Putin Unexpectedly has Let Two Dangerous Genies Out of the Bottle, Morozov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 2 – Russians born in the 1950s have been amazed by two steps Vladimir Putin one of their number has taken because they overwhelming assumed that neither would be because of the dangers they represent and because they recognized how difficult it would be to put these genies back in the bottle once they were released, Aleksandr Morozov says.

             The first, the political analyst who was born at that time (as was Vladimir Putin) says, is that they were convinced that “this generation in no circumstances would turn back to easily understood ideological practices, myths and models of collective behavior which in the past had already led Russians to self-destruction” (blog.newsru.com/article/02apr2019/generation).

            “Of course,” Morozov says, “history proceeds along various paths and it is not necessarily the case that the very same models will necessarily lead to self-destruction. But I think,” he says, there is an entirely reasonable “’presumption’” that if such an approach is accepted again, it will open the way to another “gigantic” act of self-destruction.

            And the second thing most in his generation did not expect, the political analyst says, is that when people his age came to power, they would be infected with the same sense of the leaders they succeeded that “’we are the smartest.’” Yes, they can be smart and even smarter than some others, but “they must not be ‘smarter than everyone else.’”

            Putinism, however, carries within itself “this absurd certainty that ‘we already are smarter than everyone else,’ including the Rothschilds, the Masons, Merkel, the US Congress, all our neighbors; smarter indeed than Stalin and Hitler, and that there is no one on this earth who is smarter that M. Zakharova and the screaming TV experts.”

            There is “a great illusion” that all such things can “easily be driven back into the bottle.”  But that is an illusion: it won’t be easy.  But what Morozov says he cannot understand is how this happened with his generation who experienced all the negative consequences of these two things and should have known better than to let them out in the first place.