Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 5 – Vladimir Putin
has achieved a real but Pyrrhic victory with his policy of hybridity
domestically by transforming Russia into “one gigantic and bestial special
service” and internationally by infecting other countries with the distrust and
division that are at the foundation of his own, according to Tigran Khzmalyan.
But however large his victory
appears at present, the Moscow commentator continues, it is doomed to be
short-lived because of the resources of the West. Tragically, however, many are
going to suffer until those resources are mobilized and focused on defeating
the infection Putin has promoted (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=58BBACBA2C632).
“The hybrid policy of the hybrid
state in Putin’s Russia means precisely the complete swallowing up of all state
institutions and mechanisms by the punitive and diversionary special services,”
Khzmalyan says. More than that, “it means the transformation of the state
itself into one gigantic, bestial special service.”
That gives Putin some short-term
advantages because other countries “do not understand that they are dealing
with an entire state” that is nothing more than a special service because they
aren’t willing to acknowledge that “all Russia is one single gigantic special
service,” especially since that was not the case even under Stalin or Brezhnev.
The Soviet leaders not only
controlled the special services but spoke with the people in an ideological
language that had the effect of limiting what the regime could and couldn’t
say. Now, there are no limits; and that has left many in Russia and abroad
uncertain as to how to read what is going on.
“Under Putin,” Khzmalyan says, “a
revolution of morals has taken place. License and the absence of punishment,
illegality and the lack of conscience of the transitional pot-Soviet period of
the 1990s, so aptly called ‘illegality,’ suddenly has turned out to be not
something to be ashamed or and rejected but rather has crystallized into a new
state system.”
Words and declarations no longer
have any meaning and individuals can shift from one thing to another with
impunity. But what is most horrific about this, the commentator continues, is
that this approach is perfectly consistent with and near to the hearts of “the
wide popular masses,” as the regime refers to the population.
“In other words,” Khzmalyan says, “what
has occurred is a bestial intermixing of the worst inheritance of the former
Soviet power with the worst genetic material of the former Soviet people.” And it is “no accident” that a mid-ranking
chekist has “headed this ‘revolt of the hybrids’” – or as the commentator says,
to use a Russian rather than Latin term, “bastards.”
“The phenomenon of Putin’s
popularity,” the commentator argues, “consists in the fact that in comparison
with any other Soviet or Russian leaders, he is someone whom the most numerous
and least educated strata of the population most easily and most willingly can
identify as one of their own.”
It is “precisely” Putin’s “grayness,
his lack of clear individualization, its unusual ethical ‘flexibility,’ and
even his typical visage which makes him the ideal feeding ground of this new
cult of personality in which the subject of the cult is not a personality but
namely its absence – the hybrid product of almost a century-long experiment in
negative selection.”
Unfortunately, Khzmalyan says, “this
hybrid has one awful quality about which people in the outside world are only
beginning to guess. It is infectious. A militant lack of principles,
hypocritical stupidity and cynicism elevated to the rank of state policy, total
lies and corruption, constant focus on and search for weaknesses and failures
of others” – these and other features have a long history in the Soviet
security agencies. Now they are spreading across the world.
In the last 15 years – the period of
Putin’s power – the world has seen numerous examples of leaders following the
same path: Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, Silvio Burlesconi of Italy, Marin le
Pen of France and the current US President Donald Trump; and as the leaders go
so too do their countries.
“Blackmail and bribery, bribery and
blackmail, the old instruments of all secret services, have turned out to be
unbelievably effect when they are used not simply by a government special
service but by something never before seen in world history” – a state that has
been swallowed up by the special services which now have its resources at its
disposal.
“Putin has won in that he has
infected the entire world with the virus of universal distrust and division, of
everything is permitted and of cynicism … He has sowed the poisonous seeds of
doubt in the main values of civilization … [and] in this sense, Putinism is
comparable to the attack of the Vandals on Rome or of the Turks on
Constantinople.”
The Western world as a result,
Khzmalyan continues, is thus “split apart and polarized. There is no former ‘Atlantic
solidarity,’ no former unity about the main European values of rights and
freedoms of the personality, of openness and mercy. This is an undoubted victory for Putin – the victory
of greed over altruism, nationalism over tolerance, cynicism over idealism,
human weaknesses over the power of the common good.”
There is only this good news: “It
will not last long: Europe over the course of centuries is much stronger than
any bull and no longer will allow itself to be kidnapped. Europe and following
it America will again focus and take up the banners of freedom and solidarity.” But alas “this will take time and involve victims.”
“The victims,” Khzmalyan concludes, “will
be the weakest and most defenseless countries and peoples on the territories of
which now has broken out the latest battle between freedom and tyranny.” Putin and tyranny have won this round; but
they are fated to lose the next.
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