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Russia will Always Produce Leaders Like Putin: The Question Is, How Do We End That?
Looking beyond the Putin era.
Mikhail Gorbachev and Nikita Khrushchev are perhaps the great outliers of Russia’s political history.
Throughout its history, Russia has produced a motley crew of dictators, from the Tsars of the house of Romanov through to the revolutionaries of 1917; the leading players of Eurasia have tended to favour the harsh methods of coercion as opposed to the subtle arts of persuasion.
Nicholas I and II were absolute monarchs who took a very dim view of the intellectuals in their midst; the likes of Dimitri Mendeleev and Ivan Petrovich Pavlov produced their greatest work under the shadow of the brutally repressive royals.
Even when the monarchy was overthrown and replaced with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the state sanctioned violence didn’t stop; once the civil war was won against the White army, one of Lenin’s first acts was to deport the country’s intellectuals to the Finnish border — something quite extraordinary, given Lenin’s intellectual heft.
We must also point out that the purges which took place on Lenin and Trotsky’s watch laid the template for the terrors and horrors of the gulag under Joseph Stalin.