Staring at shadows: Moscow’s Kremlin at night. CC: ePsilon/Flickr. Some rights reserved.If a Martian were sent to earth with a secret mission to figure out the trends of world politics, he would certainly be puzzled by the outsized role that Putin’s Russia plays in the 21st century imagination of the west. Almost half of Americans tend to believe that Moscow rigged the 2016 US presidential election; many Europeans suspect that the Kremlin shapes public opinion in their countries; and some of the leading western media outlets insist that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is the world’s most influential political leader. While in the beginning of this century Russia was viewed as a mixture of failure and banality, today in the minds of many it has mutated into the model of the world to come.
Frankly speaking, neither Russia’s brutal annexation of Crimea, nor its military involvement in Syria nor aggressive meddling in American elections could sufficiently explain western obsessions with Russia. It is true that Putin’s Russia is a military power and that the Kremlin has demonstrated its willingness to use force as an instrument to achieve its goals. But let us not forget that Russia is a resurgent rather than a rising power. Its power and influence are just a bleak copy of those of the Soviet Union. Russia suffers from low European-level birth rates and almost African-level life expectancy. Its population has one of the highest percentages of university-educated people, but with the lowest labour productivity per hour worked in the industrialised world.
The country is profoundly corrupt and though President Putin is a strong leader, the prospects of Russia’s development after him (regardless of when that “after” will be) are highly uncertain. In the words of Vyacheslav Volodin, the current chairman of the Duma, “there is no Russia without Putin”. So why then is the western political imagination as much or even more obsessed and preoccupied by Russia as by the economic success and geopolitical ambitions of communist China, the global spread of radical Islamist ideology or the craziness of the current North Korean dictator?
