Putin says Russia will achieve its Ukraine aims by force if Kyiv doesn't want peace

[Igel]

3. He grew up in the USSR.

So, of course. Reality is what you get the media and rhetorical environment to say it is--it's entirely socially, if not socialistically, constructed.

Sometimes I wonder if his goal isn't to "engineer" the "human soul" to make it ready for what he had when he grew up, and get that ol' Marxist-Leninist "course of history" back "on track" in Russia: First socialism, and then the withering away of the state to produce communism. After all, one bit complaint in late-stage socialism was that it had to fail because the preconditions, the transition from capitalism, hadn't actually occurred in socialist Russia. In 1918 much of Russia was properly quasi-feudal, where all the efforts to 'liberate' the serfs hadn't really changed much on the ground: they had the same culture, the same attitudes, and very often little improved economic conditions (except to the extent they'd become urban 'proletariat').