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Peter Savodnik asks if Westerners can understand the Russian people’s love of strong leaders in his article at Slate:
For 15 years, at least, a cultural-cognitive gap has been growing between the people and the state. That space is a manifestation of the public’s alienation from its government. Attempts to paper over that alienation, to foist a new solidarity on an old people, are absurd. The people, especially the young people who are impervious to the old dogma, know this.
So, too, does the president, who’s not a Soviet premier so much as a tsar, dispensing with ideology and reappropriating the powers of 19th-century imperialism. Whether it’s single-handedly rerouting massive oil pipelines or reorganizing the federal bureaucracy, Putin has not so much resurrected a dead superstate as responded to Russians’ long-festering desire for a “strong hand.”
And I myself have been surprised how many Russian desire a strong autocratic leader. Perhaps Russia will always need a tsar.
May 18th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Bolshevism is alive and well in Russia, though it has been called many different things. They were Bolsheviks before Bolshevism had a name, and they’ve time and again traded one form of it for another. Even Russian-American author Ayn Rand, who fervently opposed such collectivism, never fully escaped the “king-worshipping” mentality that characterizes the desire to be ruled. They are an interesting people, to say the least.