Russian opposition leader and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov argues that Vladimir Putin's days are numbered. Kasparov may be right that elite and public anger at the economic crisis and Putin's poor handling of it might lead to the collapse of his regime. I am less optimistic than Kasparov, however, about the likelihood that a post-Putin Russian government will be better than the current one. Kasparov seems to assume that Putin's fall will open the door for pro-western liberal democrats like Kasparov himself. I hope he is right, but I fear that ultranationalists and possibly the communists are in a stronger position to inherit Putin's mantle. They have greater influence in powerful institutions such as the military and secret police, and may well also have greater support from Russian public opinion. As I noted in earlier posts in this series, Russian opinion has been heavily influenced by years of nationalistic and anti-Western propaganda sponsored by Putin even as liberal democratic oppositionists were largely banned from the electronic media.
Garry Kasparov on Putin:
That doesn't mean it's impossible, of course. There are such things as quantum fluctuations. But until we have a good theory of the vacuum, we won't know how probable such an event is.
If Russian democrats hadn't sold the country off to the oligarchs, overprivatized, and kissed up to the west, they might still be popular, propaganda or no propaganda. Instead, Yeltsin gave democracy a very bad name.
What Russian democrats need to do is find someone who is willing to kick ass and take names when it comes to taking on the oligarchs and elites and standing up to US imperialism, while still opening up the Russian economic and political systems for greater freedoms. Until then, expect more Putin-style governance.
If by "Russian democrats," you mean the government of the Yeltsin era, it's important to note that they privatized a lot less than economically more successful nations of Eastern Europe and that they waged a brutal war in Chechnya and opposed the West on Kosovo and Bosnia. Yes, they could have privatized less (which would simply have perpetuated the flaws of the Soviet economy even more than actually occurred) and confronted the West more. But it is not true that they either overprivatized or just rolled over for whatever the US wanted.
Yeltsin's apparent willingness to simply give up Russia's traditional sphere of influence and status as a great world power.
Under Yeltsin, was still one of the 5-6 most powerful nations in the world and wielded great influence over its neighbors. Russia also intervened militarily in Georgia and Moldova, among other former Soviet republics, and generally had a lot of leverage with them. Of course, Yeltsin didn't bully Russia's neighbors as much as Putin. But it's hard to see how such bullying of weak neighbors makes Russia's people better off or enhances its status in the world. To the contrary, such policies have merely alienated those neighbors and led them to seek admission into NATO.
You think they should appoint some kind of czar, maybe?
The don't think conservation laws apply there. It's more a case of something like the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
But I guess that would explain some things. The low contribution to the heat (or any other) capacity of things made from it, the high internal pressure to expand, the improbability of finding it in anything other than the lowest conceivable state, the importance of spin...
Medvedev's problem is that he has no independent power-base. He can't count on the law to allow him to out-flank Putin, he needs some powerful group. He was picked exactly because he has no such power base, and I don't see how he can establish one. His only chance of dumping Putin will be if he becomes a stooge to a new master, perhaps if the Siliviki criminals just below Putin decide he can't help him anymore they'll push him out and support Medvedev, but w/o their, or some other group's, backing, it will be trough. My big worry is that he'll try w/o sufficient backing and that there will be a Siklivki backed coup, leading to serious instability and an even greater lack of freedom.
This is not the conclusion reached by many studies of privatization in the late 1990s, e.g., HOW RUSSIA BECAME A MAKRET ECONOMY by Anders Asland.
The privatization problem is that they went too fast. They tried to duplicate Poland, but it most assuredly didn't work. Once again, when I was there all the people who had been given deeds to their apartments had no idea what to do with it and generally sold them ultra-cheap to a bank. Plus, there was *still* so much confusion about who owned what... and a horrible mafia problem. I got out of class a dozen or more times because of bomb threats, either from the bank or the mob, who the heck knows.
So they have some wonderful cartels, but not so much of actual private property.
Spot on. If Russian democracy = Yeltsin's rule, no surprise Russians don't support it.
btw,
Does Kasparov have a strong insurance policy against getting killed in an accident or eating something poisonous? Does he live in Russia?
In particular, we invaribale make universal sufferage the first step when it really should be one of the last. We'd be much better off focusing on institution building rather than indulging this weird voting fetish we have.
The problem with russian privitization isn't that they did it at all-- obviously some was necessary-- but that they did it in a form designed to give out a lot of freebies to the oligarchs. As a result, yeltsin gave away a lot of the wealth of the country to a few very rich people without regard to the public interest.
Don't you see how doing that might make an ex-communist who threatens to take on the oligarchs popular?
As for kissing up to the west, think NATO expansion, for instance. It was highly unpopular, for reasons that date back to napoleon's time.
An interesting anecdote along these lines. I spent part of the summer after my first year of law school studying in St. Petersburg with a number of American and Russian St. Petersburg State University students.
When conversations over drinks turned political, one common topic was George Bush, but another was Putin. I was suprised to note that the one or two students in the group that I was studying with who were really "anti-putin" were treated in a way not terribly different than liberals get discussed here. One of them would start off on something and the others would roll their eyes and dismiss what he was saying with basically "oh, ignore him, he's just ranting again."
What, Yeltsin should have raged and fumed as NATO added Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, emphasizing Russia's impotence? Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added well into Putin's presidency, and Russian disapproval wasn't able to do anything to stop that, either.
It isn't Yeltsin who ceded Russia's Great Power status, it was reality that stripped it. Maintaining a "traditional sphere of influence" is impossible if you're weak enough you're struggling to maintain dominion over Chechnya. It might be popular to blame it all on Yeltsin, but it's nonsense.
Russia has tons of nuclear weapons. The US was scared as hell of loose nukes in the 1990's, and wanted to do a bunch of things in the Balkans, Iraq, and elsewhere that either required Russian cooperation or acquiescence. Plus, US firms were trying to get in on the privatization craze in Russia.
A smart Russian president who was paying attention to his job would have made clear that unless the US recognized the security requirements of a Russian sphere of influence-- which is a necessary buffer against possible attacks from the West which have been a periodic occurrence in history-- none of that stuff was going to happen. Instead, Yeltsin was convinced by the oligarchs and some overzealous free-marketers, as well as US diplomats, that the right course was not to seriously attempt to stop NATO expansion.
It was a huge, huge mistake that will have enormous ramifications for Russia for many years to come.
What happened instead is that Warren Christopher suckered Yeltsin into a "partnership for peace", which was a theory for keeping and expanding NATO while holding out the eventual carrot (which the US had no intention of actually offering) of NATO membership for Russia, which could benefit Russia in much the same way as containing or eliminating NATO would have. Yeltsin, stupidly, fell for this, and the result was a NATO that moves closer and closer to Russia's doorstep and leaves Russia less and less secure and with less and less influence in a region where it, and not western Europe or the United States, should be the dominant hegemonic power.
As I said, this will go down in Russian history as a truly huge mistake.
So if you love Putin, take that SUV out for a spin. Better yet, drive alongeI guess you could say, when you drive alone, you drive with Putin.
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