Posts Tagged ‘putin’
Twelve More Years of Vladimir Putin? Nyet!
White is the colour of political protest in Russia: it stands for clean elections and clean government. Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB regime might in theory be able to provide the first of these, organising a more or less fair contest in the presidential election on March 4. But the second is impossible: theft and deceit are not just problems in the Russian political system — they are the system.
Russian political life has awoken from a 12-year coma. After the upheavals of the 1990s, stability and rising living standards mattered far more than the openness of political procedures or the contestability of official decisions. Now that has changed. Politics, once dismissed with a weary shrug, is the hottest topic in Moscow and other big cities. The internet is humming with parodies, many savagely funny, of Putin and his cronies. One of the best is a Borat-style hymn of praise to the Russian leader by a Tajik crooner, so pitch-perfect in its rendering of the style of official pro-Putin propaganda that many found it hard to work out if it was indeed a spoof, or just a particularly grotesque example of the real thing.
A more brutal take was from some beefy paratrooper veterans, growling: “You’re just like me, a man not a god. I’m just like you, a man not a sod.” That too became an instant hit on YouTube. When the band appeared on stage at the latest big opposition demonstration on February 4, the crowd already knew the words. The song’s success highlights two important trends. One is the interaction between the internet and political protest. That is quite new in Russia, where in previous years people went online to play games, visit dating sites, and follow celebrity gossip. Now cyberspace has become the greenhouse for opposition political culture. The other point, no less sinister for the regime, is that the habits of mockery have spread to parts of society that used to be rock-solid supporters of the regime, such as veterans of elite military units.
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Putin and his cronies have plundered Russia for a decade, but though he’ll win Sunday’s sham election, his days are numbered
For the past four years, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev, who has the nominal post of president, have been engaged in a huge propaganda operation to fool Russians and the West.
With much fanfare, they have pretended to reform their benighted land. Mr Medvedev denounced corruption, and they pretended to be friends with the West, particularly through a warming of their relations with the U.S. in 2009.
But this has been a sham to conceal the truth: that Russia is shamefully misruled.
The ruling former KGB regime has squandered tens of billions of pounds and missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernise the country.
It has no real interest in friendship or co-operation with the West, whatever our gullible diplomats and officials may think. It wants to launder money in London, but not to adopt our values of liberty or the rule of law.
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Why Putin Believes His Critics Are Monkeys
In the six weeks since the protests began at Bolotnaya Ploshchad, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made one fatal, but inevitable, error. He broke his vow of silence.
Until now, one of the most conspicuous features of Putin’s rule had been his silence on every subject that had been a source of public outrage.
It was always President Dmitry Medvedev who went out of his way by promising to “get to the bottom” of the latest injustice — for example, the possible cover-up of the fatal car accident involving a LUKoil executive on Leninsky Prospekt, the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the brutal beatings of journalist Oleg Kashin and the persecution of Khimki forest highway protesters. But because Medvedev never made good on his promises, he came off looking like a windbag.
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Exposed: the ugly face of Putin’s Russia
In a powerful documentary on Putin’s Russia made by Norma Percy to be shown on BBC2 on 19 January there is an extraordinary moment when the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky confronts the recently elected President Putin. On film he tells him that Russia is so corrupt up that to 10 per cent of national wealth is disappearing into the hands of the post-Soviet bureaucracy. So much so that all the best and brightest graduates leaving college want to be tax police. That’s where the money is to be made, complains the owner of Yukos, as tax shakedowns were the most common form of getting rich quick.
At the time, in 2002, the sleek, jowly Khodorkovsky was still Russia’s top oligarch. As he confronts Putin the Russian leader’s eyes narrow and he taps his pencil with irritation on the table as he rebukes the oligarch at a business leaders’ council held in the Kremlin which was filmed and remains an electrifying moment in the documentary. Stalin also used a pencil rather than a pen to initial or tick lists to be sent to the Gulag. Khodorkovsky today finds himself in prison where those business leaders who did not pay their dues to the Putinocracy have found themselves if they did not flee to exile in time.
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UK ‘should tell Vladimir Putin he is not welcome at Olympics’
MPs call for Russian prime minister to be told he is not wanted at London games unless Russia improves human rights record.
Britain should tell Vladimir Putin that he is not welcome at the London Olympics unless Russia makes meaningful efforts to improve its human rights record, MPs will say.
In a move likely to infuriate the Kremlin, Labour’s former Europe minister Denis MacShane will make a parliamentary call for the government to make it clear that Putin is not wanted at the games.
Dozens of heads of state are expected to attend the opening ceremony on 27 July. The Queen will preside over the ceremony, with each national team – including Russia – taking part in a parade.
