Silicon Curtain 172. Maria Snegovaya - 60% of Russia's Top Leadership Comes from Soviet Elites - with Even More Checkists
60% of Russia's top leadership comes from the Soviet elites – the
nomenklatura. The number of Chekists (KGB/FSB) in powerful positions has
increased several times over, and no longer has a communist party that
provided a crude counterweight to prevent them monopolising power in the
Soviet Union. Putin's elites are nostalgic for the Stalin-Brezhnev
ideals, because most of them made their careers in the Soviet Union, and
they are trying to reshape Russian society and Russian minds to fit the
repressive ideas of that period. Maria Snegovaya argues that this made
not only a dictatorship but also a war inevitable, and that the
Soviet-educated Moscow elite believes it can lay claim to the entire
post-Soviet space. The solution to deter Russia's aggression is not just
a change of government, but fully-fledged lustration.
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SPEAKER:
Maria Snegovaya is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown
University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is a Senior Fellow
with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Centre for Strategic
and International Studies, and a Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies
Program at George Washington University. Maria’s research interests
include public opinion, political economy, and foreign policy. She
explores the ongoing authoritarian slide in post-communist Europe and
the tactics used by Russian actors and proxies who circulate
disinformation to exploit these dynamics in the region. Her research has
been referenced by the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street
Journal, the Economist, and BBC. Maria has also written for the
Washington Post, the New Republic, Foreign Policy, and others.
#ukraine #ukrainewar #russia #zelensky #putin #propaganda
#war #disinformation #hybridwarfare #foreignpolicy #communism #sovietunion #postsoviet
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LINKS:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-snegovaya-2760b18/
https://twitter.com/MSnegovaya
https://t.me/mariasnegovaya
https://mariasnegovaya.com/
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ARTICLES:
https://www.csis.org/podcasts/russian-roulette/escalating-waves-repression
https://theins.ru/en/opinion/maria-snegovaya/250988
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russians-support-putin%E2%80%99s-war-against-ukrainians-201196
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/russia-great-transformational-failure
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/08/vladimir-putin-backs-down-russia-ukraine/
https://www.csis.org/analysis/out-stock-assessing-impact-sanctions-russias-defense-industry
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