INNERSANCTUMVECTORN360™|Russia

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ISSN 2833-0455

RUSSIA SPECIAL EDITION PATRICK PASCAL

Former Ambassador, ALSTOM President in Moscow for Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

VECTOR

Patrick Pascal Takes us into Vladimir Putin ’ s years as President of Russia with his insider perspective on Putin ’ s

thoughts, Behavior and actions.

Linda Restrepo Editor | Publisher

Drawing © Christian Pascal

The current residence of the French Ambassador in Moscow, called Igumnov House after a rich merchant in the 19th century and located on Bolshaya Yakimanka Street in one of the historic districts of the Russian capital, was for a time in the 1920s a forensic institute.

It was there, in what is now an elegantly decorated small salon, that Lenin's brain was examined. It is likely that this autopsy did not provide all the explanations and secrets about the Bolshevik revolution. Similarly, to carry out a virtual X-ray of Vladimir Putin today will probably not provide definitive conclusions about the behavior and policies of the Russian president over the past twenty years.

A former President of the United States once said, after a first meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2001, that he had ‘got a sense of his soul’. For lack of a soul, let's make

a more modest effort to enlighten thoughts, behaviors and decisions. In any case, we must try to deepen the analysis off beaten track and received ideas about a power that is naturally not reduced to a single personality, is dependent on a history and is also a reflection of the state of a society.

Nostalgia for Power, a Soviet Legacy

Genes and

education, nature and nurture, are always difficult to identify and separate, but let's look first at The Soviet legacy.

Vladimir Putin's statement that the disappearance of the Soviet Union was ‘the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century’ is now well known, as are his words that ‘one would have to have no heart not to miss the USSR, but no head either to try to rebuild it’.

What were the characteristics of the transition from the USSR to post-Soviet Russia that could shed light on the situation we are now facing? The Soviet Union is now part of history, but that does not mean that it has disappeared irrevocably and that it has not left a lasting impression on people's minds, or that it no longer affects events currently taking place on the European continent.

The end of the Cold War was a failure of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not overthrown by a people's revolution, but rather collapsed in on itself.

The result was great frustration, mainly because of the loss of power of a geographically considerable entity whose ideology had spread throughout the world. It should be noted that this disintegration was not experienced uniformly by all Soviets who had suffered from the dysfunction of the system and experienced deprivation, especially in the former republics of the USSR where distance from the center that was Moscow also marked the beginning of a liberation. For those who had felt euphoria and the expectation

of a capitalism that would solve all problems and bring prosperity, as if by a magic wand, disappointment was considerable and may have fueled strong criticism of the West afterwards.

The question of power has always remained essential since the moment, on the night of December 25-26, 1991, when the flag of the Soviet Union was flown over the Kremlin and replaced by the tricolor flag of the new Russia. The decomposition of the country's power had actually preceded this moment, and historical ruptures rarely take place in a single day.

In the UN Security Council, during the last years of Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR had become more conciliatory through weakness. It no longer systematically used its right of veto, in a concern for a privileged dialogue with the United States in order to limit the arms race, the economic and financial cost of which Moscow had become unable to bear. Mikhail Gorbachev was then designated as the scapegoat for a situation he had largely inherited, as if he had somehow ‘sold out the empire’. Vladimir Putin, for his part, has always kept his distance from the man who was accused in particular of weakness in the negotiations on the reunification of Germany, which the Russians still believe should have been achieved in exchange for the nonenlargement of NATO to the east, which was promised to the Soviet leader.

This alleged ‘promise’, which was never actually formalized but was limited to an oral statement at the time by Secretary of

State James Baker, has come up several times during the current Ukrainian crisis. In any case, it is clear that the weakening of Russia has fueled Putin's discourse on the ‘greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century’ in line with a whole section of public opinion.

Evgeny Primakov, former head of the KGB, who became Minister of Foreign Affairs and then ephemeral Prime Minister in 1998, contributed to reconstituting the State and to restoring a minimum of order in a country ‘on the verge of bankruptcy’, according to his own words in 1998, in only eight months and after years of wild privatizations initiated under Boris Yeltsin and appropriation of the national wealth by those who were called ‘oligarchs’.

