Posted on 03/08/2007 8:41:51 PM PST by jmc1969
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aides at the Kremlin say they feel surrounded, and they're not going to take it anymore.
Russian corporations are being foiled abroad; the Russian state is being unfairly blamed for volatility in global energy markets; and suggestions that the state is eliminating its critics are just preposterous.
Why all the bad press? Because of "Russophobia" — an unreasoning Western hostility toward Russia — according to the Kremlin.
"I see a campaign here," Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in a TV interview last week.
Amid all the allegations that the Kremlin — in a reprise of KGB tactics — is behind the mysterious deaths of two investigative journalists and a former KGB agent turned critic in recent months, President Putin is turning to a page out of the old Soviet playbook.
His aides are reviving elements of the Soviet Union's once-massive propaganda machine as well as considering fresh approaches.
Novosti, the USSR's "information agency," has been renamed RIA-Novosti and is being bolstered by a flood of Putin-era petrocash. It has started an English-language satellite news network called Russia Today and a monthly feature magazine named Russia Profile, both of which carry offerings on the good job Putin is doing in the world and next to nothing on things like the conflict in Chechnya or the murder of government critics. The organization also brings Moscow's spin to U.S. readers with paid supplements in The Washington Post and other papers.
"Many forgotten forms of work are being restored," says Pyotr Romanov, a Novosti veteran. "We feel there is a lot of misunderstanding about Russia out there, and that the Russian point of view urgently needs to be expressed in the world media."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Gee Vlady maybe if you stop poisoning your opporatant like reporters we Freepers may not have take you to woodshed
HELLO VLADY
Go Putin!
Quite the opposite: there is a very clear understanding of what they are, and, to give them their due credit, by their own everyday actions they make it even more clear.
....someone sounds like they woke up on the wrong side of the Gulag...
Still though, if you have to poison somebody......
SHHHHH! Don't give away next week!!
Putin sounds more and more like his buttbuddy Iamjihadmad from Iran every day. Trying to hide their brutality against their own people by painting the west as some villian out to get them all.
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To be added or removed from this list, please FReepmail me...
You forgot my favorite--defenestration.
"Political opposition murdered to clear up understandings"
That's correct.
Does that slippery, soulless, ruthless KGB sob really believe the rest of the world is going to buy that the Kommersant military affairs writer, Ivan Safronov, somehow slipped (pushed) out of his apartment fifth-story window 'accidentally' falling to his death?
How many more reporters will be brutally murdered for daring to speak the truth concerning Putin vicious Stalinist reign of terror?
It's a known fact there are pro-Putin moles who have wormed their way on to Free Republic, lurking, watching every Russian related thread, verbally pouncing on anyone who attempts to warn others of the multiple imminent dangers of Putin's venomous Kremlin poses to the free world. These pro-Moscow moles continue spreading lies, Putin propaganda, coupled with twisted deliberate disinformation and Soviet style veiled 'warnings' to tell the truth about 'Comrade Vlad'.
Putin Squeezes Opposition Before 2008 Presidency Vote (Update1)
By Henry Meyer
March 8th (Bloomberg) -- President Vladimir Putin is tightening the Kremlin's grip on political life as he prepares to engineer a handover of power to his chosen successor in elections a year from now.
Two pro-Kremlin parties are expected to sweep regional balloting on March 11, in what's likely to be a preview of December national legislative elections and the March 2008 presidential vote. Hundreds of police wielding batons violently dispersed a March 3 opposition rally in Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg, detaining dozens of protesters.
``The Kremlin does not want to leave any genuine opposition,'' Leonid Sedov, a political analyst at the Levada Center, an independent polling agency in Moscow, said in a telephone interview. ``It is afraid of it.''
Putin, 54, who is barred by a two-term constitutional limit from running for re-election, said last month that he would name his preferred political heir during the election campaign. While pollsters say the popular leader's endorsement would ensure any candidate's election, surveys by Levada show that around a third of Russians are undecided whether to vote for Putin's anointed successor.
Despite Western concerns about a rollback of post-Soviet freedoms, the Kremlin is determined to ensure a smooth transition by sidelining all its opponents, Sedov said.
`Pseudo-Elections'
Yabloko, an opposition party that campaigns for Western- style democracy, has been barred from running in the regional elections in St. Petersburg, where it traditionally gets around 9 percent of the vote. Its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, hit out in a written statement at what he described as ``pseudo-elections, no better than we had in the Soviet era.''
Authorities, citing alleged registration violations, have barred Yabloko and the pro-business Union of Rightist Forces from running in four of the 14 regions that will elect local legislatures. The Communists, the largest opposition group in Russia, successfully overturned electoral bans in two cases.
