Commy
Prince
From damaged pride to prosperity
John Lloyd
November 29, 2006 02:58 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_lloyd/2006/11/post_724.html
Let us speculate on a less murky part of the Russian state than the possible poisoners of the FSB. We know that, among the other movements, trends and influences which are pushing Russia this way and that, the following are of great importance.
First, business is booming. It is not the case that Russia relies only on the very high price of oil and gas for its present prosperity - though that is part of the story. The other part is that small- and medium-sized businesses are now growing everywhere, not just in Moscow. The relative prosperity of the country over the past few years - essentially, the Putin years - has stimulated sectors, which in the 90s, despite much official encouragement, were relatively stagnant. Now, under a more authoritarian government, business blossoms.
Second, the government is much, much more authoritarian. No major TV channel now dares to broadcast critics of the administration. Newspapers are freer, but few are now prepared to take on the government frontally and most of the important ones are in the hands of friends of the Kremlin. The only relatively free sector of the media is the Internet - but for how long?
Third, this is not back to the USSR. Authoritarian government is not a dictatorship; a strengthening of the Kremlin is not a party state. Though Anna Politkovskaya suffered death for her courage (as have other, less prominent, journalists), and Yevgenia Albats lost her job, others - more or less openly opposed to the administration - continue to write, speak, meet and protest. This now carries real risks, but the space still exists. As Dmitri Furman of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Europe put it in a recent interview, "yes, we're being pushed into the kitchen again - but this kitchen is so much bigger than the one we used to have. The network of liberal dissent is powerful. It is really beginning to realise how hopeless the existing regime is."
Fourth, the problems facing Russia are vast - and towering above all of them is the health and size of its population. Alcohol and Aids are decimating (especially) the adult male population, keeping the mortality age in the 50s, a poor third world figure. The population numbers are falling very fast, shrinking the country out of the north, the far east and Siberia back into European Russia. It is not impossible that the new relative prosperity of the country might address these problems, but it has not yet.
Fifth, the administration is very popular. The past two decades have been for most of what were the Soviet peoples, profoundly disturbing at best, murderous often. Only the three small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are making, even have made, a successful transition to democracy and a market economy. Elsewhere, tyrannies, whether soft or hard, are the norm in Central Asia; wars, whether present or presently suspended, the norm in the Caucasus; an exhausted peace amid the ruins, the norm in Chechnya. In the three Slav states, there is semi-dictatorship in Belarus, a struggle for power amid corruption in Ukraine and authoritarianism in Russia.
In these circumstances, people vote for strength and look for enemies - some of which are real. Putin's administration has brought, or benefited from, a measure of prosperity; has talked of re-establishing a Russian sphere of influence; has whacked the Chechen terrorists and is now venomously opposed to the Georgian administration of Mikheil Saakashvili. Most Russians approve of all of this. Georgians are being fired from jobs in Moscow - including, I was told recently, from a liberal thinktank. Albats lost her job in part because of popular pressure. Dark-skinned (Caucasian-looking) people are often set upon by citizens.
In these circumstances, the trend of coverage in Russia of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko - that western media speculation of the Kremlin's hand in the affair is a deliberate provocation - falls on receptive ears. It cannot be stressed too much how humiliated Russians have felt in the past two decades by the precipitous fall from power and influence of their state, and by its internal chaos. An administration which restores some of its pride will be a popular one. Litvinenko's martyrdom does not travel well east.
In bed with Russophobes
The Litvinenko murder is being used by neocons in their campaign against Putin's national revival
Neil Clark
Monday December 4, 2006
The Guardian
Three weeks on, we are still no closer to knowing who was responsible for the death of the former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. The use of polonium 210 as a murder weapon could point in entirely opposite directions. It might suggest that the killing was carried out on behalf of the Russian security service as a public warning to others who might think of betraying it. But it could also be read as an attempt by President Putin's rich and powerful enemies to discredit the Russian government internationally. Whatever the truth, it has been seized upon across Europe and the US to fuel a growing anti-Russian campaign.
There are certainly grounds for criticising the Russian government from a progressive perspective. Putin has introduced a flat-rate income tax, which greatly benefits the wealthy, and plans the partial marketisation of Russia's education and health systems. He has pursued a bloody campaign of repression in Chechnya. And while some of Russia's oligarchs have been bought to justice, others remain free to flaunt their dubiously acquired wealth, in a country where the gap between rich and poor has become chasmic.
Even so, those on the centre-left who have joined the current wave of Putin-bashing ought to consider whose cause they are serving. Long before the deaths of Litvinenko and the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Russophobes in the US and their allies in Britain were doing all they could to discredit Putin's administration. These rightwing hawks are gunning for Putin not because of concern for human rights but because an independent Russia stands in the way of their plans for global hegemony. The neoconservative grand strategy was recorded in the leaked Wolfowitz memorandum, a secret 1990s Pentagon document that targeted Russia as the biggest future threat to US geostrategic ambitions and projected a US-Russian confrontation over Nato expansion.
Even though Putin has acquiesced in the expansion of American influence in former Soviet republics, the limited steps the Russian president has taken to defend his country's interests have proved too much for Washington's empire builders. In 2003, Bruce P Jackson, the director of the Project for a New American Century, wrote that Putin's partial renationalisation of energy companies threatened the west's "democratic objectives" - and claimed Putin had established a "de facto cold war administration". Jackson's prognosis was simple: a new "soft war" against the Kremlin, a call to arms that has been enthusiastically followed in both the US and Britain.
Every measure Putin has taken has been portrayed by the Russophobes as the work of a sinister totalitarian. Gazprom's decision to start charging Ukraine the going rate for its gas last winter was presented as a threat to the future of western Europe. And while western interference in elections in Ukraine, Georgia and other ex-Soviet republics has been justified on grounds of spreading democracy, any Russian involvement in the affairs of its neighbours has been spun as an attempt to recreate the "evil empire". As part of their strategy, Washington's hawks have been busy promoting Chechen separatism in furtherance of their anti-Putin campaign, as well as championing some of Russia's most notorious oligarchs.
In the absence of genuine evidence of Russian state involvement in the killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, we should be wary about jumping on a bandwagon orchestrated by the people who bought death and destruction to the streets of Baghdad, and whose aim is to neuter any counterweight to the most powerful empire ever seen.
And what you think about murder of Letvinenko?
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