Channel One’s talk show “The Great Game. Part Three” is an unusual creature in Russia’s political snake pit. Its host, Dmitry Konstantinovich Simes, is a legendary Soviet intelligence asset who spent roughly half a century in the United States under cover as an independent American political scientist of the conservative‑realist school.
Regular guests include Dmitry Trenin, Karen Shakhnazarov, Mikhail Khodarenok, and Yevgeny Buzhinsky. They are all convinced imperialists, absolutely loyal to the current regime, who see themselves as part of it and never miss a chance to underline their devotion to the man at the top.
But as not stupid and highly ambitious people, they cannot remain blind and personally untouched by the nationwide wave we called in our previous column the “Vysotsky syndrome”: “No, guys, everything is wrong, everything is wrong, guys…”
They are clearly trying to use this studio to suggest (as respectfully and cautiously as possible) steps the supreme leader might take to resist the rising wave that now threatens not only his personal power but also the imperial idea they all cherish.
In this new situation, the show becomes a priceless source of information about the moods and hesitations at the very top of Russian power, where something serious seems to have happened between April 19 and April 22. By April 23, a fairly wide circle of observers could already see the consequences in the plainly abnormal behavior of that very “top.”
Putin showed that he is not prepared to take risky actions, especially when they involve any risk to his own life.
But let us return once more to the April 19 episode of “The Great Game,” recorded a few days after the Defense Ministry published its ominous list of targets on NATO 2.0 territory – 27 defense plants that work with Ukraine or for Ukraine. That broadcast became a loud, emotional call to carry out those strikes. A few characteristic lines:
“We can’t just threaten; the limit of verbal threats has been exhausted.”
“Wars are only won by those who are ready to take risky actions.”
And finally: “Let them pick up the burning wreckage.”
The sovereign emperor answered his loyal servants with a very cold reply, which the faithful old lackey Simes read out on their April 22 show:
“To launch strikes without thinking about the consequences is, to put it mildly, not a sign of state wisdom.”
As a consolation prize, the “influencers” were allowed to daydream about striking Ukrainian drones as they pass over the Baltic states – a fantasy they threw themselves into with much gnashing of teeth.
Putin showed that he is not prepared to take risky actions, especially when they involve any risk to his own life. He didn’t have a litter of little Kabaevas just to die early; in his imagination, they form a genetically ideal pool of spare parts – young, healthy organs ready for transplant – that will let him live at least to 150, as he once boasted to his colleague Xi.
At the same time, he is just as categorically unwilling to end the war, and this paralysis of will is taking a heavy toll on his mental state – and whatever his fantasies about organ transplants, no one can give him a new head.
His very first two public appearances on April 23, apparently after a hard week of meetings with various groups of “comrades‑in‑arms,” leave a deeply disturbing impression.
Putin is the third last Russian tsar, and in his condition and behavior over these final months of his rule, he uncannily resembles his two predecessors. All three drifted passively toward catastrophe – for themselves and for the systems they ruled – unable to take any clear decisions.
The first last Russian tsar was Nicholas Romanov; with his fall, the centuries‑old Russian Empire died.
The Soviet Union was a 70‑year convulsion of the Russian Empire. We never tire of quoting the brilliant Andrei Amalrik: “Just as the adoption of Christianity extended the life of the Roman Empire by three hundred years, the adoption of communism extended the life of the Russian Empire by several decades.”
Mikhail Gorbachev was the second last Russian tsar. His departure marked and confirmed the death of the communist experiment.
Putin’s quarter‑century Reich has turned out to be the most unviable and grotesque construction of all, a convulsion of a convulsion, and it is now collapsing before our eyes under the weight of the monstrous crime it chose to commit, a crime that even Stalin’s Soviet Union did not dare attempt.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.