but are now undergoing war, revolution, or internal turmoil—Putin has been raising the profile of the security services and resorting more and more frequently to the use of force to regain control over an increasingly complex and poorly managed country.

The noted British expert on Russia, Mark Galeotti, described the declining effectiveness of Vladimir Putin in the following manner. Writing in Intellinews on September 14, , Galeotti said:.

Putin is succumbing to the same problem as most authoritarians over time, becoming a caricature of himself. Older, less flexible, more dependent on a shrinking circle of yes-men, more detached from his own country, the temptation is to rely more on force and fiat, while his cronies take the fullest advantage of his indulgence to enrich themselves and prosecute their private feuds. The most blatant use of force was the recent assassination attempt on the life of the prominent opposition leader Navalny.

Many see this as an act of weakness rather than a strength of the Putin regime, as the failure of the Kremlin to control the more aggressive elements of its regime. Such attempts in the past, many of which have resulted in the death of outspoken opponents of the Putin regime, have, unfortunately, become all too common in Russia. That toxin has surfaced not for the first time and, certainly, not for the last.

The growing negative assessment of the Putin regime is not only shared by leading analysts and journalists. It has also penetrated Russian society.

Gutterman reports:. As the Putin regime moves forward—a regime that is focused primarily on maintaining control as it prepares for the eventual transition to a post-Putin Russia, it faces a multitude of domestic challenges and it struggles to maintain its internal cohesion at a time when Putin appears weakened and the regime projects an image more of impotence than of power.

The amendments to the Constitution were intended to update the Yeltsin Constitution of , alter some of the internal administrative relationships, preserve Russia as a strong presidential republic, and rally society in support of the president by introducing changes to certain societal norms and by holding a national referendum to demonstrate this support. One of the important intended consequences was to defuse the mounting tension over the succession issue and give Putin more flexibility in deciding his future.

By adding a provision that allows Putin to serve up to two more six-year terms as president,[4] should he elect to do so, Putin hoped to reset his relationship with members of the elite by reducing their incentive to focus on a post-Putin Russia and to defuse what was already becoming a search for a successor as the elite jostled for new power positions in their struggle for self-preservation rather than focusing on their work. Putin doesn't want to encourage that.

Potentially, one of the most significant changes to the constitution was updating the status of the State Council that until now has been a peripheral presidential advisory body that includes regional governors.

There is much speculation that should Putin step down as president in or later, he could assume the role of head of the State Council, thereby continuing to wield power, just as former president Nursultan Nazarbayev has done in Kazakhstan. The problem with this scenario is that if Putin as president emeritus becomes head of the State Council and is a rival to the new president in exercising power, such an arrangement could threaten to weaken the presidency and, consequently, the governing of the country.

Putin made this clear in a comment he made on March 3, Believe me, this is just impossible, this would cause huge damage to the state. As an added guarantee to protect his future, Putin drafted a law that the legislature quickly approved and was signed by Putin. This law grants former presidents and their families immunity for life from criminal prosecution—a promise that Putin himself made to former President Yeltsin before the latter stepped down from the presidency on December 31, Although it would reassure his safety for the future, this legislation is not about protecting one person; it is about defending an institution.

President Putin has weathered a stressful and disappointing year, but he has succeeded in revising the Constitution in a way he believes will strengthen the presidency and will allow him to maintain control throughout the remaining years of his current term and beyond, should he elect to serve past Structurally, Putin has reinforced his position through certain institutional changes.

As he moves forward, he also relies on his guiding principles, ideological tenets, and historical experience to help him chart his path forward over the coming years. As part of this process, Putin must maintain a delicate balance between the three pillars of the Russian state—the presidency and its administration, the elite, and civil society.

Managing this balance has always been challenging, but it will be even more so as Putin moves toward and beyond. Putin sees the synthesis of absolute presidential power with the ideological conviction and propagation of the thesis of antithetical Western Russophobia and threats coming from the West as the foundation for the policies he and his administration pursue to ensure the sovereignty and survival of his regime for as long as he remains in power.

He sees their policies as not only naive but also dangerous. He is convinced that the West is determined to undermine and weaken the Russian state and that any attempt to establish closer ties with the West could be perilous for Russia.

President Putin appears satisfied with the current structure of government and the policy framework he has created, but he recognizes the potential for missteps that could jeopardize his options for the future. One, the president is happy with the system in place. Two, the system has demonstrated that it can hold up under stress. Peskov was referring to the issue of succession and a statement made by President Putin that he was considering running for reelection in There is another set of missteps that Putin is concerned about, and that is avoiding the errors Gorbachev made with his reform program of the s known as perestroika that continued in a different form and scope under President Yeltsin in the s.

The predicament Putin faces is that he and his advisors acknowledge that some type of reform is needed but they must introduce changes without losing control of the process, as both Gorbachev and Yeltsin did. Under Gorbachev, perestroika led to the unraveling of the entire Soviet economic system and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet, people are increasingly eager for change. Putin must find a way forward to improve the economic situation in the country without losing political control or releasing the centripetal forces that are always lurking in the background in Russia. This is a most formidable task. It is unclear what the path forward will be.

Some say that Putin has already reached a dead end and does not know how to circumvent the many obstacles that exist; some obstacles are innate to Russia, other obstacles Putin and his regime have themselves created.

The historical efforts at reform, which Putin fears and eschews, combined with the traditional model of governance that is rife with corruption and lack of any equitable societal representation, impose barriers that Putin cannot and will not overcome. Ever since Putin delivered his political diatribe against the West at the Munich Security Conference in February , the Russian president has been moving further and further away from any interest in adopting elements of the European model.

She acknowledges that Putin has restored order to Russia following the disruptive years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether the goals to advance these projects will be met hinges not just on the technocrats or even on the orders emanating from the Russian president. They also depend significantly on the numerous obstacles that are inherent both in the Russian environment and in the nature of the authoritarian regime Putin has created.

Stanovaya sums up best the predicament the Putin regime faces as it moves toward and perhaps even beyond. Stanovaya asserts:. The regime appears increasingly precarious, but this is not to say that it will collapse: it still has plenty of resilience, and the public is disoriented and fearful of things getting worse. It will be unable to enter into dialogue should the public start to become politically active, and it is losing its consolidation, making it unable to speak with one united voice.

But at some point, Putin will leave the scene, either due to natural causes or to a conscious decision by the Russian president that his time as leader is over and he needs to pass on the reins of power to others.