Cathy Young on Putin’s New Old Russia

In the 1990 film Awakenings,
survivors of an encephalitis outbreak are brought out of
decades-long catatonic states by a new wonder drug, but then start
relapsing as its effects wear off. There is a particularly poignant
montage near the end of the movie in which the once-“awakened”
patients are returned to wheelchairs and hospital beds and
re-outfitted with adult diapers as they revert to the status of
living death.

Consider it a predictive metaphor for recent events in Russia, a
quarter century after the country’s awakening from communism,
writes Cathy Young. The neo-authoritarian Kremlin regime of
Vladimir Putin is closing its grip, squeezing the air out of
the remaining pockets of dissent, cranking up the propaganda
machine to Soviet levels, and setting up the conditions for a new
Iron Curtain.

It’s impossible to tell where the Russia-Ukraine crisis will
lead. But one thing is clear: The spring of 2014 featured a
high-water mark for Putin’s post-Soviet restoration, with its overt
and belligerent rejection of “Western values,” its confrontational
stance toward NATO, and its aggressive claim to dominance in
formerly Soviet territories, writes Young.

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