To repeat what I’ve already written long ago:

What’s now being done under Putin, and of course some of this is a continuation of what began under Yeltsin, is all, forgive me for the rhetorical turn, revenge against Gorbachev. Gorbachev made a great many mistakes, but he dealt with the depth of the problems that he sought to resolve. What he had nothing of was this repulsive chauvinism that we have seen, now flaring up, now dying down, throughout the 1990s and up to the present time. Gorbachev never engaged in grandstanding and had nothing of the “We’ll-show-you” instinct of the backyard pack. Everything that emerged from the backyards and the prisons came later, and we were so very late and unprepared to see it for what it was. Force, force and yet more force...The answer to absolutely everything. Gorbachev insisted that “there were exceptions.” And they have been taking their revenge on him ever since.

That’s the “contemporary philosophy” that comes to mind.

16 September 2018