High Crimeas and Misdemeanors 0
Writing at Japan Times, Andrey Borodaevskiy sees a disturbing undercurrent to the Russian people’s support for Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian policy: cult of Putin personality.
I don’t know enough to agree or disagree, but I think it is worth a read, not only for what he has to say, but also because our own media has a disturbing case of parochial tunnel vision as regards events in the rest of the world.
Personality cult does not come from the grass roots. It is cultivated from above, more often than not inspired by the person who is the object of the cult, as was the case with Josef Stalin — the biggest “seducer of the masses” of all (except perhaps for Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who also was an Oriental-style ruler, not a product of Western civilization).
In a nutshell, personality cult is a euphemism for dictatorship.
