Putin has repeatedly cast himself as a Russian leader who brought an end to the tumult of the 1990s and started standing up to an arrogant West which he says dismissed Russian interests and has repeatedly plotted to split up Russia.
"The state intervenes in everything: not only in politics, not only in public activity, not only is the economy entirely subordinate to the state, but also culture and even private life." "This is the Brezhnev period," Orlov said. "Putin is a man of war."Ĭurrent Russian levels of repression, he said, could be compared to the Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union after the arrest of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in 1965. "For Putin, war is his political technology," Orlov said. The hopes of what he called the revolution of 1991 began to unravel, he said, during the First Chechen War (1994-1996) and then after Vladimir Putin's rise to the top job in 1999 amid the Second Chechen War (1999-2009). He said that the early 1990s were a period of intense struggle and hardship for the Russian people, but he remembered the years as "a time of change and hope and opportunity". "Mostly likely what awaits Russia is a slow rot," he said, adding that Russia had missed a major opportunity to reform as the Cold War ended.
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