![]() ![]() Because the question suggests that there’s something strategic that Western countries could be doing that would somehow change Putin’s behavior, and I don’t think that’s true. ![]() I should have taken a break from writing the book to warn people. His hypothesis was that since it had been 30 years since terror ended, Homo Sovieticus-that person characterized by doublethink and his very strong identification with the state-had to be dying off and that Soviet institutions had to crumble once Homo Sovieticus died out. But in the late 1980s, a great Soviet sociologist named Yuri Levada had this hypothesis than the Soviets had indeed created a new kind of man, not necessarily perfect, but very much shaped by the experience of Stalinist terror. This was going to be the perfect man, a man who lived in perfect harmony with his society. The explicit project of the Bolshevik revolution-as is the case with every totalitarian society-is to create a new kind of man. One concept that you talk a lot about in the book is Homo Sovieticus. I think that it would be more intellectually honest to say that Russia, as it is run today, is vastly different from an imaginary ideal model of totalitarianism, but that’s what models are like. The state that Putin has built is not that dissimilar from the old Soviet Union. ![]()
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