Vladimir Putin, who has always had admiration for Primakov, to whom he entrusted later on missions

in the Middle East at the end of his career, is in a certain filiation with the latter. The Russian people, it must be admitted, were grateful to him for this policy of restoring order, which explains much of his longlasting popularity.

But Primakov quickly understood, unlike Putin, that Russia was no longer a superpower - except as regard its nuclear arsenalfrom the moment the Soviet Union had collapsed. This is perhaps the main source of Putin's error in the war in Ukraine, after years of obsessive reflection on the revenge he had to take on the West. For the war in Ukraine is a war against the West through Ukrainians.

The theory of ‘humiliation’ of Russia, which has sometimes been used in recent months, is in fact only a camouflage or a justification of this spirit and this project of revenge.

If some blunders have been committed against Russia since 1991, there has never been a systematic policy aimed at humiliation. For example, George Bush Sr. was very concerned to spare the dying USSR, which had nuclear weapons and was threatened with collapse.

The international financial institutions, whether the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) provided significant aid to the new Russia, a NATORussia Council was set up, etc. This list is not exhaustive, which invalidates the thesis that Moscow was ostracized.

The subject would deserve considerable development, which some historians have already done, to emphasize that a ‘Soviet legacy’ is also due to the failure of the democratic

transition under Gorbachev and even Yeltsin, as well as to the inability of the Russian leaders to understand the modern world and to adapt to an open economy from a closed command economy, as if encased in an iron corset.

This was evident in Russia's handling of the international economic and financial crisis of 2008, which we shall return to later. If one wanted to summarize and schematize, at the risk of caricaturing, one could say that the transition from the USS took place, in a schizophrenic manner, against a backdrop of expectation and fascination of the Russian people for the West, accompanied by a repulsion as to the consequences of unprecedented and considerable changes.

Confinement and obsidian complex

The Soviet Union was a world apart and even claimed to be. This is still the case for Russia.

The paradox is that the country, which lost 5 million km2 after 1991, remains the largest in the world by size, in an extension from Europe to the Pacific and from the northern seas frozen in winter to the warm seas, object of all dreams and covetousness. Today, it is a question of controlling the entire Sea of Azov, the gateway to the Black Sea and beyond to the Mediterranean. For all that, Russia feels permanently threatened, or so it claims. But isn't this the result of its constant will to expand, characteristic of its entire history, starting with the Great Principality of Muscovy in the 15th century? In any case, this is one of the manifestations of its obsidian complex.

It is always striking to feel when you are in Moscow, that is to say 3 or 4 hours by plane from the main European capitals, a mental distance more than

proportional to the geographical distance alone. For Vladimir Putin, this feeling of strangeness bordering on a form of claustration, comes from far away. It is certainly partly linked to the history of his parents in the terrible siege of Leningrad during the Second World War. The Russian head of state, however stingy with confidences, told himself to Hillary Clinton - who made it public in her book Hard Choices - the story of his father who came back from the front to save his wife in extremis from a mass burial with other victims of deprivation or typhus.

While it is not a matter of superficial psychological analysis, it is generally accepted that the violence suffered is often reproduced. Therefore, do not the siege of Mariupol and the battle around the Soviet-looking factory in Avoszstal as well as the relentlessness of

Bakhmut in the Donbass - whose military or strategic significance is not always understood - have distant reminiscences with Leningrad or the battle of Stalingrad?

Celebration of May 9, ‘Victory Day’ in 1945, while totally justified, is also a way of maintaining a cult of defense of the besieged and invaded homeland. In this regard, Vladimir Putin is to be credited with having organized a parade of the ‘Battalion of Immortals’ on this date for several years.

He himself took the lead and allowed citizens, in an expression of a more individual character than the demonstrations in Red Square, to march with the portrait of their ancestors sacrificed in battle. The Russian President carried the portrait of his father, a tutelary figure who never leaves his side and is always in evidence in his office, wherever he is.

