Samzidat: Bush = Putin?
OK, so the latest scheme from Soft Skull is a new series of occasional political essays of five to ten thousand words, available as PDFs from our own website for free and, shortly, from Amazon.com and/or iTunes (working on those relationships right now...).
You could call them ePamphlets. Or iPamphlets. We're calling it Soft Skull Samzidat, and, appropriately, the first essay in the series—Bush and Putin as Leaders: The Ties that Bind—deals with Russia or, more specifically, how Bush and Putin both look into each others' souls and see kindred spirits, and kindred operators...
A short version of the essay appears at The Globalist, the long version—the actual Soft Skull Samzidat Publication No. 1—appears right here, and below are a couple of choice excerpts.
The actions of the Bush Administration point to a great irony. Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, America and Russia are undergoing a form of convergence of sorts. However, rather than Russia adopting liberal democracy and a market economy, as so many had predicted, the United States may be moving closer to a more traditionally Russian notion of managed democracy, in which executive authority reigns and the rights of citizens take a back seat to the needs of the state...
Each had his "Top Gun" moment before an adoring national press. Bush "helped" fly an S-3B Viking to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to make a speech declaring the "end" to major military combat in Iraq. Three years earlier, and less than a month before his first presidential election, then acting President Putin co-piloted an Su-27 from Krasnodar to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The media images of the two presidents, resplendent in their flight suits, are remarkably similar. Both leaders are extremely secretive and rely on inner circles to guide them. Both demand total loyalty and can be brutal to those who cross them. Both are also inclined to attack the news media, which they see as irritants at best.