Putin and the Russian People Both Angry at the West but for Different Reasons, a Divide that is Now becoming 'an Abyss,' Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 23 – Russian rulers and those they rule have always felt themselves to be fundamentally separate groups, but now this gap has become “an abyss,” Abbas Gallyamov says, because even the “the only thing uniting Putin and the bulk of the population – resentment towards the West,” means something very different to the two sides.

            The Russian population is offended by the West because it did not see its incomes rise more or less automatically as they expected after they had renounced their imperial status and communist ideology, the Russian commentator says (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/6102 and charter97.org/ru/news/2024/9/25/612073/).

            According to Gallyamov, despite all the media talk about NATO expansion to the east as the reason for their anger, the Russian people in fact “did not care about that.” Indeed, “the entry of the Baltic countries into the Western alliance passed almost completely unnoticed” by most of the groups in the population.

            Putin’s anger at the West is different and even puts him at even greater odds with the population. For him, “it wasn’t the matter of a drop in living standards instead of a ‘promised’ increase.” Instead, he expected that he would be able to continue to rule Russia “in accordance with the formula cujus regio, ejus religio.”

            As a result, he was “deeply offended” when the West having “favorably accepted his gifts including the support of American actions in Afghanistan at the same time began to criticize his domestic political course. From his point of view, this was the real ‘scam’ – ‘Why are you bothering me with your freedom of speech and human rights? … This is my country and here I rule as I see fit.’”

            Putin, of course, “couldn’t present this conflict as justification for confronting the West. After all, you can’t say ‘I’m in conflict with the West because they want to prohibit me from rigging elections.’” He had to come up with “surrogates – first the expansion of NATO and then ‘traditional family values’ allegedly trampled by the West.”

            But those are just substitutes for what Putin really cares about and do not bring him any closer to his own population given that most of what he talks about is “banal homophobia,” and Russians have historically been more tolerant of that than have many in the Western countries they are told are seeking to impose this on them.