Since the West cannot accept that a country that chooses a non-Western path can be a democracy, it also cannot accept that such a country can also be successful and happy. Instead the West assumes the "Russian autocracy" is corrupt and selfish, lacks political legitimacy, enjoys fragile popular support, and has an economy that is badly run, is inefficient and one-dimensional and depends entirely on oil and gas revenues.
This provides the key to understanding the whole otherwise bizarre "Putin’s disappearance" story.
The West imposed sanctions on Russia assuming the country is economically weak. It supposed that the sanctions would devastate the economy and that this would in turn trigger a popular revolt against Putin that would either cause his overthrow or which would force him to change his Ukrainian policy.
The West assumes this revolt will be led by Russia’s business leaders, who in the West are always called "oligarchs" (though there is no evidence any of them actually possess political power and are in any true sense "oligarchs") and who the West always assumes are selfish and corrupt.
These business leaders or "oligarchs" are supposed to carry out their coup in alliance with pro-Western liberal politicians within the government and with certain pro-Western political activists outside the government who previously headed the Moscow protests of 2011 and 2012. The latter are in reality marginal figures but mainstream Western opinion has never accepted this and continues to believe them to be far more important and influential than they really are.
We know that this is what the West intended because a stream of articles in the Western media has told us so. We also know it because no less a person than Angela Merkel has said as much.
We know that right at the start of the Ukrainian conflict Merkel was advised by the German intelligence agency the BND that Putin risked being overthrown by an oligarch-led coup if Western sanctions were imposed on Russia - which is why of course she imposed them. Merkel continues to say publicly that the sanctions will force a change in Russia, though she is now more circumspect than before and tends to speak of that change as something that will happen in the distant future.
In the event, what has actually happened in Russia since the sanctions were imposed is the exact opposite of what the West expected.
Putin has not changed his Ukrainian policy. Nor has he come under any pressure in Russia to do so. Far from the sanctions causing the elite to fracture and to plot a coup against him the elite has instead consolidated around him. Not a single member of the government or of the business community has broken ranks to call publicly for a change of policy or of government. Putin’s popular support meanwhile has hit unprecedented levels. Most alarming and baffling of all, instead of collapsing under the weight of sanctions and of the oil price fall as the West expected, Russia’s economy is rebounding.
Western bafflement and frustration at the failure of its policy is what ultimately lies behind the story of Putin’s "disappearance".
Since the West cannot accept that its ideas about Russia are wrong, its analysts scour the Russian landscape for "evidence" to prove it right and to show that its policy is working after all. Since the objective of the policy is to provoke a coup - or at least a political crisis - in Russia, Western analysts look obsessively for signs of one. Since evidence for a coup or of a political crisis does not actually exist, the analysts have to invent it. This they do so by over analysing inconsequential facts. Thus a few missed meetings in the schedule of a busy man become evidence of the political crisis the West desperately wants to believe is happening.
What has given this all added urgency is the growing sense in the West over the last few weeks that it is losing in Ukraine. Not only was the Ukrainian army badly defeated in February but the Ukrainian economy is collapsing and the Minsk Memorandum of 12th February 2015 ceded control to Russia of Ukraine’s border whilst leading to talk of a split between the US and Germany. If a coup is to happen in Russia before Ukraine is entirely lost, then that coup must happen soon. That is what lies behind the febrile atmosphere of a week ago.
If this were simply an isolated incident it would be good for a laugh and there would be no more to say. Unfortunately that is not the case. The West’s false conception of Russia guarantees that similar episodes will continue to happen, some doubtless even more preposterous than the one we have just see. When they do they will cloud understanding of Russia even more.
The State of the Union speech that Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered to a joint meeting of both houses of the Russian parliament on December 4 was the mirror opposite of the way the speech was patchily and superficially described in most major U.S. media outlets.
What little space was given to the speech was not merely hostile and often sneering but factually misleading. The speech was repeatedly described as rambling. Russian elite figures (usually code for political opponents of the president) were said to be unnerved by it.
The speech certainly came at a time of challenge, crisis and change for the Russian economy: A combination of Western economic sanctions and tumbling global oil prices has led to a fall of 40 percent in the international value of the ruble since March.
However, far from being vague, Putin’s speech was extremely detailed.
Far from proclaiming any policy of increased global isolation, Putin proclaimed Russia’s determination to increase its trade and strategic ties with most of the globe.
And far from turning Russia’s economy and society back into communist times and trying to recreate the Soviet Union, as the Russian leader is repeatedly accused of doing, he made clear his determination to liberalize the domestic economy and create a more effective internal free market, low tax system than the country has seen arguably in more than a century since the time of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin before World War I.
Putin sought to jump-start the Russian economy by proclaiming policies that, if they had been announced by any other world leader, would have been enthusiastically praised by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Financial Times. He proposed a major amnesty to attract back flight capital from offshore accounts and announced tax breaks for small businesses.
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