Vladimir Putin reportedly has portraits of Peter the Great hung in several important meeting rooms in the Kremlin. Putin will ultimately fail but, like Applebaum says, he can do a lot of damage while trying. These are big goals, definitely beyond Putin but like Lenin, Stalin and their Soviet successors there is no harm in dreaming big. Putin aims to destabilize and, if possible, destroy Western and democratic institutions and to undermine US influence wherever he can. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire and Putin’s aim is to recreate at least some part of it. “Instead of letting people hope for something better, they promote nihilism and cynicism”, says the noted historian Anne Applebaum who believes that Putin is often incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist while in truth he is an ‘imperial nostalgist’. Instead of democracy, Putin’s idea is to encourage autocracy instead of unity, division and xenophobia instead of open societies. But the real ‘other’ is the West and its democratic institutions. Ukraine plays a central role in Russia’s identity, both as an ‘other’ to distinguish Russia, and as part of a pan-Slavic identity. Russian leaders from Stalin to Putin have always exploited identity to achieve their imperial goals. What does his tussle with the ruling GreekCatholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels?” When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina not truth but the inner light of truth. Fyodor Dostoevsky in his writings and Andrei Tarkovsky in his cinema were able to uncannily capture this synthesis of opposites.īut it was Vladimir Nabokov who put it best: “Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. As several scholars and Rossiyanin (‘Russianness’) watchers have said, Russia represents polarities: the basest and the highest, the most despicable and the noblest, profanity and sainthood, cynicism and idealism, all meet here. The special fascination Russia has always had for Kerala and Malayalis is because of this cultural repertoire. It has shaped people’s minds and affected their sense, sensibilities and states of being. Historically, Russia has caused much suffering in its neighbourhood and the broader world, but its cultural contribution too is immense. How does one explain the medieval throwback, the horror unfolding in Ukraine? Is Putin’s paranoia the sole reason? Is there something ineluctably ‘Russian’ in such brazen aggression? Can a culture that gave the world Chekhov, The Brothers Karamazov, the Bolshoi, Tchaikovsky and Andrei Rublev also give us the Holodomor (the man-made Soviet ‘terror famine’ in Ukraine) the Gulag, Chernobyl and, now this? TOI searches for some clues
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