(np) Palast on Putin

[jody2.718]

Larry Summers- I'd half forgotten about that clown. What a disaster, along with the rest of the geniuses at Harvard, like Andrei Schleifer, who were going to "fix" Russia with "Shock Therapy," and ended up creating a feeding trough for the Oligarchs, and maybe themselves. But Pinochet was only a more recent model for Putin. From an historical perspective, Putin is more of what Solzhenitsyn was hoping for- a Tsar-like figure in concert with the Orthodox Church that would restore morality and order, as opposed to the decadence of the West, which, in his mind, was destroying Russia at that time. In fact, Solzhenitsyn, who passed in 2008, welcomed Putin. Solzhenitsyn also could not conceive of Ukraine being anything other than a part of Russia. Autocratic?- no problem, deeply ingrained in the Russian psyche.

Right wing fascism has deep historical roots in Russia. No way was it going to be transformed into some Harvard version of western capitalism by "Shock Therapy". Palast is right on.

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"Vladimir Putin did not arrive from outer space on an abalone shell........."