LAUGHING AT PUTIN

In 1940 Charlie Chaplin scored a hit with his movie The Great Dictator, lampooning Adolf Hitler. More recently Mel Brooks, a Jew, made his movie, The Producers, which made fun of Hitler. While it is hard to turn monsters into comedy it is one way to cut them down to size. Alexander Motyl, a writer, painter, and political science professor at Rutgers University-Newark has done the same thing with Vladimir Putin. He entitles it PITUN’S LAST STAND: An Entertainment about the Fall of Russia. In the midst of the horrific war in Ukraine we are all wondering how it will end. We long to see Putin fall from power in Moscow and Russia to come to its senses. But how and if it will happen, if at all, is all conjecture. Motyl wrote and published his satire last year before the start of the war in Ukraine. His entertainment has grown deadly serious. It is well written, informed and hilarious, with an unexpected ending.

Motyl’s Jewish parents emigrated from Lviv, Ukraine and he was born in New York City in 1953. He is a specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the Soviet Union.