Putin’s totalitarian turn

Putin, of course, can never be wrong. Hence the desperate struggle, familiar to other personalised authoritarianisms, to find suitable scapegoats, because if the monarch is infallible, then anything that goes badly must be someone else’s fault, whether because they misled the boss or simply failed to follow orders. What is especially alarming is when the blame comes to fall on a whole country for failing to live up to his notion of their destiny.

Colonel General Sergei Beseda, head of the Fifth Service of the infamous Federal Security Service (FSB), is reportedly under house arrest, accused of embezzling funds intended for the subversion of Ukraine. However, Beseda was one of the key figures known to have been echoing back to Putin all his increasingly-bizarre views about the Ukrainians. The widespread assumption is that he is being blamed for the serious strategic errors which have hampered Russia’s invasion.

We may well not be willing to shed any tears for Beseda, but in fairness, what else was he going to do? It has been clear for years that Putin has become intolerant of alternative perspectives and expects people to tell him what he wants to hear, not what he needs to know.