Yevgeniy Maksimovich Primakov, 29 October 1929 – 26 June 2015) was a Russian politician and diplomat who served as Prime Minister of Russia from 1998 to 1999. During his long career, he also served as Foreign Minister, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, and chief of the intelligence service. Primakov was an academician and a member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
It seemed that Yevgeni Maximovich Primakov would live forever.
He was a wise old man, holding no official post, but always ready to help the country. To give advice to the people invested with real power; to meet informally with foreign partners—not the ones you see on TV, but those who make the decisions; to influence his friends and followers, who held key posts in various powerful agencies.
Primakov was the incarnation of the concept of "soft power," and virtually its only practitioner who was fighting for Russia's glory.
Of course, the media is as full of "soft power" soldiers as a tin of sardines. They go on and on about "the Chinese danger," and how Russia, having quarrelled with the West, is doomed to become a raw materials appendage of China, or how it is for naught that the Kremlin is trying to establish mutually beneficial contacts with Turkey. They carry on about Iran using us as a pawn in its game with Washington, and how Beijing and Delhi will never trade in their friendship with America for the dubious benefits of an alliance with Moscow... Now that Primakov is gone, those thin, whiny voices will be louder and shriller on the air.
Right now, that is insignificant. Because Primakov's idea of creating a Great Triangle, Moscow-Delhi-Beijing, is becoming a real political construct before our very eyes, no matter how loud the liberal jackals may yap.
Yevgeni Maximovich first proclaimed the idea of the Great Triangle during his visit to Delhi in 1998. Many of us recall the condition Russia was in at that time: politically and economically crushed, having barely survived the August default, and just barely beginning to find our way out of the deep crisis into which Russia had been plunged by the "young reformers" in alliance with the corrupt members of the Yeltsin Family.
Comment: Russia has lost a great, if untitled statesman. It is heartening to see his legacy going forward, as Russia takes its rightful place in the world.