Vladimir Putin: A Personal Comment

Three weeks after I retired from full-time work as a teacher, Vladimir Putin became the Prime Minister of Russia(9/8/’99). I left my lecturing job in Western Australia and drove with my wife across Australia to Tasmania for a sea-change. Instead of living on the edge of the Indian Ocean I came to live on the edge of the Great Southern Ocean. I moved into my home in George Town Tasmania on 23 September 1999. During the weeks before my arrival in this my sea-change town, the Second Chechen War began(26/8/’99). Ten days after I moved into my house in south George Town on the Tamar River, three kms from the Bass Strait, Putin declared the Chechen government illegitimate and the Second Chechen War moved into a new stage. "Unprecedented barbarities”(1), as this doco put it, were to be committed in the months and years ahead.

As I settled into a life of writing and independent scholarship in this place of retirement in my last years of middle age(55 to 60), Vladimir Putin settled into the role of President with his managed democracy and his managed self-image as everything to everyone. -Ron Price with thanks to 1“The Putin System,” SBS TV, 14 September 2008, 11:00-12:00 p.m.

I, too, managed my new democracy:
my freedom “from,” my freedom “to.”
But I had to work in a new system,
much simpler than the multiplicity
of relationships, a system of only my
wife and I—a dyad—retirement with
its own difficulties as we managed our
world with its new parameters, battles,
boundaries, eccentricities, paradoxes,
contradictions, confusions, seemingly
endless concerns with trivia: garbage
and dishes to dust and cleaning basins
with gumption; and with its learning &
the cultural attainments of the mind,
writing’s fascinating fusion of trifles
and some of the profound questions
in the world of existence as the future
came to look brighter than it ever had.(1)

(1) The Universal House of Justice, 24 May 2001.

Ron Price
22 September 2008