Czar Vladimir

Niall Ferguson: “I don’t think Putin is mad. I think power has corrupted him. And it has also distanced him from reality. He clearly underestimated the Ukrainian resistance, and he clearly underestimated the risk to the Russian economy. These are miscalculations, not signs of madness. They’re the kind of miscalculations you make if you are very divorced from reality, because you lead the life of a czar, in vast — if hideous — palaces, surrounded by people who are terrified of you and tell you what they think you want to hear.”

“If I put myself in Putin’s position, I don’t think he’s trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. He’s looking back even further and trying to bring back the Russian Empire, with himself as ‘Czar Vladimir.’ It’s an ideology of conservative, orthodox nationalism that Putin offers, that has nothing to do with the Soviet legacy.”