Putin points to the Russia of the future
No more shit on Putin's face?
asiatimes: Russian President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union address last Wednesday, coming within five days of US Vice President Dick Cheney's criticizing the Kremlin for its policies toward the Russian people and the country's smaller neighbors, naturally invites comparisons.
But that would be a futile exercise - comparing the incomparable. For one thing, as a leading American scholar on Russia, Anatol Lieven, thoughtfully pointed out in a commentary, Putin is a statesman, whereas Cheney is at best a gifted politician. Besides, Putin's address needs to be understood in an altogether different intellectual context.
What readily comes to mind is The Russia Hand, Strobe Talbott's cold-blooded account of the Bill Clinton presidency - how Washington incessantly took advantage of Russia's weakness to extract unilateral advantages out of a bumbling, confused president Boris Yeltsin. (Talbott's book is a chilling study of the fate of any state aspiring to have a relationship of mutual respect with the US.)
An incident narrated by Talbott is worth recalling. While jogging along the birch-lined paths in Lenin Hills in Moscow suburbs one morning during a visit to Russia, Clinton told Talbott that as a politician he could already sense that a lot of alienation, a lot of anti-American feeling, was building up in Yeltsin's Russia. The time was April 1996 - hardly five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Clinton explained: "We haven't played everything brilliantly with these people; we haven't figured out how to say yes to them in a way that balances off how much and how often we want them to say yes to us. We keep telling Ol' Boris [Yeltsin], 'Okay, now here's what you've got to do next - here's some more shit for your face.'" Read more
asiatimes: Russian President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union address last Wednesday, coming within five days of US Vice President Dick Cheney's criticizing the Kremlin for its policies toward the Russian people and the country's smaller neighbors, naturally invites comparisons.
But that would be a futile exercise - comparing the incomparable. For one thing, as a leading American scholar on Russia, Anatol Lieven, thoughtfully pointed out in a commentary, Putin is a statesman, whereas Cheney is at best a gifted politician. Besides, Putin's address needs to be understood in an altogether different intellectual context.
What readily comes to mind is The Russia Hand, Strobe Talbott's cold-blooded account of the Bill Clinton presidency - how Washington incessantly took advantage of Russia's weakness to extract unilateral advantages out of a bumbling, confused president Boris Yeltsin. (Talbott's book is a chilling study of the fate of any state aspiring to have a relationship of mutual respect with the US.)
An incident narrated by Talbott is worth recalling. While jogging along the birch-lined paths in Lenin Hills in Moscow suburbs one morning during a visit to Russia, Clinton told Talbott that as a politician he could already sense that a lot of alienation, a lot of anti-American feeling, was building up in Yeltsin's Russia. The time was April 1996 - hardly five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Clinton explained: "We haven't played everything brilliantly with these people; we haven't figured out how to say yes to them in a way that balances off how much and how often we want them to say yes to us. We keep telling Ol' Boris [Yeltsin], 'Okay, now here's what you've got to do next - here's some more shit for your face.'" Read more
posted by exoplanet at 11:02 PM
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