© Katehon.com
represents the first attempt by an appreciated mainstream editorialist and diplomat, the former ambassador of Italy to Russia, Sergio Romano, to depict President Putin not as an "autocrat", "tyrant" or simply one "who every week finds new ways to scare the world", but as a "leader of a big country that has legitimate interests and understandable ambitions". Romano, who is a columnist of the
Corriere della Sera, tries to interpret the western anger against Putin and his Russia as a problem of the same western democracies: "We may deplore some aspects of his character and his politics, but I see always less people in the West with the right to impart to him lessons of democracy." He adds:
"I ask myself if democracy is still a virtuous model that the Europe of sick democracies and the US of the wicked Middle East adventures and the new racism have the right to propose to Russia?". The result is therefore that: "we might ask ourselves if the very bad image that democracies are actually showing isn't at the origin of the 'authoritarianism' of Putin".The book has to be considered not simply a biography of President Putin or a sort of humble apology of his figure. It is more than this: it is a well documented summary of the last 30 years of Russian history and a succession of brilliant considerations about how the distorted western perception has been unable to understand the "Putin phenomenon". One of the axes of the book is the attempt to define Putin's strategy to "rebuild Russia". According to Romano we must go beyond the typical consideration on the reconciliation with the past, the restoration of the Church, and the edification of national consciousness. He actually believes that
we have to consider a sort of new political and geopolitical ideology underneath Putin's politics. Romano quotes in this case the annual address to the federal assembly that Putin delivered in 2012, specifically this part of his speech: "I would like all of us to understand clearly that the coming years will be decisive.
Who will take the lead and who will remain on the periphery and inevitably lose their independence will depend not only on the economic potential but primarily on the will of each nation, on its inner energy, which Lev Gumilev termed passionarnost: 'the ability to move forward and to embrace change'."
Comment: Could this announcement have anything to do with the "Trump effect"? Trump win spells doom for European Atlanticists