The Kremlin, or rather the Kremlins should be said, because there are several Kremlins in several Russian cities - such as Suzdal, Novgorod, Rostov the Great, Pskov, Nizhny Novgorod or Astrakhan - is built on a mound and reflects the essence of a dominating power, but distant from invaders as well as the people.

In the maze of endless corridors, in the offices and ceremonial rooms, not a single sound of the city, i.e. of life, is perceptible. Offices of some officials - for example, the office of Alexander Rutskoi, a former fighter pilot and hero in Afghanistan who became Boris Yeltsin's vice-president - are arranged lengthwise along an endless map of the Soviet Union, which can be up to ten meters long.

This attests to the will to dominate a world that is not otherwise seen or heard. During the first years of postSoviet Russia, Lenin's office was kept in the Kremlin in its original state - as well as that of his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya in a ministry where she had been deputy minister of culture - like a chapel in the Vatican where people would come to worship.

What was also striking was the presence on the walls of Lenin's office of geographical maps revealing conquests and territorial projects.

If one must always make part of innate, of education and also of function, Vladimir Putin has for a long time expressed by his behavior a form of autism. If, after two presidential terms, he was no longer the man from St. Petersburg, whose elongated and hollowed out face reminded us - without misplaced zoomorphism -

more than a wolf, because Putin does not hunt in a pack, of a fox that is as much stalked as it is in search of prey, Vladimir Putin still seemed uncomfortable, even to the point of an almost sickly shyness of his behavior.

Even the endless annual press conferences did not really bring him closer to his fellow citizens and Vladimir Putin was rarely seen talking to the man in the street. Efforts made in recent weeks of the war in Ukraine, no doubt in response to the communication of the Ukrainian president, have not been more natural and convincing. A practice remains that of the ‘Potemkin village’ with its artificial decorations and sometimes its extras.

Years spent in Dresden, East Germany, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, did not necessarily give Vladimir Putin an opening to the world.

The modest KGB agent - who was appointed head of the FSB in 1998, a few months before becoming Prime Minister - was in fact doubly confined, firstly in a provincial town closer to the East than to the West and secondly within a Soviet community generally considered by the local population - with which it would not mix - as an occupying force. In fact, Soviet forces in this part of Germany reached up to 500,000 men, giving it the highest military ‘density’ in the world, given the relatively small size of the GDR. However, these forces were not very visible and were generally confined to garrisons or even forests defined as ‘no-go areas’ (Sperrgebiete).

It does not seem that Vladimir Putin came back

enchanted from such an experience, except that he brought back a very decent practice of the German language, sometimes mistaken for a German ‘tropism’.

This was undoubtedly useful in his dealings with Chancellor Merkel, and even with other representatives of the German political class. If it is not a question of evoking Chancellor Schröder, whose closeness to Putin's Russia is well known. It is to the only Foreign Minister Steinmeier, today President of the Federal Republic, received in his presidential residence of Novo Ogarevo, that he confided reportedly several months before the 2008 deadline, that he would not run for a third consecutive presidential term, which the Constitution did not allow him to do, and that he had chosen Dmitri Medvedev to replace him for a single term.

Was this an expression of Russia's unparalleled closeness to Germany in Western Europe or a message to reassure German industry?

Distance from reality is also distance from economic policy. Vladimir Putin has often displayed an impressive knowledge of the issues, thus forging the image of a competent technocrat.

It was not very difficult for him to distance himself from the image of his capricious predecessor Boris Yeltsin. But mastery of files does not necessarily translate into an understanding of mechanisms, especially those of a modern economy.

‘Diversification’ of the economy was the leitmotif of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency (2008-2012), while

Prime Minister Putin insisted in his inaugural speech on May 8, 2008 on the ‘modernization »’ of economy

and integration of Russia into the world economy.

The global financial crisis, which began to affect Russia in the fall of 2008, has dashed any hopes of transformation. The persistent mental sclerosis inherited from a closed, command economy conception did not facilitate the understanding of contemporary economic mechanisms during a particularly troubled period on the global level either.

