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MOSCOW TV REVIEWER. Revenge Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Frontline: “Putin’s Revenge” (Documentary. USA, Oct. 25/Nov.1)(PBS, YouTube; links below)
-->This 2-part PBS documentary offers a very good recounting of why and how our President for Life got into his (apparently permanent) state of high dudgeon over certain things and people American and what he decided to do about it. And did. And will likely keep doing as long as he (a) remains at liberty and (b) can get away with it.
Frontline: “Putin’s Revenge” (Documentary. USA, Oct. 25/Nov.1)(PBS, YouTube; links below)
-->This 2-part PBS documentary offers a very good recounting of why and how our President for Life got into his (apparently permanent) state of high dudgeon over certain things and people American and what he decided to do about it. And did. And will likely keep doing as long as he (a) remains at liberty and (b) can get away with it.
One can only hope, in the meantime, that PBS/Frontline will keep their documentary cameras rolling as the content for a subsequent part 3 (and probably 4) continues to emerge on a daily basis, thanks to the ongoing work of serious investigators and good journalists. Perhaps the way to think of “Putin’s Revenge” is as a highly professional work-in-progress, a sort of halfway marker for a four-hour Russified “All the President’s Men.” The difficult part of taking it as such at present is that we can’t yet envision just how we’re going to get to a happy ending.
But to cases. “Very good” doesn’t mean this smoothly-directed feature touches every base and gets everything right; it doesn’t. The VVP biographical summary leaves out two salient points: (1) his hardscrabble youth in Leningrad and (2) his period of political tutelage under Anatoly Sobchak. The former is important as the origin of a maxim the president likes to repeat: “If conflict is inevitable, strike first” – which should actually be taken as “If you think conflict is inevitable, or you’re planning on *making* it so, then take advantage of being the one who is sure of that and be the aggressor, regardless of what anybody thinks, then or later.” OK, too lumpy for a good maxim, but it’s the one he’s lived up (or down) to on a number of occasions, as we’ve seen.
Without (2), there’s a significant gap in the VVP biog: he goes from a KGB colonel watching in horror from Dresden as the Cold War ends – a trauma of which much is made in this narrative, and probably rightly – to a near-meteorically rising bureaucratic star in Moscow in the late ‘90s, assuming the FSB leadership, then the Premiership and then the Presidency in a blaze of hyper-promotion so remarkable that when he became the nation’s chief executive, the vast majority of his countrymen had no idea who he was.
So where did he get his bureaucro-maneuvering chops? Under the wing of Leningrad/SPb Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, that’s where; just how he did it is a complex story the makers of this documentary may have figured they simply couldn’t do justice to in the space allotted to them – and so left it out. At all events, viewers should know that VVP took Bureaucrat 101 (and 102 and 103) from AS up there – and at the same time did considerably more than dabble, as many have related, in Russia’s second economy of the Wild ‘90s. You don’t get to be the world’s richest man (or something close to it) either by getting lucky or merely becoming president.
Beyond those two lacunae, one can also ask why the filmmakers rightly point to VVP’s troubled reaction to the Bush II invasion of Iraq – but don’t mention that said campaign was launched on the wholly fictitious grounds of Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs, a fact that one can be sure did not escape Putin’s notice. Those non-existent weapons, which became the subject of dismissive public jocularity by the very president who de facto invented them, were about as legitimate an excuse for invading a sovereign nation as, say, neo-Nazis conspiring with the CIA to engineer a coup d’etat someplace. Like next door to you.
While this kind of whataboutism is no defense for what would be done in and to Ukraine, of course, you can bet that VVP – and many henchmen and many plain old citizens – believe it is. And they will not fail to bring the WMD fraud up, along with other instances of American infidelity to international law, if and when they are eventually required to explain themselves while making a warm spot on a hard seat at The Hague.
So yes, I would have done some things differently in this documentary – so would you, and so would anybody else who has followed Russian-American relations over the decades. On the whole, however, “Putin’s Revenge” is, I repeat, a commendable success at telling a story that very much needs telling and that nobody else has tried to put in this kind of readily-accessible, broad-audience format.
