Robert Kaplan, the author of "Waste Land" and a former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, has argued that although Putin is "nominally a post-communist," his rule - and particularly "his absolute aversion to any humanity" - reflects problems that trace directly back to 1917.
As "Hvylya" reports, Kaplan made the case in an interview with Ryan Murdock, arguing that the roots of today's permanent global crisis lie in what went wrong in the twentieth century.
Communism existed in the Soviet Union for seventy years - and unlike traditional authoritarian regimes, Kaplan noted, "a very hard left regime affected every aspect of life all the way down the line." The result was "tremendous damage to Russian political culture," damage that no post-Soviet leader has managed to undo.
Kaplan offered a striking counterfactual. Had Lenin and Trotsky failed in what he called "really a coup d'etat," the czars would have eventually become constitutional monarchs. Russia would have been "corrupt, a bit unstable, not of the quality of government of Central Western Europe," but it would not have seen tens of millions murdered. He drew a parallel with Iran: had the Shah survived, Iran today "would be like South Korea." Instead, it "has destroyed the middle class" and "cannot even provide water or electricity for its people."
The implication is clear: Russia's current crisis is not simply the product of one man's ambitions. It is the long tail of a revolutionary catastrophe that reshaped political culture so deeply that even a century later, Russia remains trapped in patterns set by the Bolsheviks. And as the Munich Security Conference recently emphasized, that legacy continues to pose the most significant and direct threat to European security.