During the first months of the crisis, oil’s price dropped from $147 per barrel to $30 between July and September 2008, while the level for maintaining a balanced budget was $60. There was a lively debate within the government, particularly between Finance Minister

Alexei Kudrin and Economy Minister German Gref, about the best allocation of oil revenues.

These revenues fed a Stabilization Fund above $27 a barrel, which had by then reached several hundred billion dollars (NB: $600 billion at its peak, including about half of the Central Bank's reserves). The Minister of Finance, in a spirit of perfect financial rigorism, argued for the freezing of the Fund on the grounds that it had been created precisely to deal with sudden fluctuations in energy prices that Russia had already experienced so cruelly. German Gref, on the other hand, believed that the considerable amounts saved should be used for investments which, even in times of low economic growth, would guarantee future development.

The Kudrin line won out in the end, and we do not remember Prime Minister Putin taking a clear line in this debate.

Kudrin thought he had triumphed when the storm hit, even though the weaknesses noted before the crisis (excessive dependence on raw materials, particularly energy, around 80%; dilapidated infrastructure; insufficient supply and double-digit inflation; regional imbalances) were still there.

Fall in energy prices had caused a marked deterioration in the terms of trade that should have led to a formal devaluation. The executive power refused to do so for political and social reasons, in a country still affected by the 1998 syndrome, a sort of ‘financial Chernobyl’ (NB: the value of the rouble fell by 70% in a few days), substituting a policy of adjustments sometimes described as ‘wrong steps in the right direction’. The Central Bank intervened to the tune of $200 billion between November 2008 and

February 2009 to halt the loss of value of the rouble. This did not prevent a de facto devaluation of about 30 per cent over the period.

Russia did not take advantage of this period to invest in its infrastructure and modernize. The diversification of the economy, despite the wishes of President Medvedev, was not seriously undertaken. There is undoubtedly a certain mental backwardness of state officials, often trained and even in charge during the Soviet period.

Autocratic tradition and endemic violence of power

The ‘vertical power’ of Putin’s years was in line with the governance during the Soviet era and the tsarist autocracy. The latter, beyond institutions and governance, is a deep part of Russian culture. Even the liturgy of the Orthodox religion, despite the soothing holy images of Our Lady of Kazan or Vladimir, is mainly male and women are veiled in churches especially during the major religious

holidays, the most important of which is Easter. The image of Christ Pantocrator reproduced under the domes of churches and monasteries projects an image of power and domination over the believers. It is therefore not surprising that Stalin, especially in order to mobilize masses during the Second World War, went closer to the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. We can think that Putin, whatever the depth of his beliefs, made the same calculation, especially in a country that has lost its bearings since the official disappearance of communism.

Vladimir Putin cultivated the image of the implacable supreme leader very early on. It is even on this project that he made himself known and elected the first time to the presidency against the backdrop of a country in the grip of separatist and Islamist forces in Chechnya. From the tragedy of the Kursk submarine at the beginning of his first term, for which his

management was criticized in particular in the powerful media (see ORT channel of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky) until then in his devotion, Vladimir Putin made an ostentatious change. Thus, he displayed himself alternately in the garb of a generalissimo, an airplane pilot or a sailor in a mimicry reminiscent of the fighter Stalin rather than the ideologue Lenin.

Verticality of power, necessary to restore the state and meet expectations of the people after the chaos of the Yeltsin years, could not accommodate a ‘horizontal’ society, i.e. the sharing of power with the powerful people as in feudalism. Post-Soviet Russia was built on a kind of Dr. Faust-like pact between state power and new prominent figures of the economy - often coming from old power structures (Siloviki) - who were called ‘oligarchs’.

It was they who, by appropriating last remnants of the national wealth, allowed Boris Yeltsin, thanks to their money and influence, to be re-elected in 1996.

