(Presidential advisor for shipbuilding Nikolai Patrushev in 2023)
As our last essay noted earlier today, the next Russian president held his coming out party on October 13th at Moscow’s Hotel Ukraina, a symbol of the country’s imperial ambitions, past and present. He is inheriting a state machine dedicated to conquest, genocide and war – the wheels of which are greased by global networks delivering corruption, subversion and longevity for autocrats.
Dmitry Patrushev has only made it to the top of the greasy pole of Kremlin politics because of his father, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev — or ‘Sokratych’, as he is sardonically nick-named. Soktratych is not well known because he is a mostly reclusive Chekist, or veteran of Russia’s hidebound security services. Over the first thirteen years of Putin’s presidency, when Patrushev was FSB director and security council secretary, he gave only one interview, on Chekists’ day in 2000.
In it, he decried those who sought to “demonize” former KGB officials then entering government. Far from being a “dark force” or “threat to democracy,” this “fresh blood” with “a spirit of government service” was needed to renew “Russia’s administrative corps.” It was pure bluster — in the same tradition of Chekists and Russia apologists who continue to portray Andropov as a ‘liberal’.
(Patrushev and Putin meeting in the Kremlin on August 9th, 2000, after an explosion rocked a shopping arcade in downtown Moscow)
In 2014, the year of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, Patrushev gave his second public interview – a hawkish one about Ukraine. Over the next five years, he gave five more. With the 2022 invasion, his public profile rose. He gave four interviews in 2022; three in 2023; and four in 2024. So far this year he has given six.
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