Putin's end result is the creation of the Stalinist USSR, which he has already done. Russia has recently banned YouTube, Viber, Discord, Instagram and Facebook. In fact, he returns the Stalinist USSR, that is, it is totalitarianism, but without social assistance. He is very different from Brezhnev, Khrushchev or Gorbachev, he is Stalin.
Putin has no ideology - he can say contradictory things every year and the Russians will tolerate it. He has already lost about 600,000 soldiers wounded and killed. By the way, the USSR lost only 15,000 soldiers killed during the entire campaign in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
Putin has only one "ideology" - his worship of the russian imperialist idea. Stupidly mistaken were those who deemed him "just" another one in the string of petty dictators who only want to grab as much goodies for themselves as possible. If it were "just" about money or power he would never invaded ukraine. Putin may have no ideology but by no means he has no ideals.
Just look at who he often cites - Peter the great, Alexander III, Stalin. Quite the company you got there. People who he genuinely looks up to. And outlines his style of rule pretty well. Whereas the likes of the "liberal" wing - Gorbachev, Lenin, etc were critisized in his "history lessons" on more than one occasion.
Lol, he started the war in 2022 just for the sake of raising the public's trust rating, just like he did in 2014 with Crimea. The only difference is that the Ukrainian army in 2014 and in 2022 are two different armies + he was given reports that he would occupy Kiev in three days, as Ukrainians would meet Russian soldiers with flowers and would not resist. Now he is stuck and trying to find a way out of the hole he got into, constantly doing absurd things from partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 to the purchase of North Korean soldiers. He's just cornered himself and is rushing around trying to find a way out of the situation.
He has no ideology, he imprisons and kills all his opponents, regardless of whether they are left-wing or right-wing: whether it is the neo-Nazi Tesak or the Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky. He spent all 25 years probing the ground in Russia, when he tried to pass himself off as a classic liberal for the first two presidential terms, and now he's openly cosplaying Stalin, when for two words "No to War" you will be given a prison sentence of 8 years.
After Yeltsin's rule and the 1990s, the deep people of Russia began to dream of a heavy hand, a dictatorship, and a strong leader who would determine the lives of the entire population of the country. At the same time, Stalin's revival began and many of his apologists appeared. Even today, Stalin has an approval rating of about 60% according to independent sociological data, although he imprisoned millions in the Gulag and hundreds of thousands were executed. The deep people of Russia want Stalin, and Putin has given himself to them in the form of Stalin 2.0.
He didn't have to do any of this shit, if you know anything about Russia and its people. In reality, Putin could've just dropped any pretense of democracy and electoral procedures and nobody in Russia would bat an eye. Democracy, civil rights etc isn't part of russian political vocabulary. It's literally a non-issue to anybody but those 5-10% of liberals who are leaving this country for better life even as we speak. Putin only has to maintain this charade for outsiders, namely western democracies who want to believe they can speak with a negotiable and legitimate russian leader who represents his own people.
In 2012, there were mass rallies against Putin, especially on Bolotnaya Square, when 100,000 Russians came out against Putin's re-election, but in 2014 he seized Crimea and gained huge popularity for it. Of course, he wanted to repeat this trick, since in 2021 there were mass rallies in Russia again in support of Navalny, who returned to Russia after being poisoned.
Whatever the Chabad jews want.
This.
He indeed has no ideology but it doesn't mean he is completely dispassionate. Left or right - these taxonomies serve no purpose and are meaningless to him. He is a faithful servant of the russian imperial project, following in the footsteps of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the great, Ekaterina II, Nicholas I, Alexander III, Stalin etc. Russia has more than five hundred years of history and political tradition. And Putin exemplifies this political tradition perfectly well. He's truly a russian ruler in spirit. And it's silly to try to compare him to petty african or lat american dictators, like some people do.
Yes, in fact, it's just despotism, whether it's an absolute monarchy or totalitarian communism of the Stalinist type. There are no traditions, there is just despotism, a personalistic dictatorship and contempt for the value of human life.
Putin is just effectively using one rhetoric after another. He was a personal friend of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and today, in 2023-2024, new monuments to Stalin are being unveiled in Russia. He has no ideals, he's just an opportunist. Today he can say good things about Nicholas 2 or Alexander 3, and tomorrow he can praise the Bolsheviks who killed the royal family. He believes in nothing and tells the people what they want to hear from him.
Everything most people know about him is just image created by political image makers, in reality he is nothing, just a empty puppet of Jewish elites that installed him instead of Yeltsin.
Yeah kinda this.
Rather, he's an old chekist who learned from the mistakes of his predecessors. Autocracies of the past were quite inflexible. USSR had communism, nazi germany had this weird racial theory, absolute monarchies had godly authoritative figure of monarch etc. These kind if regimes were vulnerable to the internal criticism. Putin and co. built the modern type of autocracy that can accomodate the internal demand. When there's a chance of Russia joining NATO and stirring the agenda towards itself, Putin calls himself a liberal. When steets are full of faithless people who dream about a firm overreaching hand of the master of the russian land, Putin cites Stalin, etc. Left or right, pseudo-communist or pseudo-liberal, the hidden undertone of this post-modernist facade is one.
That wouldn't be the historical russia we know.