Tatiana, Boris Yeltsin's daughter, was in charge of coordinating the process. It was also she who suggested to her father to call an unknown person, recently appointed head of the internal security (FSB) to become head of government and the future president who would guarantee the interests of the family of the resigning president. However, Putin could not accept this competing power, believing in his inexperience and docility. A conflict was therefore brewing in the tradition of the ancient historical opposition between the tsar and the boyars. The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had political aspirations, and his oil company Yukos, which was quickly dismembered, were the first victims of atonement because it was a question of making an example. Khodorkovsky's sentence to 9 years in prison for tax evasion was completed and announced, while the oligarch was already in prison, during a breakfast in the Kremlin to which Vladimir Putin had summoned the country's main oligarchs.

The message was clear and Putin has been in the habit, since 2000, of publicly chastising the boyars in front of the cameras.

Vladimir Putin is reputed to be one of the richest men in the world.

However, his fortune must be compared with that of his competitors in the economic sphere, whose wealth could prove threatening when one considers that annual capital flight has often been estimated for a hundred billion dollars a year. In other words, money has become in Russia as much a weapon of destabilization of power as a means of defense, even of survival. In this respect, one of the consequences of the war in Ukraine may have been reduction in the power of oligarchs. Vladimir Putin has asked them to finance his war, assets have been seized or have had to be repatriated, not to mention a cascade of brutal disappearances that have not yet been elucidated.

Extreme violence within Russian society, as a fairly ordinary way of exercising power, is almost unparalleled in the developed societies of the northern hemisphere. Tragic events have occurred during the Putin years, but they cannot be all attributed with certainty to him. The long list began with the 1999 attacks on apartment buildings in Moscow, which killed hundreds of people, allowed Vladimir Putin, who was aspiring to the presidency, to establish himself as the country's new strongman, and led to a fierce crackdown on the second Chechen war, already known as a ‘special operation’.

Other ‘cases’ have marked the minds of Litvinenko poisoned with polonium in London in 2006 and Skripal with a chemical agent in the United Kingdom, journalist Anna Polikovtskaya, killed on

October 7, Putin's birthday but whose execution points rather to Kadyrov, ‘suicide’ in 2013 of Boris Berezovski, still in Londongrad, or the opponent Boris Nemtsov, shot in the back in May 2015 a few hundred meters from the Kremlin on the bridge leading to St. Basil's Cathedral.

Many question marks remain over these cases, may we believe, according to a former head of the Russian President's communication, that the latter was actually ‘a weak man who wanted to appear strong’?

If this is the case, the strategy of terror pursued in Ukraine - up to the use of Kadyrov and Prigozhin's Wagner Legionunfortunately has a certain logic, and this could also explain the recurrent reference, veiled or indirect, on the Russian side, to the possible use of unconventional weapons in the ongoing war.

Putin's Weltanschauung

What is the world view (Weltanschauung) of Vladimir Putin? There was a speech on security matters in 2007 at the Wehrkunde in Munich and since September 30, 2022 in the Kremlin when the annexation of four Ukrainian territorial entities was proclaimed. In the Munich speech, Putin addressed the West to talk about Russia; in the Kremlin speech, he addressed Russia to denounce the West.

Inspiration for both speeches was comparable and there is no real difference between them, except in degree and style. The common orientation of the speeches is clearly anti-Western: denunciation of a unipolar world dominated by the United States in 2007 was followed fifteen years later by a full-blown indictment of the entire Western world and the assertion of specifically Russian ‘values’.

The speech at the Munich Wehrkunde was structured and diplomatic; the one in the Kremlin is more incantatory and disheveled and expresses a rupture in the form of a real indictment.

In Munich, attempts to establish a unipolar world after the end of the Cold War were denounced and the United States was named, but at the same time use of force and violations of international law were rejected; a commitment to the multilateral system of the United Nations, which alone would retain the use of force, was emphasized; a space for cooperation with Washington was preserved, in particular for further reduction of nuclear arsenals, nonproliferation and nonmilitarization of outer space. The Kremlin's speech was above all a plea for the legitimacy of the annexations, an indictment of the colonizing and dominating

West and a vigorous indictment of the degeneracy of a rogue West.

