David Remnick captures how it has grown significantly during Putin’s time in power. Remnick talks at length with former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul:
Although McFaul feels a deep sense of outrage about Putin, he also understood the mind-set of resentment and conspiracy. “I didn’t go to foment revolution,” he said. “I went to take the reset to the next stage. That was my mandate.” He added, “Obama people don’t sponsor color revolutions. Other Administrations had done this. Has the U.S. used covert operations to foment regime change? The answer is yes. I don’t want to get in trouble or go to jail, but has the U.S. supported the opposition to bring about political change? Serbia is a paradigmatic case: direct money to the opposition to destabilize things, and it was successful.” He also cited the overthrow of Mossadegh, in 1953, in Iran, and the support for the Nicaraguan Contras.
“Putin has a theory of American power that has some empirical basis,” McFaul went on. “He strongly believes this is a major component of U.S. foreign policy. He has said it to the President, to Secretary Kerry. He even believes we sparked the Arab Spring as a C.I.A. operation. He believes we use force against regimes we don’t like. . . . By the way, he damn well knows that the government of the Soviet Union used covert support. He worked for one of the instruments of that policy. He really does kind of superimpose the way his system works onto the way he thinks our system works. He grossly exaggerates the role of the C.I.A. in the making of our foreign policy. He just doesn’t get it. Or maybe he does get it and doesn’t portray it that way. I struggle with that: is he really super-clever and this is his psych op, or does he believe it? I think he does believe that we are out to get him.”
Dreher is most interested in Remnick’s “series of interviews with prominent Russian figures in Putin’s sphere.” One passage Dreher is struck by:
The world, for [Aleksandr] Dugin, is divided between conservative land powers (Russia) and libertine maritime powers (the U.S. and the U.K.)—Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage. The maritime powers seek to impose their will, and their decadent materialism, on the rest of the world. This struggle is at the heart of history. For Dugin, Russia must rise from its prolonged post-Soviet depression and reassert itself, this time as the center of a Eurasian empire, against the dark forces of America. And this means war. Dugin rejects the racism of the Nazis, but embraces their sense of hierarchy, their romance of death. “We need a new party,” he has written. “A party of death. A party of the total vertical. God’s party, the Russian analogue to the Hezbollah, which would act according to wholly different rules and contemplate completely different pictures.”
In other Russian news, Ioffe finds it ironic that Russia is cracking down on any mention of Siberian self-determination:
All these months, Russia has been supporting Russian separatists in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, trumpeting the principle of self-determination. “The right to self-determination is formalised as one of the most important goals of the UN Charter,” said Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov before the Russian parliament. “As to Crimea, as you know, its autonomy was restricted several times in the past against the will of the Crimeans. After the armed coup by persons, who seized power in Kiev, actions were undertaken, which even more aggravated the possibilities of the Crimeans to exercise their right to self-determination within the Ukrainian state.”
But, in the Kremlin’s understanding, self-determination begins where Russia ends.
The Dish 