The Naked King, or Potemkin’s Village as an Immediate Political Reality

by Iurie Roșca

Iurie Roșca argues that Putin’s inauguration was the culmination of a 25-year political farce, beginning with a group of oligarchs recommending Putin to then-President Boris Yeltsin, highlighting a system where genuine electoral competition is absent and economic power dictates politics behind a liberal facade.

Today’s political pageantry in Moscow has awakened a new wave of cheers and triumphalist jubilation among the two indispensable supporters of any government, no matter how venal and hideous. I have in mind the eternal profiteers and careerists ready to glorify any nullity in office, as well as the indefatigable naive and enthusiastic who practice in good faith exercises in dreamlike perception of reality as a form of escape from undesirable authentic reality.

The first remark addressed in particular to the followers of the democratic religion would be the following. In Russia, there was no election in the classical, liberal sense of the term, but a simulacrum of bad taste designed to cover up a political and legal fraud by a regime that decided to usurp power in the state for the benefit of private and dubious interest groups.  Of course, advocates and apologists of this long-standing trick in the history of usurping power will find endless excuses and justifications.

The first of these is the providential, exceptional, indispensable, and irremovable character of the giant personality embodied by Putin. Excellent, that is the one I have been holding onto for a quarter of a century now. The second of the justifications is that Russia will reach unprecedented heights of development in its history under this person. And the third explains the perennial tenure of this Kremlin brand by the “state of emergency,” the war in Ukraine, the external danger.

So, I have retained all three circumstances offered to the gullible public with a skill worthy of all appreciation. It could not have been otherwise. In a world of appearances and marketing, no one distinguishes between authentic and fiction any more. In the “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord), it does not matter how you are but only how you look, how you are “sold” to the consumer of advertising.

It is important to remind those who believe in Kremlin-produced political myths that genuine politics has not existed in Russia for the last twenty-five years. Only individuals specifically authorized by the Kremlin are allowed to engage in politics, including expressing political opinions publicly. Moreover, only those who agree to play the part of the token opposition, serving merely as decorative elements in this political spectacle, are permitted to run in elections.

Those who broke this unwritten rule of “Russian democracy” often paid with their lives, their freedom, or were forced into exile due to this significant departure from the financial interests of the oligarchic groups supporting Putin. I am not a proponent of Anglo-Saxon democracy, but I find the hypocrisy of how this political-legal model is mimicked in today’s Russia even more contemptible. We are witnessing a mix of the “religion of Soviet civilization” and a Western-style electoral farce, which also attempts to draw on the monarchical model of historical Russia. This caricatured, parodic, and deeply eclectic concept fits perfectly into our current historical era. Deception, trickery, and manipulation are the essence of the political simulacrum that defines today’s society.

People who tie their hopes to Putin’s new presidential term, whether from Russia or abroad, have serious difficulties in using their own memory as tools for political analysis and prediction of the future. The author of these lines had several situations when he hoped that Putin had broken away from the globalist system and Russia under his leadership could become an alternative pole to the collective West.

Initially, in 2014, when a bloody coup inspired by the Americans was ordered in Kiev, Putin fought back by taking over Crimea. At that time, the famous American paleoconservative Patrick J. Buchanan wrote the famous editorial “Vladimir Putin, Christian Crusader?”¹ So, I was not the only one who let himself be seduced by the Kremlin ten years ago. But shortly in the same year, 2014, Donbass was abandoned; the regime in Kiev that committed the coup was recognized as legal and a dialogue partner, following the Russian negotiating rounds at Mink and the Normandy Format. At the same time, the population of the two rebel republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, found themselves abandoned for eight years, being subjected to artillery attacks, which caused thousands of deaths among civilians. 

The second hope that the Kremlin got rid of the control of the globalist mafia, which I openly expressed two years ago, was when Russia started the so-called Special Military Operation in Ukraine. And this despite the Russian campaign of promoting the agenda of the false pandemic in previous years under the WHO dictate, with the imposition of all absurd restrictions and forced injections. And even despite the fact that Putin himself assumed the role of an advertising agent for Big Pharma, strongly promoting the campaign of “murder by injection.”

The events of the past two years have clearly shown me where I went wrong. My main mistake was overlooking a fundamental aspect of capitalism: that in modern societies, real power lies with those who control the money and not those placed in visible political roles by the plutocracy. After the collapse of the USSR, the “civilization of money” also prevailed in Russia. Yet, despite this, some of us only apply the principle of “Follow the money” when critiquing Western realities, choosing to believe that Russia does not follow this universally applicable rule.

I will not return here to the false dichotomies I have written about several times. Nor will I argue again that Russia/China/BRICS is not an alternative to the globalist unipolarity but a model perfectly complementary to it. The fact that the US is losing its hegemonic role still does not predict a better future for either humanity or Russia.

Those who are jubilant on the occasion of the fifth inauguration of Putin as president from the positions of Russian patriotism or sovereignism deserve all compassion and sympathy. I feel compassion for those who consciously worship him and sympathy for those who choose to remain under the influence of propaganda and their own illusions.

1. At that time, very few noted the significance of the query in the title of the famous American political scientist.