Since coming to office in 2000, Putin has centralized power in his hands, scrapping elections for regional governors and ensuring Parliament is packed with loyal lawmakers. He also has put nationwide television under state control and restored government ownership over key companies.
Likely Successors
A February poll by Levada showed the candidates most frequently mentioned by the Russian media as Putin's likely successors had higher ratings than other contenders. The poll from Feb. 21-26 surveyed 1,600 people and gave First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev 32 percent and First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov 27 percent.
A separate Levada poll in September showed that 35 percent of voters wouldn't back Putin's candidate without knowing who it was, 14 percent would vote against and 12 percent refused to answer.
Putin Ally
The Kremlin is also cementing its control through a new pro-presidential party formed last year and headed by a loyal Putin ally, senate speaker Sergei Mironov. Fair Russia, which stresses a social-justice platform, aims to supplant the Communists as the second-largest political bloc in Russia after the dominant pro-Putin United Russia party.
At Fair Russia's inaugural congress last month in St. Petersburg, Mironov read a message of support from Putin to loud applause, and children recited poems praising the party. The event drew comparisons in one Russian newspaper to the Soviet- era ruling Communist Party.
The two pro-Putin parties are far and away the most visible in the St. Petersburg legislative campaign: Posters for United Russia and Fair Russia can be seen across the city. Their opponents can't afford to pay for advertising; they've had little access to business donations since the 2003 jailing of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky scared off other wealthy individuals from funding the opposition.
Uphill Struggle
The head of the Communists' St. Petersburg branch, Ivan Melnikov, complained his party faces an uphill struggle.
``These are two parties which are supported by big business, government structures,'' he said in his party's cramped and dingy offices. ``We don't have those resources.''
Vadim Tiulpan, the speaker of the St. Petersburg parliament and leader of the United Russia ticket, said he is confident of maintaining its dominance. ``We don't see a real threat from any party,'' he said in an interview.
Since Putin was elected, Russians have seen their incomes rise as oil and natural-gas prices soared, after the chaos and impoverishment of the 1990s during the presidency of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
Since 2000, the average monthly wage has jumped fourfold to almost $400; gross domestic product growth has averaged more than 6 percent a year and inflation dropped from 36 percent in 1999, the year before Putin took office, to 9 percent last year.
United Russia
Pollsters currently forecast that United Russia and Fair Russia will take more than two-thirds of seats in the December elections to the State Duma, the lower house of the national parliament. The rest will probably be split between the LDPR -- a party with nationalist views that regularly votes in line with Kremlin wishes -- and the Communists, the pollsters say.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denies authorities are restricting democracy. ``We can't ignore the fact that over the past 10 to 15 years, during very hard times, Russia has managed a transition from a one-party authoritarian system to a democracy,'' he said in a telephone interview.
Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of the organizers of the March 3 St. Petersburg rally, disagrees. He said in an interview that street protests may become the only way to register disapproval of the government.
``More and more people recognize that if the ballot box is not a solution, you have to express your protests in other acceptable forms,'' he said.
DO you know how the author signature of your posters "Pridurki.org" is traslated to English? The "morons. org" accually:))). I love it so reveling:).
but some of what they are being blamed for is odd.==
"The odder the better" the rule 1 of dr Goebbels:).
Don't forget there was also a slip and fall from a fifth-floor window.
Comrade you might want to consider defeating and telling US everything you know about Putin's war plans against the West.
The Western MSM is shallow in reporting, sensationalistic, and stupid, but they are not "state controlled".
The murder with Polonium was intentionally done to send a message. You can't buy polonium in a Wal-Mart or Sears. Dioxin as was used in the Ukraine is also a not so subtle way of doing business. Truth is, what you claim as odd, was standard practice all through the Cold War where the Russians were known you use contact poisons, poison darts and other methods to eliminate dissidents even in the West.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2636459.stm
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/01/07/terror.poison.bulgarian/index.html
The murder with Polonium was intentionally done to send a message. You can't buy polonium in a Wal-Mart or Sears.==
My version. Linvinenko traded Polonium or some kind of rare radioactive matherials himself as the middleman. When the trade was settled his "partners" decided to eliminate the middle man to save money do not pay his fees. It is very ordinary practice in Russia. So they used the matherial which they traded and hence had in possesions.
Comrade you might want to consider defeating and telling US everything you know about Putin's war plans against the West.==
OK I'll tell you:). The "limited nuclier war in Europe" scenario. Russia will create artificial "glassy band" to isolate herself from NATO ground attack. Poland-Hungary-Romania. If they would be the neutral countries then to make the glassy band from them would be immoral. But today everything is perfectly normal.
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