Putin’s Vision Increasingly Millenarian and Apocalyptic, Arkhipova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 11 – In recent years, Aleksandra Arkhipova says, Putin has become increasingly millenarian and apocalyptic, a view that compels him to try to slow down those processes which are leading to deterioration and destruction around the world and try to create a bastion in which Russia will survive as a saving remnant.

            The independent Russian ethnographer says that for such an individual, “it is important to slow down any development” lest it contribu to catastrophe and preserve what he can “frozen like a fly in amber.” Only a “select few will be saved” and then “only through special efforts” by leaders like himself (t.me/anthro_fun/2838).

            “Therefore,” Arkhipova continues, the current Kremlin leader “fights new technologies and genetics, sees biological weapons everywhere, looks with suspicion at all new social and gender practices and protects everything traditional, trying to isolate it from external destructive influences.”

            She argues that “this frozen world for him is a mixture of good old Soviet practices of the 1960s and 1970s and some notions about ​​​​Orthodox Rus,” a combination that leads him to want to restore Komsomol organizations but have the youth of Russia attend Orthodox church services.

            And in this attempt “to save the world from what is destroying it,” Arkhipova concludes, Putin clearly believes that “Russia must be mothballed in a ‘patriotic isolationism,’ in which it relies only on itself and on the values of the Soviet Union of the 1970s and of Russia’s Orthodox past.