Malignancy or disease of the soul and the enigma of the Russia jester (any former students are welcome to comment)

The kleptocratic oligarchy proudly fleecing and selling out their own nation (after they sold out their previous allies to buy off their new partners or enemies) certainly explains a lot and, in my view, easily beats any competing hypotheses that try to explain the whoring character and idiosyncrasies of the anti-communist, post-Soviet and anti-Soviet system. But some of us know that greed and class interest are not necessarily the best or deepest one can do. We are after all psychological beings, and, as such, class analysis and class interest, like other or their bourgeois competing theories, are in their essence hardly more than a simplified psychological algorithm.

Michael Green wrote:

"My point is that Putin usually functions as a stooge for the Russian oligarchy, such that it is. The underlying problem, however, goes deeper. Russian citizens worship him. What they are liking, it seems, is his CEO charisma, his witticisms and their middle class comforts, never mind that Putin is drilling in the Arctic while Siberia is burning, never mind that Kiev's Nazis hope to invade Russia.
What I wouldn't have given to see the Russian people take Glazyev's warning to heart. To offset that possibility -- i.e., it was mostly concerned about public opinion at that time, not the lives of Strelkov and his men -- the Kremlin staged a cynical and diversionary chess gambit which, in the end (no surprise), worked to the benefit of Poroshenko, his Banderite shock troops and the west.
In this and in many other ways, Putin symbolizes the outer manifestation of a cancer affecting the body politic. At a deeper level yet, however, we are talking about a terminal malignancy of the Russian soul itself. Instead, we see a lot of rhetorical/romanticized smoke and mirrors from the left (e.g., the holy 99%), when in both Russia and America, the 99% has, for the most part, proven itself to be dumber than a rock, and as malleable as butter."

Michael's point about the malignancy of the soul put a bg into my head and so I started to think. One of the compelling thoughts is that one thread and clue points to the archetype, motif of the Russian jester ("shut," "shutka" = joke; hence joker), who is actually like the Devil paired with God, one half of the pair of "the jester and the king." The Russian jester/joker is a special one. The first joker in modern Russian/Soviet history was Khrushchev. Brezhnev was too, but he tried to hide it by deadening himself and all around. Gorbachev was a joker too, but one who tried hard to be a Western, British gentleman. Yeltsin ... well that goes without a saying. Here we have a whole dynasty of jesters being or playing kings and kings playing jokers and jokes with the people.