Putin – the average KGB manager : interview with Dmitry Bykov (Krosno, May 2014)

An interview with a very famous Russian writer of the middle generation, Dmitry Bykov (born in 1967), recorded in Krosno in the Subcarpathian region in mid-May 2014, concerns the situation in Russia and in Eastern and Central Europe shortly after the annexation of Ukrainian Crimea by Putin’s Russia. Dmitry Bykov is strongly against this aggression, seeing it as the source of many future misfortunes for Russia, but at the same time he sees the disastrous dimension of contemporary Ukrainian politics, also – in his opinion – too nationalist. When it comes to the assessment of President Putin who functions to this day, Bykov considers him a very mediocre manager, and generally – a man without qualities, predicting his imminent collapse and retirement in some foreign country. The most interesting fragments of the conversation, however, are not those in which the writer’s, of course, unfulfilled predictions were formulated, but those about the past and present fate of Russia, which at the beginning of the 21st century again turned out to be hostile to democracy and good relations with its closer and more distant neighbours. Bykov sees in this peculiar Russian “laws of historical development,” but his vision of the future history of Russia is far from fatal and we can even call it moderately optimistic