Putin's Reality

One-sided coverage of Putin fuels anti-Russian mania and heightens the risk of serious war.

To understand Putin, it is important to understand the conditions in which he came to power.

Russia in the 90s was the equivalent of Weimar Germany in the 30s, or Zimbabwe in the early 2000s.

Life expectancy fell off a cliff. Inflation had reached over 2000%. Unemployment had reached nearly 15%. The economy had been looted by gangsters, domestic and foreign. Suicide and alcoholism was rampant. The country was ruled by the alcoholic maniac, Boris Yeltsin, who, with the support of Bill Clinton, had bombed his own parliament.

What happened next was incredible. Putin turned the country around. Inflation fell to around 10%. Unemployment today is 4%. Look at life expectancy after 2000:

Look at the concomitant drop in the murder rate:

Putin is obviously not close to being some kind of saint. But imagine a leader had achieved the same results in South Africa. He would win Nobel Prizes and be celebrated globally. Instead, the world celebrates the war-monger and speech-reader, Barack Obama, who accomplished nothing.

Unlike in Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany, Russia, in the midst of chaos, did not turn to radicalism. Putin is an authoritarian to some degree, but all western governments have proven themselves to be highly authoritarian lately, and he is a great deal more popular in his country than any western leader, leaders who currently seem to be more interested in globalism than the welfare of their own people. Russians do not value democracy as some kind of god, as the west does - despite the fact that it has been shown western democratic governments almost never reflect the will of the people - probably because democracy is, in fact, impossible.

To understand Putin’s foreign policy positions, I highly recommend this new piece from IM-1776, in which his famous interviews with American filmmaker, Oliver Stone, are reviewed.

Putin is accused in the west of attempting to re-establish the Soviet Empire. His famous statement, that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century is often cited as evidence.

But as Nathan Fischer in the piece reminds us, this is missing important context:

Consider this: that oft-cited remark above comes from a 2005 address to the Russian parliament, but it was followed by more. Putin added: “[the fall of the Soviet Union] for the Russian people became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” This is a point that Putin stresses throughout the interviews as well. In the USSR, Russians settled in territories that, formally, were not part of the Russian state. When the various republics broke off and became independent, in excess of twenty million Russians became minorities overnight, often in countries that despised them…

In other words, Putin views the fall of the Soviet Union as a “catastrophe” not in itself, but for the Russian people. It is clear his aim isn’t to rebuild it, nor to make any editorial remarks on the virtues of communism. He even outright tells Stone that the economic system of the USSR was a failure. He praises Gorbachev for recognizing that changes were needed (Glasnost, Perestroika), but thinks Gorbachev and his entourage had no clue how to go about reforming the system. Anyone who has read Paul Klebnikov’s book Godfather of the Kremlin, which describes the rise of 1990s gangster capitalism in Russia out of the ruins of the USSR, would have to agree.

It is also in the light of this disaster, that Putin has come to view NATO as an existential threat.

NATO as an organization existed to defend Western Europe against the member states of the Warsaw Pact. But with the collapse of the USSR, and revolutions in other Eastern European countries, its raison d’être vanished. In conversation with Stone, Putin asserts (and some Western foreign policy professionals concede) that the United States promised that if the USSR permitted the reunification of Germany there would be no further NATO expansion. Putin chides Gorbachev for his failure to get this down in writing.

Assuming this promise was made, we can imagine Russian consternation as NATO expanded to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999, and then the Baltic states, Romania and Bulgaria in 2004. Just recently in 2020, NATO expanded again to include North Macedonia. Not unreasonably, Putin emphasizes that Russia viewed the Cold War as over, and thus could not understand the purpose of such expansions. He speculates that the NATO bureaucracy took on a life of its own and needed to set up Russia as its arch-enemy in order to justify its continued existence.

Finally, there’s the recklessly cavalier attitude of the US toward Russia and its security interests. Following 9/11, Putin recounts how he was the first foreign leader to call President Bush and offer support. Russia then assisted the United States with its logistical challenges in Afghanistan… Bush … proceeded with plans to set up missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, purportedly to defend Europe and the US against Iran. If you were the President of the Russian Federation, would you believe this? Only Russia has missiles in that region with the range necessary to strike the United States. And, as Putin correctly points out to Stone, missile defense systems can quickly be retrofitted to house offensive missiles. Putin does not want nuclear missiles on his border any more than the Kennedy administration wanted them in Cuba.

Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger, arch US imperialist, recently admitted at the detestable World Economic Forum that Ukraine need to come to terms with Russia and concede territory as their hopes of victory are nil, and continued conflict threatens overall European stability.

Putin went in to secure autonomy of Russian-speaking territories. These territories declared autonomy for themselves in 2014 after the Ukrainian regime, put in power illegally by the US, began to oppress Russian language and culture.

The Putin argument for incursion - that Ukraine refused to stop attacking the separatists, that their talk of going nuclear, and their hosting of American weaponry were all unacceptable to Russian security - is infinitely stronger than the arguments proposed by the US and NATO to use force to secure independence for Kosovo in the 90s, to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq (after arming him in the 80s), to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan (again, after previously supporting them, and after they declared they would hand over Bin Laden) , and to make Libya safe for the human-traffickers and ISIS by getting rid of Gaddafi.

And now Kissinger admits that arming Ukraine and encouraging them to keep poking the bear, at enormous cost to their country, has been for nothing.

This is the western way - a willingness to destroy order in distant nations for illusionary gains and power play. Kissinger has previously admitted that the Iraqi invasion was simply about sending a message and offered no other strategic gains - particularly as the final result was simply to hand over the country to an Iranian-puppet regime, who are the chief enemies of the Western Sunni alliance in the Middle East - although nobody really knows why.

The Ukrainian debacle, and the western de-banking of Russia, has resulted in pushing Russia towards China, and China looking to unite Taiwan to the mainland, with Biden promising military action if they do so.

What happens when the west confronts China and Russia simultaneously is anybody’s guess.