Kremlin Remains Confident about Its War in Ukraine and about Future of USSR 2.0, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 13 – Many assume that in secret at least, people in the Kremlin share the concerns of others about the problems the war in Ukraine is creating. But in fact, Vladimir Pastukhov says, the Kremlin leaders do not. They are accustomed to taking risks and even are excited by them, feel no remorse, and expect to win.

            According to the London-based Russian analyst, “the Kremlin is confident that the patriotic cushion it has acquired will serve as a shock absorber and that no revolution threatens them for at least one to three years,” by which time they assume they will “come up with something” to postpone it further (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=62AB1209B871C).

            Those at the top of the Putin system are “inspired by the example of the USSR, for which isolation was the norm,” Pastukhov continues. They recognize that the West could stop purchasing Russian energy exports but that unless that happens, Putin’s war in Ukraine is “practically self-financing.”

            Those who have taken Russia to war don’t care at all about Russian businesses which are losing out or the Russian people who are suffering. And they remain confident that “they will be able to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors and not suffer the fate of USSR 1.0 but instead create an eternal version of the empire.

            That there are many such people in Russia should come as no surprise, the Russian analyst says. They have been described frequently in Russian literature, most classically by Turgenev in his description of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons. Such people now are “’techno-optimists’” and they are not without talent as administrators.

            But such people in the Kremlin today have a problem, Pastukhov argues. They think that the USSR ended “as a result of managerial errors which can be rationally comprehended and then eliminated.” In fact, that state collapsed as a result of unavoidable historical and cultural contradictions and could not have been saved.

            The same threat will emerge again if the Kremlin continues on its current course, he concludes; and in the fight against that kind of enemy, the current rulers and their methods of calculations will do no better than their predecessors who were equally clueless as to why their empire could not survive.