re: #160 HappyWarrior

Putin’s probably the hardest world leader for me to figure out. He uses an interesting combination of nationalism, love of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and nostalgia for the USSR.

There was a nationalistic strain to Russian communism, it had to kept to a dull roar because the party was officially supposed to be internationalist and secularist.

But since the other republics have fallen away, the nationalist wing of the party has taken over. And the Russian Orthodox Church is part of national identity and nationalism.

I grow convinced that the second echelon of the party just stepped back and let the old guard dinosaurs wander into oblivion, and then allowed a few years of complete chaos and collapse under Yeltsin before stepping in to be welcomed as the ones to restore order and national pride.