Most Russians Resemble Putin in Their Basic Dispositions and Thus Support His War, Eidman Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 24 – When Putin launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022, few Russians were on his side; but now the majority is, not so much because of propaganda or fear, but because most Russians share Putin’s basic dispositions and thus are in their own situations little Putins, Igor Eidman says.
    The Russian commentator who now lives in exile in Berlin argues that most Russians share Putin’s “imperial ambitions, his cruelty, national arrogance, xenophobia and homophobia, patriarchal sexism, and masculine authoritarianism” and thus have come to back the war “as a natural continuation of all this” (t.me/igoreidman/1858 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/takie-kak-putin).
    When he was still living in Russia, Eidman continues, he “constantly encountered people like Putin, cruel authoritarians full of imperial arrogance, Muscovite, national or other. There have always been almost 100 percent of such people in the security forces,” but they exist far more widely than that.
    “I have met many Putins in completely different environments” – as physical education teachers, factory workers or even university instructors, “Putins as bandits and Putins as government officials.” And thus he concludes that “the average Russian man is most often a Putin as well.”
    Eidman concludes with a confession that strengthens his argument: “I myself was partly a Putin, when morally I found myself on the side of the empire during the First Chechen war, and even now I understand that I have not yet completely squeezed the Putin out of myself.”