Putin’s ‘Russian World’ Comes Not from Russian Culture but from Uncultured Lumpen and the Views of that Class Must be Changed, Pastukhov Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 --  The intellectual framework, if one can call it that, behind Putin’s “Russian world,” Vladimir Pastukhov says, does not come from Russian culture but from the lack of culture of the Russian lumpen which wants to see everyone else as inferior in order to reassure itself of its own superiority.

            The London-based Russian analyst says that understanding this is fundamentally important because “Putin’s strength is not that he doesn’t idealize the Russian people but that he consciously and intentionally uses its dormant vicious instincts for the strengthening of his own power over the country” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=63B58DDCD0A3B).

            And consequently, even when Putin leaves the scene and the actuarial tables make that inevitable and when the imperialism he is promoting no longer is the focus of state media, this kind of imperialism won’t disappear. It will simply “fall asleep, go underground and survive like the moral outcast” it is.

            Because that is so, any real guarantee against a future return to “national Bolshevik practices won’t be a change in the political regime – that is, after all, a minimum requirement – but rather a long-term effort to eradicate the ‘imperial’ stereotypes which have been formed over centuries in the consciousness” of the Russian people.

            Achieving that, even if everything is done correctly, will take a minimum of decades, Pastukhov concludes.