RUSSIAN WORLD Putin, the weakness of the strong man

The alternatives of the war in the Ukraine and of Russia’s confrontation with the Western world are not leading to the apotheosis of the ideology of the “Russian world”, which Vladimir Putin so desires and which should shine in the great Victory parade on 9 September. May, the true holiday of the identity of post-Soviet Russia. Drones over the Kremlin cloud the fireworks already set to light up the skies of Moscow and a few cities, as the parade has been canceled almost everywhere for fear of incidents.

The attack on the palace of power, according to spokesman Peskov, left only “a little fogged up windows” in the highest part of the Kremlin Weapons Museum, a sacred place of memory where the Shapka Monomakha, the crown-hat attributed to to the Kiev Prince Vladimir of the early 12th century, the great-grandson of Vladimir the Baptist. Since she had married into the Byzantine emperor’s family, Vladimir claimed the title “Monomachus” to affirm the Constantinople inheritance entrusted to the Russians, although in reality the Shapka is clearly later and of Tatar make. Next to the crown is the text of the Ulozhenje, the decree establishing the Patriarchate of Moscow, which was made to be signed under duress by the Patriarch of Constantinople Ieremias II and where it is stated that Moscow is the “Third Rome”, called to save the world whole of the enemies of the true faith. It is not known if the drones were actually launched by the Ukrainians, if it was a set-up by the Kremlin itself to launch accusations against Kiev and Washington or if, as is speculated, it was the work of an opponent of Putin who wanted to end the “glass czar”. “.

In any case, the grotesque incident reveals the weakness of the leader, although he “was not in the office at that time” but hidden, as always, in a mansion or in a bunker, for fear of enemies and, above all, everything, to friends. Many remembered the ironic feat of Mathias Rust, the 19-year-old West German who managed to land in Red Square in 1987 with a small Cessna, eluding all Soviet radars and decreeing the beginning of the end of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforming dream. The radio dialogue, broadcast by the press, between the square guard and the police chief became famous: “Planes over Red Square! – Yes, maybe there are also tanks on Gorky Street…”. The Soviet Union was not aware of its fragility, which in a short time would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the empire.

The analogies with the fall of the Soviet Union seem to accumulate more and more with a Russia bogged down in the fields of the Ukraine, as in the days of Brezhnev it was lost in the mountains of Afghanistan. The “friends” of Moscow, from China to South Africa, passing through the BRICS countries, Iran, Turkey and others, do not bring any real relief to the economy increasingly pressured by sanctions, which are beginning to overwhelm the population sowing the discontent. They also do not fully support Russia politically and diplomatically, with ambiguous votes at the UN increasingly isolating Russia from the rest of the world and leaving Putin in the humiliating status of an internationally wanted war criminal. Even in the ecclesiastical sphere, Patriarch Kirill is considered heretical and unpleasant by almost all his Orthodox brothers in the world, and if it were not for the outstretched hand of Pope Francis, at this point I would not know which saint to entrust myself to, having already invoked all the celestial legions, from the archangel Michael, “the arch-strategist”, to Saint George “the victorious”, in defense of an increasingly metaphysical and very little evangelical Holy Russia.

It is not that a popular revolt is imminent -although in Russia, the homeland of the revolution, you never know-, or that the electoral consensus that once again will lead the “eternal” tsar to be re-elected “democratically” has been decisively affected. in 2024. The population supports the leader not so much because of his person or his achievements, given the discouraging turn of the war in Ukraine, but because of conformism and the pride of being “against everyone”, especially against the hated Americans, the unattainable model paradise country that Russians can only dream of. Especially since the repression of any form of dissent has reached levels only comparable to those of Stalin, with the widespread practice of denouncing relatives and neighbors reminiscent of the Soviet story of Pavlik Morozov, the boy who denounced his parents by sending them to a camp of concentration and became a model for future generations.

