JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin the Great; Russia’s Imperial Impostor” – Foreign Affairs/ Susan B. Glasser

File Photo of Vladimir Putin Sitting at Desk

“… Putin did not want to be compared with … Brezhnev … [who] ruled the Soviet Union … 1964 to 1982 … leader of Putin’s gritty youth … the long stagnation that preceded the empire’s collapse. Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon Sitting and Talking, as Nixon Gestures, with Third Man Standing and Leaning Closely Between ThemBy the end … butt of a million jokes … doddering grandfather of a doddering state ….  ‘Stalin proved that just one person could manage the country,’ went one of those many jokes. ‘Brezhnev proved that a country doesn’t need to be managed at all.’ … No matter how contrived his admiration for Peter the Great, Putin File Photo of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalinhas in fact styled himself a tsar as much as a Soviet general secretary over … two decades in public life. … only nine years away from hitting Stalin’s modern record for Kremlin longevity …. We may have misunderestimated him before, but that doesn’t mean we might not misoverestimate him now. The warning signs … shrinking economy … shrill nationalism as a distraction from internal decay, an inward-looking elite feuding over the division of spoils while taking its monopoly on power for granted. Will this be Putin’s undoing? Who knows? But the ghost of Brezhnev is alive and well in Putin’s Kremlin.”

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