House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia by Craig Unger

House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia by Craig Unger

Author:Craig Unger [Unger, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593080306
Google: 4KH4tQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0593080300
Publisher: Bantam Press
Published: 2018-08-14T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

WAR BY OTHER MEANS

AS THE UKRAINE crisis was building to a boil, a short story called “Without Sky” was published in a literary magazine called Russian Pioneer. Set in the future, after the “fifth world war,”1 “Without Sky” was written by Natan Dubovitsky, whose literary endeavors would have been considerably less noteworthy were it not for the fact that his real name was Vladislav Surkov and from 2011 to 2013, as deputy prime minister to Vladimir Putin, he served as the Kremlin’s chief ideologue and “gray cardinal.”

As Soviet-born British author Peter Pomerantsev put it, Surkov, “‘the puppet master who privatised the Russian political system’ … is the real genius of the Putin era,”2 a man who is essential to understanding how Putin created a new strain of authoritarianism that was far more subtle and more understated than the epic spectacles from the previous century.

On some level, it was not surprising that Surkov wrote a war story, given that life in Russia under Putin essentially means living a narrative of unending war, which is broadcast on Russian TV incessantly on programs about enemies of the state, Chechen terrorists, fascists taking over Ukraine, and the like, mixed with a dark romantic nostalgia for Russia’s lost imperial past.3

Still, Surkov’s war was fundamentally different from past wars:

This was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the nineteenth, twentieth, and other middle centuries, the fight was usually between two sides: two nations or two temporary alliances. But now, four coalitions collided, and it wasn’t two against two, or three against one. It was all against all.

And what coalitions they were! Not like the earlier ones. It was a rare state that entered the coalition intact. What happened was some provinces took one side, some took the other, and some individual city, or generation, or sex, or professional society of the same state—took a third side. And then they could switch places, cross into any camp you like, sometimes during battle.

The goals of those in conflict were quite varied. Each had his own, so to speak: the seizing of disputed pieces of territory; the forced establishment of a new religion; higher ratings or rates; the testing of new military rays and airships; the final ban on separating people into male and female, since sexual differentiation undermines the unity of the nation; and so forth.4



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.