Russia: Dreaming of a Return to the West

Approved ~ AA

  • Russia may be talking in Slavophile tones but deep in its heart, desires to be readmitted into the Western camp. This is seen in the way Russians dress, the kind of food they eat, the beverages they drink, the music they listen to, the TV shows and the films they watch, and the books they read. Queues in front of McDonald’s joints may be a vulgar sign of creeping Westernization.
  • The results of this month’s municipal elections, declared last week, show a clear setback for Putinism in its Slavophile version. The president’s United Russia party lost more than a third of its seats in Moscow that, as in other metro-centric countries, has set the tone for national politics at least since the 1920s.
  • Putin wants to fool the Western democracies into helping negotiate a bad patch before he returns to his old shenanigans. President Macron’s call for reintegrating Russia into the G7 summit last month was dismissed by other participants even before it made it onto the agenda.

by Amir Taheri
September 15, 2019 at 4:00 am

Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a speech during the Tsinghua Universitys ceremony at Friendship Palace on April 26, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Kenzaburo Fukuhara – Pool/Getty Images)

Article URL : https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14882/russia-solvophilia-occidentalists