172. Maria Snegovaya - 60% of Russia's Top Leadership Comes from Soviet Elites - with Even More Checkists

60% of Russia's top leadership comes from the Soviet elites – the nomenklatura. The number of Chekists (KGB/FSB) in powerful positions has increased several times over, and no longer has a communist party that provided a crude counterweight to prevent them monopolising power in the Soviet Union. Putin's elites are nostalgic for the Stalin-Brezhnev ideals, because most of them made their careers in the Soviet Union, and they are trying to reshape Russian society and Russian minds to fit the repressive ideas of that period. Maria Snegovaya argues that this made not only a dictatorship but also a war inevitable, and that the Soviet-educated Moscow elite believes it can lay claim to the entire post-Soviet space. The solution to deter Russia's aggression is not just a change of government, but fully-fledged lustration. ---------- SPEAKER:Maria Snegovaya is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is a Senior Fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and a Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University. Maria’s research interests include public opinion, political economy, and foreign policy. She explores the ongoing authoritarian slide in post-communist Europe and the tactics used by Russian actors and proxies who circulate disinformation to exploit these dynamics in the region. Her research has been referenced by the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and BBC. Maria has also written for the Washington Post, the New Republic, Foreign Policy, and others. #ukraine #ukrainewar #russia #zelensky #putin #propaganda #war #disinformation #hybridwarfare #foreignpolicy #communism #sovietunion #postsoviet ---------- LINKS: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-snegovaya-2760b18/ https://twitter.com/MSnegovaya https://t.me/mariasnegovaya https://mariasnegovaya.com/ ---------- ARTICLES:https://www.csis.org/podcasts/russian-roulette/escalating-waves-repressionhttps://theins.ru/en/opinion/maria-snegovaya/250988https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russians-support-putin%E2%80%99s-war-against-ukrainians-201196https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/russia-great-transformational-failurehttps://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/08/vladimir-putin-backs-down-russia-ukraine/ https://www.csis.org/analysis/out-stock-assessing-impact-sanctions-russias-defense-industry ----------