Putin Was the First Alt-President: How the New U.S Administration Needs to Think About Russia
Author URLs
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-14-2017
Subject: LCSH
Conservatives, Trump, Donald, 1946-, Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952-, Cabinet officers, Populism
Disciplines
Political Science
Abstract
Between now and the middle of the next decade, the arc of Russian foreign policy will be determined by Vladimir Putin’s attempt to establish his legacy as a figure of grand history. Much like Ivan III, the man who re-founded the Russian state after a calamitous civil war, Putin is set on bringing Russia back to its glory days before the collapse of the 1990s. This Russia is independent from both the East or the West. Putin’s vision is not to build a new Soviet Union, but rather a new Russia that adapts much of its feudal past to the present. Putin is reimagining the authoritarian state at home, and the vassal-state-abroad structure of Imperial Russia for the new century, not the centralized Communist state. The motivation behind such a neofeudal world order is Eurasianism: a pan-nationalist movement that puts Moscow at the center of a countermovement to the American-dominated post-Cold War order.
Repository Citation
Schmidt, Matthew J., "Putin Was the First Alt-President: How the New U.S Administration Needs to Think About Russia" (2017). Political Science Faculty Publications. 8.
https://digitalcommons.newhaven.edu/politicalscience-facpubs/8
Comments
Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on March 14, 2017.