The Putin Parody
In just ten years, Vladimit Putin's regime, which was consciously designed by its image-makers as a simulacrum incorporating all the aspects of power in Russian history, has also run through all the classical missteps of that history. Indeed, Putinism now seems like a trite parody of all of them.
MOSCOW – The history of authoritarian rule in Russia displays a certain depressing regularity. Such regimes rarely perish from external shocks or оррosition pressure. As a rule, they die unexpectedly from some internal disease – from irresistible existential disgust at themselves, from their own exhaustion.