MOSCOW (Realist English). On October 7, Russian President Vladimir Putin turns 70. Historian Boris Yakemenko believes that Putin managed to become the leader who answered the historical expectations of generations.
“They will always talk and argue about him. Both today and in 100 years. Putin managed to become the leader who answered the historical expectations of generations. Man-state, Homo Etaticus, he has found the points where his personality and millions of personalities scattered from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok connect.
Putin, who has become an absolute model, will remain such for a very long time. He might leave, but the Putin era will remain, what he has done will remain, there will be people brought up by him, obliged and grateful to him. And all this, put together, will dictate its own rules of behavior and play. And either a person will appear who will be able to continue the Putin era with his era, gradually melting one time into the other, or you will have to live in a deformed Putin era, where the ends do not meet, there are more questions than answers, “darkness over the abyss,” and the ruler looks like a saddle on a cow,” he wrote in his telegram channel.
Yakemenko recalled that in the 1990s, citizens tried to instill the belief that Russia is “the backyard of world civilization, infested with rats, the smartest of which run to the Potomac, the backyard littered with garbage and the corpses of those who were unlucky”:
“Accordingly, it is shameful, embarrassing to be the rat king and ruler of the backyards, and if anyone has been brought “under the arches of such almshouses”, it is only out of meanness and for the sake of theft.
Putin has returned the status of a great state to Russia and, inextricably with this, the status of a real president to himself, along with the shamelessness of the government, because impostors are ashamed, and he has nothing to be ashamed of, on the contrary, both the president and the ordinary citizen should be proud. If earlier every little thing was a string, now, on the contrary, everything served to the greater benefit of the state and the authorities.”
The historian believes that “attempts to squeeze Putin into the Procrustean bed of a “tyrant”, “strangler of freedom” and “usurper” are doomed to failure in the first place”:
“Suffice it to recall that he has already been a “KGB man”, “Yeltsin’s henchman”, a “gray mouse”, but when he turned out to be neither the one nor the other, nor the third, new agitators, loudmouths, ringleaders and inventors of definitions were mobilized, who, having driven chants and worn out slogans on the asphalt of the Boltnaya Square, subsided and they disappeared in order to give way to new stigmatizers and burnouts. All of them are long gone. And he stays.”
