Putin Now More Cut Off from Russian Reality than Brezhnev Ever Was, Eidman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 21 – Vladimir Putin’s performance at his press conference this week confirms that he has lost the last links with reality and lives in a hermetically sealed world, a manifestation of deep psychological problems and a state that not even the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ever reached, according to Igor Eidman.

            For Putin, the Russian sociologist and Deutsche Welle commentator says, Russia has 160 million residents rather than the 145 million statisticians count, the economy is growing rather than in the crisis other Russians see around them, and “all problems are being successfully overcome” (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2169620266434274&id=100001589654713).

                Moreover, Eidman says, in Putin’s mind, “this hallucinogenic Russia has created super weapons of unbelievable power and holds the entire planet by the throat.”  And “even on the personal front, everything is remarkable with Putin: As a normal man, he will sometime marry someone, and it isn’t important when or whom. One can congratulate him already now.” 

            “Even Brezhnev was less cut off from reality and periodically allowed himself some criticism of the situation in the country,” the commentator continues. “But Putin in recent years isn’t prepared to admit that anything is fundamentally wrong. Instead, he exists “in a permanent maniacal euphoria and doesn’t want to leave that state.”

            Indeed, his press conferences now appear to be less about communicating his views to others than about reassuring himself that “everything is going well and that he is a remarkable and successful ruler,” although “in the depths of his soul, he cannot fail to understand” that his rule has brought “complete failure on all fronts, decline and isolation.”

            All of Putin’s proclaimed achievements are “fake,” Eidman says. They could all collapse “in a single day.” The pacification of Chechnya has left Russia paying tribute to “Kadyrov’s bandit regime.” Economic stability rests on the price of oil. The annexation of Crimea has left Russia isolated and sanctioned.

            And that is not to mention the complete failure “of all attempts to shift the economy onto innovative rails, to catch up with European countries, and so on.”

            According to Eidman, “the Putin regime, like a rotten tree, awaits a good kick which will leave it in rotten shards. But the dictator himself is in euphoria.  Apparently from the embassy in Columbia a new shipment of coke has arrived.” How long that and the inactions of others will allow that to shape his mental state remains to be seen.