The Russian obsidional complex took its full measure there (see ‘hatred against Russia...Barbarians are those who do not comply...hunger, discord and poverty imposed on Russia after the collapse of the USSR…'). Under a classic and renewed leitmotiv of ‘(unkept) promise not to enlarge NATO to the East’, inversion of guilt and distancing from any responsibility is total: it is NATO that violated principles of inviolability of borders; the Blitzkrieg was the work of the West against Russia; a hybrid war was waged against it; the borders of the Soviet republics were ‘cut up in the corridors (of offices)’.

This language was uncompromising, even violent and threatening, as was the speech in the Luzhniki stadium, on March 18, 2022, in front of 80,000 people: a catalog of Western turpitudes was endless (see treatment of the ‘Indian

tribes’ of America, colonial policy of France and England, opium war against China, Korea, Vietnam, napalm and chemical weapons, ruins of Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne, telephone tapping of world leaders); veiled threats to use nuclear weapons was once again raised (see ‘the United States used it twice, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is a precedent’); evolution of Western societies is globally judged ‘satanic’.

In addition to this catalog of unforgivable grievances, the Russian president echoed the theme, which was more or less in the background in Munich, of ‘a new world order, just and democratic’. Russia, with its thousand-year-old history, is a ‘country at the head of the anti-colonialist movement',

in favor of ‘new alliances’. If, according to Vladimir Putin, it is necessary to engage in a ‘battle for the great historical Russia’, its language, its culture and its values, what is striking in the presentation of this Weltanschauung, is the absence of real introspection, and of reflection on Russia itself and its evolution, except for a few clichés stated in conclusion. At most, we learn, at the beginning of the speech, that ‘past cannot come back, and that is not part of our aspirations’. Indeed, the Soviet Union is dead, including its positive aspects, because there were some for the people, for example in the field of education and culture. But what has become of Russia? What is its history in the collective memory?

In reality, isn't Russian culture above all linked to the soil, to the land, rather than to a transmission through memory?

‘Russian memory, Russian oblivion’, wrote a great historian. Denying Russian history, fantasizing about it or tinting it with ideology has prevented the Russian people from rebuilding themselves, even though they were losing their bearings at the time and undoubtedly had a deep desire to do so. The democratic ferment of the Gorbachev period and even of the first years of the ‘transition’ under Boris Yeltsin demonstrated this.

In his Kremlin speech, the Russian president, contrary to the Hegelian principle that ‘one poses as an opponent’, asserts exclusively a rejection.

But he does not clearly define what Russia is. Does he know it himself, i.e. does he have a real historical knowledge of it beyond his personal background? He had said that disappearance of the Soviet Union was ‘the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century’.

But if he admits today that he does not want to return to this past, it is because he has never tried to defend or restore it. His project was devoid of Marxist-Leninist ideology, of communist values - and dare we say morals? It consisted of a religion of the state, of power, and of an autocracy barely concealing in reality a predatory oligarchy. This is not to deny a form of patriotism, but it was associated with a lack of deep knowledge of history and a willingness to erase or distort parts of it in the good old Soviet tradition. Vladimir Putin talks about Western colonization, but he does not say that the entire history of Russia is that of an expansion towards the East, that is to say also a colonization but this one having been deployed on a contiguous space. His presentation of the emergence of the independent republics from the Soviet Union suggests

that they were created at a distance, far from the will of the people. Nothing could be further from the truth, as there were already strong tensions between certain Central Asian republics and the center even before the end of the USSR. The Russian president seems to be discovering today Ukrainian national feelings that his intelligence services would have hidden from him, which is also a way of explaining the initial strategic error of Ukraine’s invasion. But everyone knew and there was no need for investigations and indicators on the spot.

Putin's silence on the vicissitudes and monstrosities of the Stalinist regime is deafening, and the image of the ‘Little Father of the Peoples’ even seems to be a reference for this new tsar.

It is obviously not a question of amnesia when the cereal blockade, now somewhat relaxed, reminds us of the terrible Holodomor of the 30's; it is the same when populations are displaced as Stalin did with the Crimean Tatars, and when one reaches an absolute monstrosity when one separates children from their families to deport them to the heart of Russia with the aim, no doubt, of purifying the race of the ‘genocidal people and Nazis’.

