The Law Of Putin’s Jungle
Vladimir Putin is a snake–he says so himself. At his latest four-hour press conference, the Russian prime minister compared himself to Kaa, the huge, hypnotic python from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. And the growing ranks of protesters against his regime? He called them “monkeys.” As any Jungle Book fan (which includes most Russians) knows, Kaa is “everything that the monkeys feared in the jungle, for none of them knew the limits of his power, none of them could look him in the face, and none had ever come alive out of his hug.” Which leaves little doubt about Putin’s response to the series of protests that have brought 100,000 people into the streets of Moscow and 100 other Russian cities over the past month. Hypnotize them. Then crush them.
