Vlad the Throwback

Vladimir Putin is a throwback. For Putin it's as though the 20th Century never happened, which stands to reason inasmuch as for Russia generally, the 20th Century was something that happened someplace else.

The 20th Century was very largely a continuation of the later 19th Century till sometime after the First World War of 1914-18, and Russia was knocked out of the war in '17 by the Bolshevik Revolution and descended first into chaos and before long into that Hadean nightmare called communism, till the 20th Century was near enough to over. And because communism can't survive the exposure of its people to the alternative, the Soviet Union had of necessity to be a hermetically-sealed hermit-state which would sooner shoot its citizens summarily than watch them step over its border and out of its system. So Russia skipped from the Edwardian world of 1917 to the 1990s, and passed the intervening decades as if in a bad dream.

The notion that annexing territories is the worst kind of gauche in international relations is novel, coming as it does in the 20th Century among the earlier phases of Western Civilization's project of dismantling itself and reducing the towering, gleaming skyscraper to a useless, miserable little heap of broken and twisted bits. Putin is a quite conventional nationalist, as alien to the West in 2014 as it is unremarkable to every civilization from the dawn of nations until living memory. 
 
So Vladimir Putin and Russia today are unbound by our decadent 21st Century Western notions of "international law" and all that rot which in practice amount to civilizational self-immolation.