Putin, a former member of the KGB, became the leader of Russia in 1999, eight years after the fall of the USSR. Would anyone have considered it acceptable for a former member of the Gestapo to be leading West Germany in 1953?
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And the really big problem with Russia is…November 20th, 2006 |
 20 comments to And the really big problem with Russia is… |
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Yeah, how dare a former spy-master take control of a nation like that?
We here in the US would never tolerate such a thing.
Oh, wait…
re: 1953. I think Germans might have.
The Putin situation is not comparable. Post war Germany could find leaders who had never been Nazi.
Many prominent Germans had stayed abroad during the Hitler years, others had survived by avoiding confrontation, and some had been political prisioners – Hitler did not kill all opponents, he discriminated.
Russia, a much more closed nation, had no such pool of leaders who had never been associated with the Communists. That era lasted a lifetime, the Nazi only had total control for about a decade.
I am not surprised the new government of Russia came from the old government of the USSR.
Yes, K has it right. With only 150,000,000 people living in the country, it would be very difficult to find people to run government offices who were not cynical former KGB agents. I know that many people have been spreading falsehoods about there having been various classical liberal parties in the country before Putin took over and eliminated most forms of political dissent, but that is all untrue! Those people never existed, and we know this to be true because the news media in Russia, which is now all state controlled, never mentions them.
It is also important to understand that, unlike all the other countries where opportunistic tyrants have claimed local conditions did not permit an open society, in Russia it is actually true. It is little known, but the Russian people are in fact genetically incapable of functioning without a tyranny in place. Why, I understand that the so-called poisoning of an anti-Putin investigator in London was in fact simply a case of the genetic problem kicking in — if the gentleman had simply stayed inside a tyrannical locale he would never have become sickened.
Lastly, let me note that one of the world’s most astute observers, George W. Bush, has looked into Putin’s eyes and seen that he is a good man. Since Mr. Bush is God’s Chosen Instrument on Earth, surely we can take his word on Mr. Putin’s personal qualities.
USSR wasn’t conquered, it collapsed. The ruling class remained in place tho.
K: Point taken, but some organs of the Party are more offensive than others. If Putin’s previous job had been in one of the agricultural or energy ministries or whatnot, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Tim: The operative (pun not intended) job description here is “enforcer for a police state”, not “spy.” Bush Sr. did not have “suppress dissidents” as part of his duties. Now, if he’d been head of the BATF, I’d be closer to agreeing with your attempted parallel.
Yes, the KGB wasn’t nice. But it had many tasks. It is a little like saying everyone at the CIA amd MSA combined likes to torture people.
I don’t know what Putin personally did or did not do. But the Russian voters don’t see things the way we might.
To me he seems smart and would liberalize if he could. But he figures he can’t get that done, so he rides the tiger.
Much though I dislike the C.I.A. (which has been for many decades dominated by Democrats and “Progressive” Republicans who never met an Welfare State program they did not like) to compare it the K.G.B. which (under its various names since 1917 has helped murder tens of millions of people in what had been Russia and tried to put the entire world under collectivism) is an evil thing to do.
Members of the C.I.A. have made many mistakes (and committed many crimes) but they tried to oppose the forces of Marxism – not to support them.
To pretend that being from the C.I.A. is the same as being from the K.G.B. is like saying there was no moral difference between working for British intelligence and German intelligence in 1940.
As for Putin.
There were films in the West that mentioned that there might be a threat to new democracy that was emerging from the collapsed Soviet Union. However, (as one would expect from the culture that dominates places like Hollywood) it was greedy businessmen who were seen as the threat – and the democrats were seen (for example) as people who supported collective ownership of raw materials.
In reality when the economic crises came (a banking collapse caused by a classic credit money bubble that the Russian government had produced) a K.G.B. man was on hand to promise “order” (too many frightened people, who should have known better, supported Putin)
And then the conflict in the Caucasus just happened to return (a conflict that President Yeltzin had seemed to solve by de facto accepting the independence of the Chechens) Putin was able to take power.
It is held to be paranoid to question who was behind the destruction of the Russian housing blocks that provided the reason for the second war (“you are just like the people who say Bush was behind 9/11”) so I will not discuss it.
However, almost needless to say, the “owners of capital” who according to Marxist theory have such power were unable to prevent Putin nationalizing anything he wanted – from television stations to oil wells.