Putin, currently the prime minister, is certain to win Russia’s presidential election in March despite public discontent and huge protests against election fraud last month. He will be back in the Kremlin and on the international stage from May.
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Andrei Piontkovsky. Features of the Russian “light totalitarianism”
A paper of Andrei Piontkovsky – a physicist, scientist of Startegic studies center, publicist and one of the most famous dissidents in contemporary Russia. The speech was delivered in an international conference “Totalitarianism and Tolerance. The Challenges to Freedom”, which was held in Vilnius, November 16th.
Some time ago my book about contemporary Russia “Third Path to Serfdom“ appeared. The name of the book was an allusion to the famous work of the philosopher and economist Friedrich August von Hayek „”he Road to Serfdom”. F. Hayek claimed that fascism and communism as well inevitably lead to serfdom. Completely agreeing with this, I still think that today we can complement the considerations of F.Hayek by maintaining that there’s also a third way leading to serfdom, and this is putinism.
I would like to emphasize that I truly am not going to equalize putinism, fascism and communism. For me it is important to stress that despite of internal differences all these ways lead to the same point. It would be irresponsible to call putinism as fascism in a new form. If fascism or stalinistic totalitarianism would be prevailing in today’s Russia, I would for sure not have this opportunity to talk to you from this tribune, and all the opponents of the regime would be simply physically eliminated. Putinism can be called as “light totalitarianism“. But let’s not get it wrong, even though looking from aside it is not so bloody and agressive, in certain aspects this phenomenon can be even more dangerous than its “hard“ form.
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Fragments of a Defunct State
How to characterise the Putin regime, a now shaken and besieged ruling group sometimes said to be the richest in the history of the world? ‘Soft authoritarianism’, ‘hybrid regime’, ‘managed democracy’: the labels reveal less about Russia than about the inability of commentators to loosen the Cold War’s lingering hold on their thinking.
Luke Harding was the Guardian correspondent in Russia between 2007 and 2011 who last February was turned back at Domodedovo Airport and told that his presence in the country was no longer welcome. An editorial in the Guardian described it as ‘the first removal of a British staff journalist from the country since the end of the Cold War’. Harding himself sees his account of Putin’s Russia as a kind of codicil to Malcolm Muggeridge’s denunciation of the Soviet Union when he was the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in 1932-33. ‘Eight decades on,’ Harding writes, ‘not much has changed’: ‘Kremlinology is back’; Russia ‘has become the world’s foremost spy-state’; ‘KGB habits of secrecy’ have returned; ‘Russia’s state media are still stuck in Cold War battle mode.’ And so on. Harding is not alone in this view. But it’s wrong. Putin doesn’t represent a return to Soviet ways; it’s something very different and more anarchic.
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Russians await Putin’s fall
With Russians taking to the streets to protest the recent flawed parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suddenly ceased to be an inevitable leader. He may think that this spring he will be elected president — the job he held from 2000 to 2008 — and serve up to 12 more years in that office.
But I, like many Russians, think the regime will fall before the March election or soon after.
As Putin’s grasp on the country loosens, I wonder: What would Russia look like today if he had never come to power? And now, what might be in store for a post-Putin Russia?
Twelve and a half years ago, then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked Putin as his successor from a tiny pool of bureaucrats who had remained loyal to him when his popularity plummeted. If Yeltsin had picked someone else, it almost certainly would have been another little-known functionary. This person would probably have been, like Putin, afflicted with severe nostalgia for the Soviet past — when the country was feared, the trains ran on time and most people did not like to stand out from the crowd. But this hypothetical bureaucrat’s love of all things Soviet would probably have been more obvious to the West than Putin’s has been.
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People tire of democratic facade in Putin’s Russia
The Guardian – Prince Edward Island
For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have swarmed the streets in the tens of thousands across the country in protest of the Dec. 4th parliamentary elections, in which Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party maintained its majority of seats in disputed fashion.
Outraged by the extensive allegations and reportings of electoral manipulation, Russians have called for new, transparent elections and even for the resignation of the prime minister himself. Yet, there is more to this sudden public outburst than meets the eye. Rather, it is a manifestation of general dissatisfaction with the state of democracy and corruption in the Russian Federation.
Twenty years after the fall of communism, little in Russia has changed. Political power and financial wealth remain concentrated in the hands of an inner circle of elites who dominate all facets of society. To the frustration of the Russian people, the development of a multi-party democracy, which once seemed genuine in the 1990s, has given way to the resurgence of authoritarianism and elitism under Mr. Putin and current President Dmitri Medvedev.
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