Yesterday’s now-famous Volodin line — “If there is Putin, there is Russia; if there is no Putin, there is no Russia” — proclaimed at the Valdai Forum as a slogan “reflecting the country’s current condition,” is, of course, the most Russophobic statement one could have heard in quite some time.
Even a caricatured Bandera (Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader), risen from the grave exactly as imagined by Channel One, could hardly have put it more forcefully.
The core of the new national idea has finally been stripped of all the extraneous stuff: all that culture-schmulture, history, science. By now, even Orthodoxy and the empire with its “Third Rome” mythology are no longer needed.
If there is Putin, there is Russia. If there is no Putin, there is no Russia.
Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Lenin-Stalin, Pushkin, Sholokhov-Vavilov, even General Secretary Chernenko, all stare in mute astonishment at the Valdai Forum’s “political scientists.” And only Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who sees right through everyone, leans toward Volodin and whispers in his ear: “Tell them about your marble garden beds, Slava. You have to go all the way, to the essence of it. What does Putin have to do with it? This is really all about them.”
That’s exactly what it comes down to. It’s about the marble garden beds at the Volodins’ country houses. And Putin is the symbol of a state system whose main purpose is to preserve an order in which Volodin and the many like him openly steal billions, build themselves palaces, and dig marble vegetable beds beside those palaces for onions and cabbage.
As long as our marble garden beds are safe, there is Russia, Vyacheslav Volodin is really telling us_. And if those marble garden beds come under threat, then there will be no Russia. We’ll start running wild, going mad, stirring up wars_.
And he isn’t even lying. They are already running wild and stirring up wars. For the sake of those marble garden beds, they are ready to bury the whole country. Fascists and punishers.
PS To vote against bureaucrats’ marble, granite, and alabaster garden beds, click here.