Just over 100 years ago, Russian Emperor Nicholas II abdicated his throne and his vast empire ceased to exist, setting off decades of world-shaking change. Yet this year, not a single Russian television station marked the anniversary. The decision to ignore the centennial arose from a meeting at the Kremlin last year, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin told his advisors that it would be unnecessary to commemorate it. Instead, the occasion should be discussed “only by experts,” he reportedly said. That is, let the experts, the historians, discuss the Revolution; the rest of Russia shouldn’t concern itself with such matters.
This order was then conveyed by Sergei Kirienki, the Kremlin’s new political strategist, to the directors of Russia’s state media companies. Russia doesn’t need revolutions—it needs stability, he said, according to those who attended these meetings. The collapse of empire had become taboo for Russian media, and apparently a negligible historical footnote for Putin. [...]
The idea of Russian empire, then, comes naturally to Putin. But his version of empire isn’t an exact replica of Nicholas II’s. Instead, it is an imagined, virtual empire, encompassing the traits of the Soviet Union, Russian Orthodox Christianity, sovereignty, populism, Joseph Stalin, victory in World War II, Yuri Gagarin’s trip into space, and the palaces of Catherine the Great. Putin’s ideology is built on a feeling of Russia’s inherent greatness, the idea that it is a country to be feared and respected. A world in which CNN airs a documentary about Putin called “The Most Powerful Man in the World” is his best world.
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