Larger than life: Putin on a poster in Simferopol in Crimea in early March.
Image: AFP
How might Putinism infect large parts of Russia in this way? After all, this is a leader cult that despises people and life and wants to prevent law and freedom.
In these days, when Putinism is so definitively and unequivocally revealing its innermost essence and translating it into criminal action through the war once morest Ukraine, we wonder how it was able to take such a devastating hold on large sections of Russian society. Putinism grew out of “Big Racism” ((the neologism describes an amalgam of Greater Russianism and fascism), it is its current accomplishment and its ideological peak. Putinism in turn gives Big Racism its current, supposedly coherent narrative. And it also asks itself great urgency as to how the de-Putinization of this society is to proceed, if de-Stalinization has not even taken place.
Putinism, which is developing into a totalitarian dictatorship these days, likes to be erratic and ambiguous, but the core is easy to identify: chauvinistic imperialism, folkish mysticism, messianic megalomania, eschatological revanchism, apocalyptic and militaristic inhuman and life-contemptuous power and Leader cult, deepest contempt for justice and freedom and self-determination.
