Conscious chance

“Without dumping Putin, you can’t do anything with Russia,” the head of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov explains to reporters. “There is Putin - there is Russia, there is no Putin - no Russia,” his first deputy Vyacheslav Volodin echoes him. There is nothing new in these grades. Not only the predecessors of Ivanov and Volodin in the Kremlin thought exactly the same way, but also ordinary Soviet citizens more than 60 years ago, when the alarmed body of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was carried out of the House of Unions. There is Comrade Stalin - there is a Soviet Union. There is no comrade Stalin - there is no Soviet Union. And they pushed in lines, and died, trying to see their favorite body for the last time, and sobbed and fought in the Paduchi ... And the members of the then Politburo - they also assured everyone around that the leader should die - and everything would end at once. Because such is a distinctive feature of all the courtiers, existing in a system built under accident.

Stalin was just such an accident - a skilled apparatchian who has been around the seasoned party ideologists, who shot most of officials and military leaders and created the country's leadership completely sharpened under his whims - not very competent, gray, but devoted. After his death, the apparatchiks built a system that was aimed at the refusal of accidents: to head the country, you had to go through a certain school, take specific positions, understand how everything works. This system was destroyed by inertness and gerontocracy, but we must admit that even in the most hopeless years of stagnation, it never occurred to any of the members of the Politburo to say that with the death of Leonid Ilyich (Yuri Vladimirovich, Konstantin Ustinovich) everything would end. Such thoughts climb into the head only when another accident is on the throne, simply put - an impostor.

Putin is similar to Stalin precisely the fact that, if not for the Yeltsin whim, he would never have become not only the head of state, but even the director of the FSB. He never made a serious career, neither hardware nor political - unless he showed Skuratov with prostitutes, but in his own reign this became so banal technique that he no longer applies to merits. Putin, like Stalin, is an accident surrounded by accidents. Ivanov and Volodin can pronounce their words completely sincerely, because for them Russia is limited by the Kremlin and the Old Square - and they do not understand at all what will happen to the country that devour the country if Putin does not become.

In the future of the device, in their own future there is no pattern. Who became the heir to Stalin? Malenkov - I don’t know who is it? And the powerful Beria, quite comparable to Ivanov in terms of influence and roles in power structures - why did he find himself in the role of a scapegoat, defeated and executed? Where did Khrushchev come from, whom the "real" associates of the deceased leader never perceived seriously?

When Putin does not become, Volodin may well become the new president of Russia and remove Ivanov from all posts, accusing him of responsibility for the Crimean adventure and the country's defense capabilities. And it can happen and vice versa. And Medvedev may also become the president. And no Medvedev, but a goat. Or Naryshkin. Or even Gryzlov is generally the most likely candidate: a member of the Politburo, who does not hold any posts and does not respond directly to all the paranoid decisions of the leader of the last time. But there are no clear criteria. There is a simple rule: accidents depending on the whim of chance are afraid of any accident. And therefore they assure everyone that without Putin no Russia - that is, Russia, in which they themselves are not scared - will no longer be.