Fwd: Opinion piece from the Moscow Times (independent news)

[Mark Kohut]

A friend with an interest in things Russian sent me this article (cut and
pasted) ...

*It is not Ukraine that needs fictional "denazification," it is Russia that
needs real de-Stalinization *By Andrei Kolesnikov
<https://www.themoscowtimes.com/author/andrei-kolesnikov>

Updated: March 23, 2022

Moskva News Agency

Putin's system cannot be improved, reformed, modernized, or even simply
normalized. It leads to the destruction of Russia. If there is anti-Russian
system, it is Putinism. If there is a symbol of anti-patriotism, oblivion
and perversion of the basic foundations of the nation, it is Putin's elite.

It is impossible to put an equal sign between the state and the people. But
Putinism leads to a situation where a rogue state turns its citizens into
rogue people.

No one knows better than the Russians themselves that a cornered autocrat
becomes even more dangerous — for the world, but above all, for the
citizens of Russia. Artillery is hitting its own people, not only from
outside Russia’s borders to the West, but also inside the country.

Putin has killed the historical righteousness of the nation that was based
on the sacred memory of the 1945 victory in the Great Patriotic War.
Putin's government kept this memory as a historical shield. But after it
fired on Kyiv and Kharkiv, it lost that moral shield. Exploiting that
victory seems especially cynical.

Putinism has lost its historical foundation, its historical
self-determination. It has shredded, reduced the memory of the Great War to
fictional paradigms and threats, to the odious "denazification and
demilitarization of Ukraine." This is an astonishing historical example of
a political regime getting rid of part of the basis for its own historical
legitimacy.

It is not Ukraine that needs fictional "denazification," it is Russia that
needs real de-Stalinization. Work was not done to overcome the difficult
past, and now this past is destroying the nation, its sense of self, its
self-identification. What is left is defensiveness, as if the nation were
under siege in a fortress and suffering from Stockholm syndrome, bonding
with the jailer.

When a country that claims a leading role as an empire, albeit an imaginary
one, bombs itself, even the imaginary empire disappears. A real empire must
have soft power, not hard power. The strikes on Kyiv were the final
destruction of the right to self-legitimacy at the expense of the memory of
the Great Patriotic War. The regime never had the right to do this. The
people did, but the regime did not.

The "high-precision" hit at Babi Yar had a symbolic meaning that had
nothing to do with "neo-Nazism." The point was to show that if the military
could hit Babi Yar, it could also hit Chernobyl with the same
"high-precision" accuracy.

"Putin's system cannot be improved, reformed, modernized, or even simply
normalized. It leads to the destruction of Russia. If there is anti-Russian
system, it is Putinism. If there is a symbol of anti-patriotism, oblivion
and perversion of the basic foundations of the nation, it is Putin's elite."

Russia's allies are now the army and navy, Eritrea and North Korea. In the
political and economic suicide of the Putin regime, it has lowered Russia
to the same level as North Korea. This was done with the tacit, cowardly
consent of the elites.

A great power that became a member of international communities and
organizations, a country that had made its way to a market economy and a
democratic constitution, was reduced to being a global spoiler and then a
threat to the entire world.

But the Russian economy does not exist outside of the global economy. No
"import substitution" is possible without global components and seed stock,
container transportation and technological imports. "Import substitution"
does not exist because the market economy, like science, has no nationality
and can only function as a world economy.

The first thing the government did after the start of the "special
operation" was to prohibit the transfer and export of money so that
citizens would not run away but be forced to share the consequences of
their decisions with the elites — so they’d have to tighten their belts at
home, not fasten their seatbelts on the last plane leaving for the cursed
West.

Putin wanted to speak to world leaders as equals, and as a result no one is
talking to him. He was condemned at the UN General Assembly by 141 nations,
and even big brother China may be looking at its neighbor with some
apprehension.
Russians have no choice but to "cultivate their own garden," that is, to
feed themselves from their own garden. There's no help to be had. The
artillery is hitting its own people.

*A version of this commentary in Russian was first published in The New
Times <https://newtimes.ru/>.*

The views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the
position of The Moscow Times.

<https://www.themoscowtimes.com/author/andrei-kolesnikov>

*Andrei Kolesnikov
<https://www.themoscowtimes.com/author/andrei-kolesnikov>*

Andrei Kolesnikov is a senior associate and the chair of the Russian
Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow
Center.  @AndrKolesnikov <https://www.twitter.com/AndrKolesnikov>




On Sunday, April 3, 2022, 07:57:53 AM EDT, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
wrote:


Samuel Ramani
<https://twitter.com/SamRamani2>
@SamRamani2
<https://twitter.com/SamRamani2>
·
1h <https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1510569399211732995>
BREAKING: The EU vows to impose more sanctions on Russia following the
Bucha Massacre and "atrocities committed by the Russian army in Kyiv
liberated region"