There is thus both amnesia and erasure of memory, an ‘organized amnesia factory’. The banning of the Memorial Association in the autumn of 2021 - the same one that won the Nobel Peace Prizefor its courageous investigative work on Stalinist persecutions, and then on human rights violations in general, was already a particularly worrying warning sign. The concomitant closure of the radio station Echo of Moscow, hosted by Alexis Venediktov, the most free-thinking of the Russian audio-visual panorama, could only reinforce such apprehensions. This erasure of memory was

manifested, for example, by the destruction with explosives in 1931, probably on Stalin's orders, of the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was erected in honor of the combatants of 1812. It was rebuilt in 1989 on the initiative of Yuri Luzhkov, then mayor of the capital. On the other hand, in the historical district of Zamoskvoretche, which burned like all the others after the Napoleonic occupation, many houses and buildings in neoclassical style were rebuilt with the inscription "destroyed by the Moscow fire of 1812 ».

A scenario of the end of Empire?

All empires will perish...historians have sometimes estimated. In any case, it can be said that the spectre of Putin's defeat appeared as soon as the regular Russian troops crossed Ukrainian borders.

Whatever the military outcome, a Russia that is outlawed will not be viable in the long term. Ukraine, on the other hand, has already earned its place in Europe.

The lesson of forgotten memory will have to be learned, but the process will not take place naturally: in Russia, re-education of the people by the people themselves is far from guaranteed. In postwar Germany, the ‘Three Ds’ Demilitarization, Denazification, Deindustrialization - were the result of the policy of the occupying forces.

The first two components, applied to Germany, represent a long-term process. The third part does not arise in the case of Russia, as the war industry was not the driving force of the economy.

based essentially on hydrocarbon exports.

Putin has never been a sort of Peter the Great reformer and builder, despite his youth, which contrasted with the Soviet gerontocracy, except for Mikhail Gorbachev, and the post-Soviet one. A modernity of facade thus made illusion that embodied the oligarchy, the fast and easy fortunes and a youth freed for a time from the shackles and the closure of a communist society.

Contradictions became more pronounced as Russia became largely dependent on the West for trade and investment. Things have since rebalanced in favor of China, but Europe remains Russia's main economic partner.

On the contrary, it will be necessary for this country to get out of its rent economy,

At the same time, the government's ‘Eurasian’ policy is coming up against the new realities of a Central Asia that intends to pursue its emancipation.

This ex-Soviet Asia is becoming increasingly anxious in light of the aggression of the Ukraine, even though it is still home to significant Russian minorities, for example in Kazakhstan. The former Soviet republics intend to continue their forward march, restrained only by the caution aroused by the prospect of an exclusive face-off with China.

The Tsar of a Russian Island

By attempting to reconstitute a style of power inspired by czarist autocracy and by relying on the parallel power vertical of the Orthodox Church, Vladimir Putin has entered into a slavophile tradition. In doing so, he has been more in tune with the working classes, who have guided him as much as he has guided them, as befits a statesman.

Popular imagination remains oriental, in an innate and natural way, and it largely escapes the great intellectual debate opposing occidentalism to the slavophile current which began in the first

third of the 19th century. Kadyrov, the Chechen, or Minikhanov, the president of Tatarstan - both present in the Kremlin for the September 30 speech - are perceived from the outside as representing the marches of the empire, even though they are not geographically very far from Moscow and are even a sort of enclave in the heart of the Russian Federation in the case of Tatarstan. It is not certain, however, that the majority of Russian opinion appreciates the inclusion of a Chechen - and in general of those who are not ethnically Russian - in the war in Ukraine.

But Russian attitude is ambiguous in relation to this Eastern world, which is nevertheless part of the deep unconscious. One only has to think of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade or Borodin's Polotsian Dances, two works of the so-called Musical Group of Five, which advocated a specifically national music based above all on Russian folk traditions.

