Pyongyang Lessons: Putin Leans In To Role As World’s Autocrat-In-Chief

-Analysis-

“Ugh.”

“That’s not the right word. Not even close,” senior Russian officials from Vladimir Putin’s entourage sighed with fatigue as they entered the conference room during their visit to North Korea. With heavy steps, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov headed over to his armchair and quickly sat down. Closing his eyes, First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov took his place with difficulty. Defense Minister Andrei Belousov spread out the papers…

“Go back out into the hall!” a North Korean official commanded.

“So why did we already come in here?” one of the members of the delegation said with surprise.

The North Korean comrade calmly responded: “Our leader will now enter.”

This awkward moment is a sad illustration of the pole where Russia now finds itself, and with what allies it is choosing to surround itself. Our bloc is made up of countries where the chiefs are valued above all, and the rest are by and large barely perceived as people. So the most senior – and themselves not the youngest – members of government, who can barely move their legs from fatigue, can be told like schoolchildren: leave and enter as required.

And what can be done to ordinary citizens is frightful to even consider.

Vladimir Putin believes that he is recreating a multipolar world. He regularly speaks with passion about the hegemony of the West, about the alien values and pressure being imposed on those who want to develop independently. It comes through loud and clear, but what do we in fact have?

Dictators and dynasties

In fact, Russia is attracting states where “traditional values” ultimately boil down to the murders of opposition politicians, activists and journalists – and to the nearly limitless power of dictators or dynasties.

“There is no morality in foreign affairs, only national interests,” former head of Soviet intelligence Leonid Shebarshin once noted. Indeed, in the history of the United States and other Western democracies there are examples of collaboration with thieving and cannibalistic regimes. But the problem of today’s Russia is that we have become a pole that attracts precisely such regimes, and precisely such societal forces.

As a result, our “multipolar world” looks something like this: on one side there are states where leaders change more or less regularly, there is political competition, you can hear criticism and different points of view and one way or another there are more opportunities to defend your rights in court. It is harder to take away property and personal freedom from people in these countries, their rights are more difficult to limit and their voices more difficult to ignore.

Sovereign authority

The other pole attracts countries where “traditional values” are for some reason firmly linked with protecting the lifelong rule of one person (or family), which requires murdering or imprisoning those who disagree for many years. Any sharp criticism or remark that does not toe the official line is considered extremism, an assault on stability and work carried out for the enemy.

People living in the countries of the ‘Russian pole,’ there is nothing good to be found.

Such multipolarity may be good for the independent political evolution of some countries. They have more room for maneuvering, and even the weakest states in such a system might defend themselves physically and economically while navigating between heavily armed poles. But for people living in the countries of the “Russian pole,” there is nothing good to be found. After all, paradoxically, those who fight for state independence deny ordinary people the ability to make their decisions independently.

According to Putin himself, only the sovereign authority (the core value) possesses this capacity. This approach, which he has demonstrated more than once, became the cause of many tragedies, including the war waged against Ukraine. After all, as the Russian president has conceded more than once, the people who came out to Euromaidan in Kyiv were of course dissatisfied with the government in power at that time (the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych). But the overthrow of this government occurred only thanks to the machinations of the hostile West. That is, the people themselves seem to be unimportant and do not possess their own will, but are subject to a certain bidding (to exit and to enter).

In such a system, independent will is denied not only to the people, but also to entire countries (if they do not agree with us). Russia’s neighbors strove to join and became members of NATO not because they feared an unpredictable neighbor with nuclear weapons and imperial ambitions, but because they acted under the dictate of the United States, which deceived us when promising that there would be no expansion of the military bloc.

Kadyrov to Assad

Judging by the recollections of those who have spoken personally with Putin, he has long been concerned not with people as such, but primarily with a historical mission that he believes is carried out for the good of the country and the people as a whole.

For example, in a personal conversation with Alexei Venediktov, a Russian journalist and the former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct “Ekho Moskvy” independent radio station, the president once asked if they would write about him in history books. With such an obsession, phenomena such as Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechnya become possible, where rights were strictly controlled and cruelty and lawlessness seem unlimited.

The suffering of the people is an inevitable but small price to pay for the territorial integrity of Russia; so murders, the repressions of entire families and the pedophilia of the local “sultan” can be overlooked, because Putin is convinced that without Kadyrov, who cements Chechnya together with horror and massacres, there will be even more suffering and blood.

A “union of monarchs”

External allies attracted to the “Russian pole” are cut from the same mold as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, such as the Syrian Bashar al-Assad, who led his country into civil war, and various African dictators. In essence, this is a “union of monarchs” where the main goal is to prevent revolutions, and the main fear is the loss of personal power. At the same time, the “monarchs” sincerely perceive it as the greatest good for the people, since without their authority they would simply strangle each other like foolish children.

They genuinely began to feel they radiated like the sun.

At the other “pole” it is difficult to understand such a notion of people and the world. But when you sit on the throne for almost 30 years, and those around you unanimously sing odes to you as a national savior, it is not difficult to come to believe that nothing except the great mission matters. This has already happened with the leaders of totalitarian sects — after a long period of time, they genuinely began to feel they radiated like the sun, even if the cult had only started out to collect more money.