Posted on 09/19/2004 10:39:50 PM PDT by MarMema
MOSCOW Countries react differently to terrorism. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans rallied behind their government of their own free will. After the Madrid train bombings last March, Spaniards ousted theirs. President Vladimir Putin took steps last week that seem to ensure that Russians will do neither.
After modern Russia's worst terrorist act the horrifying seizure of a school that ended with more than 330 hostages dead Putin ordered an overhaul of the political system, stripping Russians of their right to elect their governors and district representatives in Parliament.
Putin's response seemed like a non sequitur, since how the country conducts its elections on the regional level has little, if anything, to do with fighting the terrorism that war in Chechnya has spawned.
But there was a logic to it, at least for Putin and his supporters, and it was one that dashed perhaps decisively hopes here and abroad that Russia had left behind its long, tortured history of authoritarianism when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Democracy, Putin suggested in remarks after the school siege, does not result in stability, but rather instability. It does not unify, but rather divides. The principal threat posed by democracy in Russia today, he made clear on separate occasions in the past two weeks, lies in simmering ethnic and religious tensions along the rim of Russia where ethnically non-Russian people live. That division, he suggested, can be controlled only with an iron hand from above.
In the tragic arc of Russian history, it has always been so even if, in the end, the rigid power of the center has always failed.
A theme of those who accepted Putin's prescription was distrust of the unruliness of electoral will in a country with deep ethnic, social, class and religious divisions.
It was those divisions that the fighters who seized the school terrorists loyal to the Chechen separatist commander Shamil Basayev seemed eager to stoke when they struck in multiethnic North Ossetia.
They seemed well aware that what Russia has failed to do in more than 13 years of post-Soviet politics is develop a sense of national identity that might overcome those divisions. Indeed, in the southern and Asian areas where Russia's Muslim groups live, an ardent religious identification is threatening to take its place.
"We live in conditions of aggravated internal conflicts and interethnic conflicts that before were harshly suppressed by the governing ideology," Putin said the night after the siege in Beslan ended on Sept. 3. In his speech, he lamented the demise of "a huge, great country," the Soviet Union, and rued the forces of disorder that its dissolution unleashed in Russia.
Clifford Kupchan, vice president of the Nixon Center in Washington, attended a Sept. 7 meeting Putin had with a group of American and European academics and analysts. He summarized Putin's dark view of democracy as "one man, one vote, one war."
"Given that Russia is not a melting pot, but rather a fragmented pot, he does not believe that democracy is the solution," Kupchan said.
In the years since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia's embrace of democracy and Putin's has always been awkward.
Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the country's most prominent liberals, said the public's concept of democracy had been tainted by financial scandals and crises, by the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few well-connected billionaires, by a decade of war in Chechnya, and lately by a wave of terrorist attacks, staged not in symbols of grandeur like skyscrapers and government buildings, but in places chillingly familiar to virtually every Russian: trains, subways, airplanes, a theater and, worst, a school.
"All this period of time was called democracy," Yavlinsky said. "The people looked at it and said, 'If that is democracy, then, thank you very much.' " But he added, angrily: "All these things had nothing in common with democracy."
During his presidency, Putin has shown little enthusiasm for the democratic experience. He has smothered political opponents, wrested control of independent television and manipulated the outcome of regional elections, none more so than the two presidential elections in Chechnya, where loyalists were elected by Sovietlike margins last October and again last month, after credible challengers were struck from the ballots.
Still, until Sept. 13, Putin had never reversed the fundamental democratic right of representation through the ballot a right enshrined in the 1993 constitution's letter and spirit, according to his critics.
Under his proposal, which the Parliament will almost certainly adopt since it is dominated by parties loyal to him, Putin will appoint governors, presidents or other leaders who are now elected in each of the country's 89 regions. Putin's proposals also would eliminate the district elections that choose half of the 450 members of Parliament; instead, they will be selected based on national party lists drafted in Moscow in close consultation with Putin's Kremlin.
What was striking last week was how many Russian elected officials heartily endorsed Putin's plan.
"Elections are often dirty, with money from the shadow economy and criminal groups trying to influence the results," said Valentina Matviyenko, the governor of St. Petersburg, as she fell into line behind a proposal that would deny her much of her electoral legitimacy and political authority. (She was elected last fall and, apparently, knew whereof she spoke.) "All this causes concern and alarm."
