Here’s my perspective on the controversial Russian President:
Putting Putin in Perspective
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About the Author: Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is a Catholic author and biographer who has written about subjects as various as GK Chesterton, economics, and Shakespeare.
I agree with you regarding Putin, Joseph. The US doesn’t understand Russia because it doesn’t want to. There seems to be a compulsion in our country to assign “roles” for other countries to play in a dramatic narrative we are forever constructing about ourselves.
To understand–or just get acquainted with–a people, look at their art, their music, their literature. We all live, or have lived, under political regimes that do not reveal who we really are. Putin’s admiration for Solzhenitsyn is not surprising; I believe that, whatever else he may be, he’s a man who loves his country, and he is helping Russia rediscover her soul.
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This piece is dismaying. I have never thought Joseph Pearce to be naive. But this makes him look it.
I’d never argue against a more balanced perspective regarding an important figure on the international stage, but this piece doesn’t provide it. No mention of the political murders of Litvinenko or Nemtsov. The latter occurred within site of the Kremlin, the former occurred over tea in a posh London hotel via polonium.
No mention of Putin’s connections to the Chechen wars, the annexation of Crimea is not mentioned, nor is the kidnap and farcical trial of Nadia Savchenko.
Yes, Putin should be applauded for including works by the Soviet Union’s most famous dissident, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. But we cannot use that as an excuse to ignore his erasure of Gulag history elsewhere with the state taking over Perm-36 and replacement of all the exhibits.
Reason and balance requires the bad be treated fairly as well as any good.
This, Pearce does not do.