Mikhail Gorbachev’s hearse is the hearse of the Soviet Union itself. Three decades after the disappearance of the first workers’ and peasants’ state, Vladimir Putin finds himself face to face with this Soviet specter that haunts the Russian imagination. The image of Mikhail Gorbachev is a hateful image of surrender. The end of the Soviet homeland is a catastrophe for Putin’s Russia. Nostalgia feeds on the memory of a great time.

The whole order of the Putinist imagination is based on this idea of ​​continuity with the Soviet genius. Fascination with Stalin is part of this obsession. Stalin embodies the virtue to which Vladimir Putin himself aspires: the political brutality that underlies imperialist tyranny.

In this picture created by Putin’s propaganda, the era of Mikhail Gorbachev is an era of retreat and failure. Strategic retreat equals defeat. The reforms, aimed at the impossible reformation of communism, undermined the authority of the state and opened the way that led to its final collapse.

Because the main sin of Gorbachev in this Putin’s Russia is the very lack of will to preserve the integrity of the empire. The Putin myth is based on the exploitation of the traumas of Russian identity. The messianic complex of a nation that cannot adapt to a post-imperial role is the ground on which the scaffolding of today’s dictatorship is built.

Gorbachev is to blame for Putin’s Russia, and this historical guilt can be eliminated only by the aggressiveness with which today’s Russia tries to return at least a part of the legacy liquidated in 1991. The USSR is a home that Putin’s state looks up to with admiration. . And in this house of memory, the Stalin era is the peak of national greatness.

A break with Gorbachev does not mean a break with the USSR, on the contrary. Putin’s Russia is the very negation of the foreign policy inaugurated by Gorbachev. From now on, Russia no longer accepts the position of the second in relation to the West: it returns to barbarism, which is the only guarantee of maintaining its power. Read the entire article on Contributors.ro