Putin Dares to Go Where Soviet Leaders Feared to Tread

As Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual state of the nation address this week, offering one social handout after another, praising heroic doctors and vaccine researchers and promising to toughen environmental regulation, it felt like a trip to a parallel reality. Yet notwithstanding Putin’s largely empty domestic exhortations, his message to the West highlighted a radical difference in approach from that of his Soviet predecessors.

In Putin’s world, Russia was an advanced country overcoming the Covid pandemic and trying to resolve some inevitable but not particularly daunting social and economic issues. In another world outside the cavernous hall of tense, mostly maskless faces hanging on Putin’s every word, troops were massing on the Ukrainian borders. European and U.S. leaders were calling for a de-escalation and their calls were being ignored. The U.S. had just stepped up sanctions, expanding them to Russia’s new debt. The Czech Republic had just blamed Russian intelligence officers for a munitions depot explosion in 2014 that killed two people, and expelled 18 Russian diplomats from the embassy in Prague. The battered Russian opposition, officially designated by the government as “foreign agents,” faced pre-emptive detentions and a heavy riot police presence as it tried to hold rallies in support of their jailed, hunger-striking leader. Russia’s Covid vaccination rate stood at 4.3%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, about 13% of the U.S. rate. In February, the latest month for which official statistics are available, 24,369 people reportedly died from Covid or with Covid; but excess deaths compared with February 2020 reached 29,493, suggesting a continuing cover-up of Covid mortality.