Comment by Tatyana Felgenhauer:
Imagine a club that brought together tyrants, autocrats and dictators. It will look a lot like the recently held summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. As it turned out, in their personal conversations, the participants discussed the topics that concern them the most. Such as - their own immortality!
72 years is still nothing
The shots in which Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un walk, surrounded by their entourages, are perfect for political science textbooks dedicated to dictatorial regimes. Kim Jong-un stands out for his youth, but the other two - 72-year-old Putin and Xi - discuss immortality. The Russian state agency TASS delicately writes "longevity". But these people dream of immortality. And they convince each other that their age is nothing yet. The decades they have been in power are not enough for them - they want more and believe that modern science and technology will provide them with eternal life. Both Xi and Putin understand that for them this is equal to eternal power.
But isn't this the dream of every tyrant and dictator? Faced with the prospect of living to the age of 150 (whatever figure Xi mentions), the scale of today's events, whether it be repression or war, is lost, trivialized and recedes into the background. They dream of not having to look for heirs and not saying goodbye to the main thing in their lives - unlimited power in the country.
Putin's life and the death of everyone else
This conversation seems especially ominous against the backdrop of war, repression and the attitude to the value of human life in Russia. Putin is a war criminal - sane people would hardly dispute this. But the spirit of death hovered around him even before the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine: from the reluctance to save the sailors from the sunken submarine "Kursk" to the murder of his main political opponent, from the disregard for the lives of the hostages in Beslan to the demonstrative ignoring of domestic violence - all this shows that for Putin human life means nothing. Only his own power and his own life are important.
For what is he ready to sacrifice tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives? He has no ideology, no understandable goals, he is filled only with the desire to rule forever. As such, power is based on fear and death. It is logical that Putin would like to maintain this status of his as long as possible. He has no doubts about his impunity, so all biotechnologies and promises of eternal life are not a threat to live to the International Tribunal, but a chance to commit even more murders and conquer even more territories.
The Triumph of Hopelessness
Listening to Putin's reasoning about immortality, I think that we will not wait for the former high speed of change of Soviet political leaders, as during the time of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. Putin and his entourage clearly intend to live as long as possible. In discussions about regime change, one regularly hears that the only hope lies in the biological factor, not in the (impossible) palace coup or some external influence. It seems that Putin himself thinks so.
But if he really lives another 20-30 years, what will happen to the country? What generation will grow up? How many people in Russia have never seen any other government than Putin's? And how many more Russians will there be who consider repression to be the norm of life? Will they submit or rebel? Perhaps in this case, the only consolation is in two grave banalities, but just because the words are banal does not mean they are not true. First - do what you have to, and let it be what you want. And second - everyone dies at some point.
* Tatyana Felgenhauer is a Russian journalist, host of the program "The Breakfast show" and on the "Mediazone" YouTube channel.