I am presently reading Masha Gessen’s horrifying and damming biography of Vladimir Putin – “The Man Without A Face”. She describes him as a “small and vengeful man, prone to furious vendettas, fond of helping himself to other people’s property, and the godfather of a mafia clan ruling the country”. There is a good review of the book from The Guardian here.
Whilst I do not know enough above post-Soviet Russian politics to make really informed comment on some of the accusations in it, I would make this point in relation to our course. As things stand in 2012, Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Yelstin years of the 1990s can be seen as just another “moment of reform” akin to the Emancipation, the October Manifesto or the N.E.P. Perhaps absolutism is Russia’s usual form of government. As Birdiev said of Stalin, “all the past is repeating itself, and acts only behind new masks“. Perhaps…
Mr Kydd
