Peter Morgan’s play “Patriots,” which ended its Broadway run Sunday, tells the backstory of the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The author of “The Crown” sees the story as the arrogant folly of post-glasnost Russian oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky who had laughed at drunken old Boris Yeltsin and thought they were installing in his place a benign apparatchik they could trust to do their bidding.
Alas for those making billions from formerly state-owned utilities, their obscure deputy mayor of St. Petersburg proved to be an unreconstructed thug who embraced the old Soviet ways of murder and show trials for innocent Western journalists such as Evan Gershkovich and who rose up to poison his benefactors.
In some cases, literally.
The play, which attracted plenty of Russian emigres but did not do especially well at the box office, was a reminder of how little most Americans know or care about the conditions that created Putin. Therefore, they fail to understand the concern, and surprise, that some older people felt seeing Putin waltzing around the other day with North Korean President Kim Jong Un, whom he has threatened to arm, should Ukraine get more of the kind of international military support Putin does not like.
What a nauseating spectacle occurred Wednesday in Pyongyang as simpering sycophants presented the ruthless Russian with flowers and other gifts while Kim, famous for his nuclear and missile-lobbing ambitions, lined up his military forces for Vlad to inspect. This was a long way from “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” This was Soviet Cold War maneuvering, redux. And more than enough to make us shiver.
This Putin-Kim pact, if that is the right word, threatens the balance of power and stability in Asia, understandably causing heartburn in Seoul and Tokyo. And of course, it reflects the new American-European weakness on the global stage. Kim, who has shown himself to be unstable, is a threat to the U.S., and this palpable new closeness with Putin’s Russia only compounds the worry. China was hard to read on the matter, which no doubt was exactly what Beijing had in mind.
America, of course, is distracted by an election and internal tribalism and hardly is offering us ideal presidential candidates to deal with the future affairs of Putin and Kim, never mind their other potential new friends. We will all need to start paying closer attention and trying to better understand contemporary Russian events.
If you were alive for the end of the Soviet era and the joyous freedoms then celebrated in Ukraine, the Republic of Georgia and elsewhere, think back to where you thought we would be a generation later.
We bet you expected to see tourists flocking to St. Petersburg, McDonald’s thriving in Moscow, and Ukrainians worrying about soccer, not Russian tanks. We know we did.
But that is not at all where we find ourselves. Instead we’re watching a movie called “Mr. Putin goes to North Korea” and worrying about what the sequel might be.
