Putin: Russia's Choice
Putin: Russia's Choice by Richard Sakwa
English | Dec. 29, 2003 | ISBN: 0415296633 | 320 Pages | PDF | 1 MB
English | Dec. 29, 2003 | ISBN: 0415296633 | 320 Pages | PDF | 1 MB
The coming to power of Vladimir Putin at the beginning of the new millennium signalled the beginning of a period of change in Russian politics that could well prove decisive. The choices made in the early years of a century have traditionally established a long-term pattern. In 1703 Peter the Great began the building of St Petersburg and thus signalled the aspiration to modernise the country ‘from above’ along Western lines. His attempt, as Lenin put it, ‘to chase out barbarism by barbaric means’ by establishing the city in the marshes of the Neva river established a pattern of forced modernisation that ruptured evolutionary patterns of development. Russia was thrown back into bureaucratic authoritarianism, and the development of inclusive government and popular representation was retarded. A distinctive pattern emerged of modernisation without modernity, adopting a type of superficial Westernisation in forms without the critical spirit that distinguishes Western modernity.