Murat Zyazikov, president of the semi-autonomous republic of Ingushetia, who was elected with the Kremlin's help, echoed her opinion, saying elections had turned into "competitions between people with more money, which resulted in tensions in society."
"Western and human values are very close to us, but we have our own way of development," he said. "I think this was done in order to consolidate society."
In other words, it would seem, "the people have spoken" remains a phrase that strikes fear in Russia's ruling elite, which presumes to know better what is better for the country.
"It is soft Stalinism," Yavlinsky said.
He and others have spoken out against Putin's reordering, but they have done so from the margins. A rally organized by Yavlinsky's Yabloko party with posters of Putin as Hitler drew a handful of protesters. A few of the 15 independent members of Parliament voiced objections and then admitted there was little they could do to stop Putin.
The most prominent criticism came from the two men who, arguably, did much to create the system Russia has today, for better or worse.
In twinned essays that appeared Friday in the newsweekly Moskovskiye Novosti, Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, former leaders who pushed Russia's move toward democracy, wrote that the nation should preserve the democratic gains of the last 13 years.
"Strangling freedoms and curtailing democratic rights," Yeltsin wrote, "marks, among other things, the victory of terrorists."
There never really was a Democratic Russia...
Communists don't change their ideals, they just change their 'skin', as in their 'perceived reality'...
I don't see any truth in it. Lots of tinfoil to go around though. :-)
True... just a lull between tyrannies; basically Russia has just used this time to lull the West to sleep while it re-strategizes and re-consolidates. Russians love a good game of chess, don't they?
TADA! You get my award, which I am sure is meaningless, but nevertheless you get my award for post of the day.
No, I've studied bits and pieces of this truth for years, this just puts the whole thing together. You haven't had time to read it. Your response just told me all I need to know about your Putin-loving Communist ways...
Get in line, dear. :-)
Goto the link at #20. This is the real deal brother...
And, let's get this straightened out...
"True... just a lull between Communist expansion; basically Communism has just used this time to lull the West to sleep while it re-strategizes and re-consolidates. Communists are evil, incrementalist bastards..."
There, that's better...
When you read it, get back to me with something more than 'tin-foil-hat' crap...
The Reichstag fire scenario works when there is a) a weak or merely surficial democratic tradtion and b) a genuinely chaotic economic situation. Both are true in Russia, neither is true here. It would take a major strike -- e.g. multiple nukes in US cities, before you wound up with this being credible. At least for now.
The mistake most freepers are making is seeing centralized power, and forgetting about all the other things involved in communism.
Besides other than being a control freak, Putin is a conservative. Look at his economic programs.
Then read about who is after him bigtime - the liberals. And they support the chechens.
Hard to understand how freepers are missing the boat and siding with the liberals, but I see it all day long.
Read the information and come back with intelligent dialogue based on the facts, all footnoted for your convenience...or just be a Communist tool...
It's fearmongering.
It's trying to sell something, using fear.
I am not feeling so patient with namecalling these days, so either knock it off or don't ping me anymore.
Don't worry, I'm finished with you...
Just added this to my favorites list for later reading. Nice to see someone making the Communist/Islamofascist link. I made a comment on a thread once about Bin Laden supporters previously receiving Marxist training and support from Soviet agents and was ridiculed. I don't remember the source but it was pretty compelling, hard facts, dates, etc. Of course, we know the extent of the Soviet/Iranian relationship, even to this day.
I wonder about all of the prophecy teachers (who I disagree with on a number of issues) who made the claims that the Soviet Union would return and that there would only be a "window" of opportunity to reach Russia with the gospel before totalitarianism returned. This was when the rest of the world was singing the praises of a "democratic" Russia. Seems these prophecy teachers didn't accept that Russian democracy would last because they believe the Bible names Russia as the king of the north, Gog and Magog, who will invade Israel in the end-times.
You've got every right to question their policy. Notice how Marmena hasn't replied to a single post on Russia's pro-Iranian government's nuke plan program.
Marmema, if you've got a defense for Putin reply to why Russia is helping the Iranian government build their SECOND nuclear power plant, after the terror attacks in Beslan?
Kids! Break it up!
None available, sorry.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.