Putin a Man of the Soviet Past who May Leave Office as Yeltsin Did, Gordon Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 11 – Vladimir Putin is “a very Soviet man,” Dmitry Gordon says, who does not think or act in ways that correspond to the demands of the world today. “The time of other people has arrived,” and Putin has “lost a sense of reality” and thinks that he could end as Stalin did in 1953. Instead, he may leave as Boris Yeltsin left in 1999.

            The Ukrainian journalist and businessman made those comments on Ekho Moskvy’s Personally Yours program (echo.msk.ru/programs/personalnovash/2621509-echo/ and excerpted on this point at censoru.net/2020/04/12/gordon-putin-ustarel-i-ponimaet-chto-mozhet-zakonchit-kak-stalin.html).

            To understand Putin, Gordon continues, “one must study history.” An obvious case concerns Putin’s decision to initially schedule the referendum on the constitutional amendments on April 22, the birthday of Vladimir Lenin. But then “this cursed coronavirus upset all the cards” the current Kremlin leader thought he could play.

            According to the Ukrainian journalist, “Putin is poorly informed and very much fears mass protests in Moscow.” That is “the lot of all rulers, especially those who have been in power a long time: he is provided with information only by those he wants to hear. He is cut off from the Internet.  And so he can’t search for and find alternative points of view.”

            “He has,” Gordon says, “a distorted picture of the world … Putin is at a crossroads. He very much fears the appearance of popular anger and prays to God that in Moscow everything will be fine with the coronavirus because [in his mind] revolutions and all meetings always begin there. A rising never begins in Vologda or Kostroma but only in Moscow.”

            Putin can’t connect with younger Russians because they don’t care about his “’Russian world.’” He remains “a product of Soviet times who studied in the KGB Higher School and the Andropov Institute totally different things” from those that matter in the world today “which went on ahead.”

            He remains mired in the Soviet past and all the time things about the restoration of the USSR. But the world today “lives according to entirely different laws! When the Internet, the iPhone and other new inventions have appeared, you aren’t going to achieve anything by talking about spiritual bindings.” 

            Those notions may work for pensioners living in the backwoods part of Russia, “but a new generation has grown up” which doesn’t care.

            Now, and precisely because he is so Soviet, Putin is afraid. The collapse in oil prices contributed heavily to the demise of the USSR. Cheap oil now may undermine his position. Indeed, Gordon says, he wouldn’t be surprised if one of his colleagues at some point told him, it’s time to go and you’ll be protected just as you protected Yeltsin.

            “I think,” Gordon says, that this is how there will be “a bloodless transition of power from Putin to other people.”