Without a clearly defined project, other than that determined by an eternal resentment towards the West, without ideology or reference points, the Russian president has withdrawn into his ‘vertical power’. He has tried to reproduce the triptych of Nicholas I, namely OrthodoxyAutocracy-National Specificity, against the current of a Europeanization in the in the spirit of Peter the Great. Vladimir Putin leads in Ukraine a war of the 20th century in the 21st century, with a mental scheme inherited from the 19th century.

When Russia was threatened in 1565 with invasion (NB: by the Poles), Ivan IV the Terrible wanted to save the Holy Russia. In his film Tsar, Pavel Lungin asks the question whether such a resistance authorizes to free oneself from all moral references and to accomplish all exactions.

Ivan the Terrible wants to rely on the Church in his enterprise, as did Stalin during the Second World War. Two conceptions of religion are opposed: the exalted one in the service of absolutism; the authentically spiritual one of the metropolitan.

The latter is a childhood friend of the Tsar, appointed by the latter and who will end up rebelling against the secular power; he embodies a mystical and emotional Russia. The Tsar was not lacking in spirituality either, baptized and married in the Trinity Cathedral of Sergyev Possad to which he was very attached. But in the name of what he believed to be the reason of State and in order to preserve the absolute character of his power, he will have the one who will become ‘Saint Philip of Moscow »'executed. The admirable actor Piotr Mamonov, who plays Ivan the Terrible, summarizes the thought of the latter: ‘as a man I am a sinner, as a Tsar I am just’.

While the war in Ukraine continues and we safe from a new seems difficult to Russia after the the nature of our with it. In any case, have lost by violating international law his country's image, handicapping its and technological development, not to mention alleged massive that will be brought attention of the relevant international bodies. Russia will however remain Europe's neighbor and it will continue its post-Soviet evolution. It is even desirable that it accelerate it in the interest of all.

The filmmaker Pavel Lugin can still be called upon to help us discern a way out of a crisis that is in fact a catastrophe for the entire European continent.

In his film The Island, a man who believes himself to be a criminal takes refuge in a monastery in the northern regions. This geographical isolation is also a mental confinement in a remorse which, by dint of being repeated, can lead to a form of redemption. Such a step will always remain possible for Russians as individuals. But Putin seems walled up in his myth of Stalingrad and of a possible reversal of fate at the end of a relentless winter. PP

Hasn't his confinement, accentuated by the pandemic, finally led him to be affected by a Stockholm syndrome?

Hasn't he indeed become his own jailer and doesn't he love his character?

PATRICK PASCAL

Former Ambassador, Former President of ALSTOM Group in Moscow, Founder and President of "Perspectives Europe-Monde" Knight of the National Order of Merit. ALSTOM President in Moscow for Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. PASCAL’S diplomatic career has focused on strategic issues, East-West and North-South, the UN, the Arab world, Europe, and Central Asia, during his postings in Berlin, Rome, New York, Moscow, Riyadh, Damascus, London, and Ashgabat.

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Political Affairs Division, United Nations and International Organizations.

• Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations, New York.

Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paris.

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Political Affairs Division, United Nations and International Organizations.

• Embassy of France to the GDR, East Berlin.

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Directorate of Political Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Disarmament.

Publications :

- Journal d’Ukraine et de Russie, les crises and l’évolution du système international, VA Éditions, 2022.

Academic background:

- Sciences Po Paris, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Sorbonne, Universität des Saarlandes, Rheinische Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität Bonn.

LINDA RESTREPO is the Director of Education and Innovation Human Health Education and Research Foundation. She is recognized. Women in Technology Leader, Cybersecurity, and Artificial Intelligence. Restrepo’s expertise also includes Exponential Technologies, Computer Algorithms, Research, and Implementation. Management of Complex Human-machine Systems.

Global Economic Impacts Research. Restrepo is President of a global government and military defense multidisciplinary research and strategic development firm. She has directed Corporate Technology Commercialization through the U.S. National Laboratories. Emerging Infectious Diseases, Restrepo is also the Chief Executive Officer of Professional Global Outreach. Restrepo has advanced degrees from The University of Texas and New Mexico State University.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-restrepo-6341a962/

TECHNOLOGY IN THE MAKING

TECHNOLOGY IN THE MAKING

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