IN A RECENT Washington Post column, Sergei Guriev, one of Russia’s top economic thinkers, warned that President Vladimir Putin’s regime was now exclusively focused on survival, and not on a vision for the country’s long-term development. “The Russian regime no longer talks about the future,” he wrote.
I suspect he’s wrong about that. More likely, it’s Guriev, in exile and teaching economics at Sciences Po in Paris, who can’t take seriously Russia’s vision of the world because it seems so irrational to a Western intellectual. To understand this mindset, consider what happened when the Economist published its forecast for 2015, which featured a densely populated illustration on its cover. Conspiracy theorists had a field day. The Vigilant Citizen website, which is devoted to ferreting out Illuminati and other occult symbols it says are hidden in plain sight, published a detailed analysis that was reposted on like-minded sites in a variety of languages. Here’s a sample:
“Right under the Pied Piper we see a young boy with a dumbfounded look on his face. He is watching a game called ‘Panic’. The words ‘Federal Reserve’ and ‘Chi’ (which probably stands for China) are on top while the words ‘Green light!’ and ‘sis!’ (which probably stands for “Isis!” or “Crisis!”) are at the bottom. The little boy watches as this twisted game of Plinko unfolds the same way the clueless masses watch powerlessly while various events unfold on mass media. As the name of the game states, the ultimate goal is to cause panic around the world as crises are almost randomly generated.”
That was in January. This week, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia’s most popular tabloid (with a print circulation of about 30 million and 20 million website visitors per month) published its own analysis of the Economist cover.
Paranoid publication
It used an “expert”, Igor Belous, from a group called Institute of Scientific Research for the Third Millennium, to dissect the illustration. Among other things, he wrote that the presence of the US magician David Blaine behind Putin’s right shoulder was “a transparent hint that Russia should expect more ‘magic tricks’ like the story of the shot-down Boeing… It’s not for nothing that a helicopter bearing the inscription ‘crop-o-dust’ is circling in front of Putin.“
The Rothschilds – a long-time staple of conspiracy theories about nefarious global government – also figure in Belous’s text.
Komsomolskaya Pravda isn’t an official Kremlin publication, nor is it a habitual publisher of alien abduction stories. Putin takes it, and its readership, seriously: Before the 2012 presidential election, he used it to publish an article outlining his social policy. The publication’s dip into paranoia reflects widespread views in Russia. Last autumn, a poll showed that 45 percent of Russians believe in the existence of a supranational government, described as “a certain organisation that controls the authorities of many countries”. That group supposedly includes wealthy individuals – mostly from the West – and Western politicians.
Ivan Ilyin, a Russian philosopher Putin likes to quote, was also a firm believer in mirovaya zakulisa, or a “global behind-the-scenes establishment”. In his 1950 work “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World”, Ilyin wrote: “Let us immediately establish that the dismemberment of Russia being prepared by the mirovaya zakulisa has not the slightest foundation, no spiritual or Realpolitik-related considerations behind it apart from revolutionary demagoguery, a mindless fear of a united Russia.”
Protecting Russia’s unity is one of Putin’s recurrent themes. It’s an issue that resonates: According to a Levada Center poll, 28 percent of Russians, more than before, believe that a foreign conspiracy destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991.
In line with this worldview, Russia’s role in the world is to resist the “global government’s” conspiracy. Its future, as Putin and his ideologists see it, consists in achieving a kind of reverse isolation of the West. While Western governments see themselves on the inside and Russia on the outside, Putin and his entourage are working on turning this image inside out.
The other part of Putin’s vision is rearmament, both military and spiritual.
It’s understandable that none of this makes sense to a rational economist such as Guriev. Putin and his people are now far outside the realm of the conventional. To them, there is far more at stake than just the regime’s survival. That’s what makes them dangerous. – Bloomberg