It is not an uprising that demonstrates Putin’s weakness, but the ridicule, the increasingly evident lack of credibility that is making him pathetic, not only in Western propaganda portrayals but also within the country. His most famous opponent, Alexey Navalny, owes much of his popularity not only to the courage to return to his homeland after being poisoned and accepting being locked up in a concentration camp, but also to not losing his fortitude. and the jovial spirit even in extreme conditions, while his pursuer grows ever darker and sinks into ever more bombastic and empty rhetoric.

From the solitary confinement cell in which he is confined, if only for the blink of an eye, Navalny still manages to get his comments out and post them on social media, almost as if he were lounging comfortably on the sofa at home, making the cruelty of his tormentors is increasingly grotesque. A few days ago he described the paradox of “Putin’s torture”, whereby every afternoon in the Shizo sector of maximum punishment, the president’s speeches are reproduced at full volume with loudspeakers placed in all the corridors. “As I once read in a spy novel, in which they forced to listen to Mao Tzetung’s poems… this speech thing is the latest trick to harass me, after my friends and I spread the story of the jailers who steal the money destined to buy vegetables for the prisoners”. The opponent admits that “the noise of the crazy speeches of the big boss disturbs my sleep and reading books a bit”, but he consoles himself thinking that “at least that way the jailers admit that listening to Putin is a punishment” and that they are the first to suffer it. wrong… when they roll their eyes in exasperation, that’s the best reward for me.”

Along with Navalny’s irony, the proclamations of many other opponents arrested and imprisoned with interminable sentences, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza or Ilja Jashin, who assure that “the night will end” and Russia will regain its freedom, also hit the heart of power. and true democracy. However, more than his external and internal adversaries, what worries Putin are his supporters, who are increasingly active and brazen, starting with the “cook” Prigozhin, whose popularity is really beginning to overshadow the figure of the leader. . The Wagner company, which is now out of any control of the Kremlin, is all the rage in the Ukraine, in Africa and throughout the world and increasingly criticizes with greater harshness the generals that Putin is forced to replace like figurines, beyond the fame of “butcher” or “exterminator” that many of them had earned in Syria or in the Caucasus. Or like the Chechen president Kadyrov, who is also impatient with the vacillations of the improvised Russian soldiers, mobilized by force, without any war experience and with little equipment, impotent before the tenacity of the Ukrainians, led by a president- actor who, thanks to Putin’s initiatives, rises to the glory of international hero.

Even the numerous “Putin ideologues” who follow one another on the propaganda stage as often as the crude generals are no longer really capable of extolling the greatness of the Tsar and Russia, trying at least to maintain a high pitch as singers. of “traditional moral values”. A few days ago it was the turn of the philosopher-oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who is organizing in many cities of the Urals, such as Kazan in Tatarstan or Saransk in Mordovia, the sections of the Universal Russian People’s Council, a political-cultural institute invented in the decade of 1990 by the then Metropolitan Kirill, current patriarch, to give a socially relevant face to the “religious renaissance” of the early post-Soviet times.

Malofeev’s initiative, according to several commentators, more than support for Kremlin policy, seems destined to the construction of his own political project that expresses the world of “values” in more effective and radical ways than the Kremlin’s contradictions. His version of the Council is openly xenophobic, pointing to non-Russian peoples and religions, including Islam, as the real enemy that must be fought, and leaving aside any “internationalist” rhetoric of a universal gathering of “friendly” peoples, the synthesis Orthodox-Soviet of Putin’s ideology. At meetings of Malofeev’s supporters, Shaman’s song Jarusskij is sung like an anthem and they end up taking on much more pronounced “neo-Nazi” traits than those attributed to the Ukrainian extremists of the Azov battalion.

The extreme nationalism of these rallies resonates not by chance in the ethnically most threatened regions, in the prospect of a possible disintegration of the empire, with the Tatars and other Eurasian groups who must be kept under control and ideological pressure. Malofeev also owns a TV channel called Tsargrad, “imperial city” (it was the Russian title for Constantinople), which further evokes dreams of the restoration of the Third Rome, perhaps replacing the losing tsar with more imposing figures like the Konstantin himself, with the beard and corpulence of the ancient bogatyrs, the heroes of the old Russian fairy tales who defeated all the satanic barbarians who camped on the sacred borders of Kievan Rus.