Because Vladimir Putin talks about recovering territory that Moscow lost when the USSR disintegrated and because he has had positive things to say about Stalin, many people assume that he is trying to restore the Soviet empire. But that gets things exactly wrong, Andrey Kolesnikov says.
The New Times columnist argues that that Putin both because of his motives and because of his tactics is in fact “provoking an entirely different process – the continuing disintegration of the imperial space” and in a way that will involve the kind of violence the region generally avoided during the first three decades after 1991 (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/232864).
In fact, Kolesnikov says, Putin and his team are trying to build what one could call “an anti-Soviet empire,” one based almost entirely on the use of brute force rather than soft power and “along the way destroying the very…
