The Russian System.A view from the inside.Implementing George Kennan's method to explane Russian conduct

by Gleb Pavlovsky

Mr. Pavlovsky may not be a household name in the West, but he's worth listening to. An erstwhile Soviet dissident trained as a historian who transformed himself into one of the interior designers of Mr. Putin's regime, he performed in the Kremlin's "jazz band" for over a decade. This year he published "The System of the Russian Federation;·which relies heavily on Mr. Kennan's ideas to offer a timely critique of the West's assumptions about Mr. Putin's Russia... In Mr. Pavlovsky's reading, Russia today is neither an ideologic warrior seeking to remake the world order nor a hard-nosed realist desperately defendin its sphere of influence. Far from grand strategy,what animates Mr. Putin's Kremlin is the assertion of its right to break international rules. In fact, breaking the rules withou being punished is the Kremlin's peculiar definition of being a great power... Reading Mr. Pavlovsky's book, one realizes that what is totally absent in the Western analyses of today's Russia is this "end of the world" mentality among Mr. Putin's political and intellectual elites. In Mr. Pavlovsky's view,the experience of the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than geopolitical interests or values, is the key for derstanding Russia's strategic behavior and the inner logic of Mr. Putin's regime. Ivan Krastev,chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in nna, author of Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. The New York Times,August 13,2015

Genres: Russia

83 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2015

Reviews

[Nadin Brzezinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a must read

It’s not Putin’s Russia. It’s the system. It’s older than Soviet Russia and we must become acquainted with this, again. We will have no choice but to contain Russia, and watch.

Putin miscalculation may lead to the end of the Systema, with the concomitant dangers. But we are where we are.