Daily Archives: February 23, 2006

The reflection on Khrushchev’s speech continues. This time, Julian Evans gives a fascinating take on the “Cult of Putin.” It’s worth reading. He argues that the Cult of Putin is not just some ancient Russian tradition of worshiping leaders. If anything it might have more to do with the type of leader Putin is compared to more recent Russian leaders.

This is rather strange to Westerners but we shouldn’t be quick to see it as evidence of some Asiatic religious awe of Putin among Russians. For my colleagues in the office, the calendar is there half-ironically. They are slightly mocking the cult, while also enjoying the fact that their young president actually does all the activities he is pictured doing. This is the point about the cult of Putin – it is quite pragmatic, not some fever of patriotic intoxication. Newsweek interviews one government bureaucrat, who says that ..read more

Articles and commentary commemorating Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 continue. Today Anne Applebaum, the author of Gulag: A History, weighs in on the pages of the Washington Post. Unfortunately, her commentary is more about us than about the historical significance of Khrushchev. I’ll do my best to refrain from ranting on Applebaum’s statement that the American military is in Iraq “trying to pick up the pieces after the collapse of another totalitarian regime.” Excuse me, but last I checked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq didn’t collapse. That state was smashed by the very military that is now “trying to pick up the pieces.” So let us not equate Iraq with the Soviet Union and the US military as some sort of altruistic totalitarian mop up force. But I digress. . . One thing that you can count on with the commemorations of Khrushchev’s speech ..read more