I’m really bored with the unintelligent idea that Putin is crazy. It is shameful that our political leaders despise us so much that they think it’s OK to offer this ridiculous explanation to us.
Putin is not in the least crazy. He is expressing the interests of an overwhelming majority of people in his enormous country. And they love him for that.
Many – or probably even most – people in the FSU countries have not accepted the fall of the Soviet Union. They don’t like the capitalist system, they can’t manage to learn to live in this new reality, they perceive the values and lifestyles that go with it as deeply alien. They didn’t have a chance to learn capitalism and civil rights gradually and slowly. Instead, they were thrust into a way of being that they will never master as well as everybody else does. And this makes them feel constantly and painfully inferior.
This is a shared experience in the FSU countries but the non-Russian republics have received something in return for relinquishing the USSR that compensates them for this suffering. Their humiliation at the hands of the much closer Russians rankled more than the feelings of inadequacy when comparing themselves with faraway Americans. Nationalism is a potent force, and people will choose it over pretty much anything.
With the fall of the USSR, Russians saw their opportunities to feel good by humiliating Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Latvians, Georgians, etc severely curtailed. Instead, they found themselves constantly humiliated and made to feel painfully and constantly lacking. This does seem like a really lousy trade off: give up the pleasing feelings of total superiority and in return get to feel inferior and receive a system that you have no use for.
What we are seeing now in Russia is an intense acting out against this trade off and an effort to return to the status quo. And the only people who are crazy are those who are dismissing these efforts as nothing but an act of insanity.
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