Amongst the most famous tsars and commissars, several—Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584), Peter the Great (1672–1725), Catherine the Great (1729–1796) and Stalin, the Man of Steel (1879–1953)—dominate the landscape. [...] We need to grasp Putin’s and his fellow Russians’ sense of the “Times of Troubles”13 and their feel- ings of profound loss regarding the disintegration of the USSR and the Soviet bloc (i.e., the enormous decline of a once mighty imperial state). [...] Even more dramatically, the major Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 resulted in historically sweeping and severe Western sanctions, the freezing and seizing of Russian assets in the West, the withdrawal or suspension of many Western corporate operations inside Russia, and the removal of many Russian corporations and banks from the critical and all-powerful monetary SWIFT banking system. [...] As a number of authors noted, the totalitarian model seemed to fit the Stalinist era, particularly describing the era of the “Great Purges” of the 1930s.34 Daniel Bell penned a landmark article in the April 1958 issue of World Politics entitled: “Ten Theories in Search of Reality: The Prediction of Soviet Behaviour in the Social Sciences.” The pioneering essay was re- printed in his influential 19. [...] For two decades, Putin had sought to reverse the Western drift of Kyiv, particularly the eastern extension of NATO, and most recently demanded the demilitarization and the so-called “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.66 For Moscow, the latter meant removing the role of Ukrainian nationalists.
- Pages
- 37
- Published in
- Canada