And audience, in fact, is a key issue here. For starters, it is obvious that this edifying documentary is not going to reach large swaths of the Russian population any time soon. And even if it did, and in ideal form – that is, translated smoothly into Russian and broadcast over Channel 1 Moscow in prime time – it would almost certainly have very a limited effect. The majority of Russian viewers would look at the collection of American experts assembled by the filmmakers – informed and articulate officials, diplomats and journalists – and see only a bunch of paid talking heads saying what they’re supposed to say.
The well of TV news reportage has been so thoroughly poisoned here since the onset of the VVP millennium that foreigners are routinely viewed as foreign agents and their pronouncements treated accordingly. And it may take a generation for this mindset to fade away. The good news, ironically, is that television itself is fading away in the meantime; people under 30 get what they need and want not from their grandparents’ box on the floor or their parents’ rectangle on the wall, but from the 4 x 6 and 8 x 10 devices in their hands. Which VVP & Co. have only recently figured out, hence their desperate new campaign to both regulate the RuNet space and intimidate its referees at Facebook, Twitter, et al., into playing by their New Moscow Rules.
An even more troubling audience question is that of viewer reception in the United States, where Russiagate continues to unfold and its implications continue to expand. Shouldn’t “Putin’s Revenge” – a straightforward, factual, measured rendition of what has obsessed much of the country for well over a year now – be both must-see viewing for Americans and a great contributor towards air-clearing the national public discourse, so long fouled by fake news, fake opinion and partisanship-as-prime-mover?
Well of *course* it should – and of *course* it won’t be. Of the 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump, how many have been persuaded that they did so in error? Probably less than half. And even among those who have sobered up, how many are likely to watch, much less believe, PBS? For them, “Frontline” is just one more Deep State outlet to distrust (“liberal bias”), while Fox News and call-in radio remain beacons of enlightenment. The documentary for *this* contingent is, alas, Oliver Stone’s sadly confused but consistently fawning “The Putin Interviews,” in which the president sententiously shows earnest Ollie a fake newsreel, among other things. I just mentioned Russians requiring “a generation for this mindset to fade away”? Does anyone think Americans will need less?
A final plaint: this is first-rate television, as I hope I’ve conveyed, and I encourage everyone from savvy Russiagate hands to vaguely interested non-specialists to watch it. But I also wish it were titled something else. Maybe it’s just my inner (pedantic) philologist champing at the bit, but “Putin’s Revenge” seems by its very etymological nature to imply that there was (indeed is) something, or some *bunch* of things, to seek revenge *for.* When there *isn’t* – or wouldn’t be if VVP had reacted in more enlightened ways to the “lifetime of grievances” the narrative outlines here.
Whatever his seeming power and (domestic) authority, Putin is – just as Trump, his funhouse mirror doppelganger, is – a man limited by his own misperceptions and incapacity for growth. Putin apparently *believes* that George W. Bush “had Dan Rather fired” (to name a small thing) and that Hilary Clinton signaled Moscow’s Bolotnaya protestors to demonstrate vociferously for regime change (to name a big one). Right, Hilary as an updated Aurora, setting off Bolotnaya like the storming of the Winder Palace in 1917. Key-ripes, Mr. President.
Perceptions that dim-bulbed remind one of the recent observation by Masha Gessen (who appears in this feature) that Putin and Trump are “not particularly bright.” Well, yes. They’re both enormously capable at certain things and have reached positions that are only reached by the exceptionally driven; yet they can’t stop lying, either of them, even to their own detriment; and they can’t find it in themselves to admit a truth many around them have seen for some time – that they have become victims of paranoia – and deal with it.
So the title “Putin’s Revenge” seems to me slightly off; “Putin’s Revenge Against Imaginary Slights” would put it better – though it clunks as a title, of course. “Putin’s Paranoia” is both closer to the mark and nicely consonant – but it also suggests a documentary by a bunch of shrinks, which this is not. This film is an unpretentious and largely very competent overview of a train wreck presidency we will have to keep living with for a considerable period of time. Probably until part 4 comes out, and one hopes under the title “Revenge Manqué.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pWALA6vgoY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CseelcF16GA
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