Russia as it was, as it will be

I've been looking at that last post above, and how much things have changed since then. It's been an amazing, and profoundly depressing few weeks for those of us who have an interest in Russia and its future. I've been paralyzed over how to begin to make sense of all this here, my attitude and fears about what's happening keep changing — becoming reliably more bleak.

There has been a lot of interesting commentary about all this. I think Julia Ioffe at the New Republic did the best job of capturing just how sad it has been to watch from afar this descent into madness:

"Westerners rightly know Russia as a font of absurdity, but lately, it’s been hard to keep up: I’ve been trying to write this post for a solid week now, and have been constantly derailed by the increasingly bizarre and worrying developments coming from the Trans-Eurasian Development Belt."

She ticks off some of the nonsense. The absurdities issued by Kremlin flunkeys in the Duma, the belligerent posturing of the neckless tough guys that dominate the Russian conversation, the inability to discern just where all this ends.

"Here’s what’s scary about this: this is all being done, according to various reports, without any consultation with anyone outside Putin’s shrinking inner circle of old KGB spooks. The economic elites most likely to suffer from a plummeting ruble and sanctions have been shut out of the decision-making process. This is all about intangibles, the things that reason can't hook, the things impervious to logic and reasoning and even the cynical algebra of geopolitical interests. This is about pride and values and the Trans-Eurasian Development Belt. 

And, yes, all of this is familiar and increasingly terrifying, but to whom? To you and me and an increasingly besieged island of Moscow liberals? Because, terrifyingly, familiarly, all of this works. The method has been tried many times, and it is true: Putin’s approval ratings have grown to their highest level in three years."

For 15 years, Putin in plain sight wrote the blueprint and assembled an apparatus for a new kind of autocratic oppression. And now we're watching it click and whir into life.