Staunton, April 9 – A report by the Inter-Regional Association of Young Political Scientists notes that Vladimir Putin has changed his language to reflect is “commitment to stability above everything else,” a conclusion that one Moscow commentator suggests fails to capture just how dangerous Putin’s position is for Russia as a whole.
In an essay posted on the LawinRussia.ru site yesterday, Vyacheslav Petrov says that the report – available online at dropbox.com/s/o4qvp90tmrz5er4/Doklad_Putin_AMP.pdf – offers two conclusions, one “banal” and the other incompletely developed because the report’s authors did not choose to draw on the work of others (lawinrussia.ru/node/261492).
On the one hand, the report says, Putin in 2000 presented himself as “a balanced combination of conservative and liberal ideology.” And on the other, it concludes that by 2012, the Russian president had shifted to authoritarianism, dropped references to liberal values in favor of conservative ones, and talked not about goals but about his directives to the elite.