Russia * Europe * America
Russia under Putin was unable to create a stable state with a succession principle and the rule of law. Because failure had to be presented as success, Russia had to present itself as a model for Europe, rather than the other way around. This required that success be defined not in terms of prosperity and freedom but in terms of sexuality and culture, and that the European Union (and the United States) be defined as threats not because of anything they did but because of the values they supposedly represented. Putin executed this maneuver with stunning rapidity as he returned to office as president in 2012.
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The basic line of Russian foreign policy through 2011 was not that the European Union and the United States were threats. It was that they should coooperate with Russia as an equal. The decade of the 2000s was the lost opportunity for the creation of a Russian state that might have been seen as such. Russia managed no democratic changes of executive power. What had been an oligarchy of contending clans in the 1990s was transformed into a kleptocracy, in which the state itself became the single oligarchical clan. Rather than monopolizing law, the Russian state under Putin monopolized corruption. To be sure, the state provided a measure of stability to its citizens in the 2000s, thanks to exports of natural gas and oil. It did not deliver the promise of social advancement to the bulk of the Russian population. Russians who founded business could be arrested at any time for any imagined violation of the law, and very often they were.
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The mature Ilyin rejected the rule of law in favor of the arbitrariness--proizvol--of fascism. Having given up hope that Russia could be governed by law, he presented lawlessness(proizvol) as a patriotic virtue. Putin followed the same trajectory, citing Ilyin as his authority. When he first ran for president in 2000, he spoke of the need for a “dictatorship of the law.” Those two concepts contradicted each other, and one of them fell away. Running for president in 2012, Putin rejected the idea of a European Russia, which meant ignoring external incentives that favored the rule of law. Instead, proizvol would be presented as redemptive patriotism. The operative concept in the Russian language today is bespredel, boundary-less-ness, the absence of limits, the ability of a leader to do anything. The word itself arose from criminal jargon.
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— Timothy, Synder (a credentialed historian Kasparov recommends)