From Andropov to Putin: The Last Spasm of a Decrepit Dictatorship

frontpagemag.com ^ | July 30, 2014 | Vladimir Tismaneanu

[Tailgunner Joe]

Years ago, the Soviet dissident Yuri Glazov, one of the most lucid interpreters of the Soviet experience, diagnosed Andropov’s neo-Stalinism, more sophisticated but no less repressive than Leonid Brezhnev’s, as the last gasp of the nomenklatura’s squalid rule. The same can be said about Putinism, this latter-day incarnation of the Andropov model. ....

Putinism meant imposing a disguised dictatorship of the KGB’s successor, the new/old secret police known as the FSB. The FSB’s “ethos” is deeply rooted in the tradition which began with the Cheka and the entranced Polish-Russian Bolshevik, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. ....

Putin’s propaganda has gone once more into a state of hysteria, bearing a shocking resemblance to that of Slobodan Milosevic, especially that of the delirious Serbian television, during the wars of secession in former Yugoslavia. The lies are coming down in heavy waves, frantically and shamelessly. Brought up in the KGB’s climate of fabrications, legends, and mystifications, Putin idolizes Andropov. What is currently happening in Russia is linked to perhaps the last great spasm of the totalitarian secret police. Stale and stifling, Putin’s world belongs to bygone times.

[Pearls Before Swine]

And we’re in the early spasms.

[Jim Robinson]

Oh. I thought this article was about Obama.

[SandRat]

The KGB in fact.

[elhombrelibre]

Also good background how the Russians got to where they are now is this link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpiZw1R8w-c

[riverdawg]

As the article points out, the similarity between Hitler’s active pursuit, beginning in 1939, of the unification of all ethnic Germans under his rule and Putin’s active pursuit, beginning in 2008, of the unification of all ethnic Russians under his rule is ominous.