For indeed it was indeed the antidemocratic forces (Putin) who supported the “control of natural resources by the people” (how confusing for Hollywood and the New York Times).
You have to wonder what would’ve happened if the Clintonista mafiacracy hadn’t sold Russia back down the river to the Russian mafiacrats, if Putin’s crowd weren’t on the take, if prominent opposition politicians and news outlets weren’t being, um, eliminated, and if the Nomenklatura weren’t so busy aiding their comrade murderers-in-chief in Peking. But Bush peered into Putin’s soul, while his head was lodged somewhere, so don’t worry, be happy. 😉
Well, if Joschka Fischer is good enough for the Germans…
The fact remains that Putin is popular because times are probably better now in Russia than they have ever been in its history. I know a lot of Russians, and now you mention it, I’m married to one. All but a few think the last couple of years have seen vast improvements in Russian life, and most agree that times now are better than any time before.
Sadly Putin and co were not “on the take” – at least if they took bribes to leave people alone, they took the money and then DID NOT leave people alone.
That being said I agree with the other things that tdh says (including the implied attack on Mr Bush).
As for what Mr Newman says.
Well the flat tax (which President Putin copied from other Eastern European lands) did do a lot of good, but most of the improvment in finances of the last few years comes from higher oil, gas and other natural resources prices.
Leaving people alone (not taking over news outlets or murdering people) would not have made natural resource prices lower. Nor did the second Chechin war benefit the economy.
Also the nationalization is already having bad effects – investment is falling.
Even people close to Putin understand that the best policy for the regime is to tax privately owned mines and wells – not to own them. But when property is insecure (i.e. when Putin can steal it at any time) why should anyone buy these wells and mines from him?
Maybe the problem with Russia was that before Putin there was too much anarchy, too little of the rule of law, and crime, organized or otherwise, was too widespread. There was little protection of individual rights and property.
You need law and order. Putin probably veered too much in the authoritarian direction, as a reaction to the lawlessness before him.
It is also concievable, that if you have to choose between the two, Putin’s regime is better.
What remains to be seen is if Putin will step down in 2008, and if Russia will correct it’s course.
The Bush/Putin comparison fails for at least one other reason: Vladimir Putin was a career spook – he served in the KGB from 1975 to 1990 (assuming his 1990 appointment to the International Affairs section of Leningrad State University ended his KGB tenure). GHW Bush was CIA director for 355 days during Ford’s presidency. Bush has less experience with clandestine affairs than Ollie North.
Oh, and Putin was never a spy master – he was a lower echelon spook.
Not that he’s less qualified to be a spy master than Bush…
Under President Yeltsin there was trial by jury and independent judges – that is a vital part of the “rule of law”. President Y. was even moving to end conscription – with all the rituals of gang rape and murder that Russian conscription means.
As for “order”, I do not see how being killed by the F.S.B. is better than being killed by organized crime.
The difference between Yeltsin and Putin is that Yeltsin did not want innocent people to be killed but failed to prevent it – Putin wants innocent people killed.
As for the true chaos of President Y.s time (the inflation and the bank crises) thank his “Western advisers” (and their Russian hangers on) for this.
Had been Putin been President at the time the same events would have occured.
What little President Putin knows about political economy has come from watching the mistakes made before he came to power.
For example he still has too much money issued by the central banking system – but not so much as the clever people did. And he only got rid of the “progressive income tax” (the pride and joy of the Clintonian advisers) because he could see what a farce it was compared to the flat tax system of (for example) Estonia.
Although, to be fair, it takes some wisdom to see and understand mistakes – a lot of politicians seem not to have this ability.
I think the point is that it wasn’t any worse either, or at at least it doesn’t seem that way when your living with it.
Anarchy is nothing but a million petty tyrannies, it’s no real surprise that people decide they’d prefer just the one.
“Gabriel” should educate himself about the distinction between anarchy and chaos.
He might also want to consider whether a strong central tyranny is indeed better than a large number of weak and easily evaded ones.
“Perry” might want to stop referring to people in the third person for no discernable reason.
“Perry” might also want to read what I wrote, specifically the word ‘seems’. The benefit of one central tyranny, by the way, is that at least you have a chance of being on the right side of it, the benefit of numerous ones is that you can play them off against each other.
Finally, “Perry” might want to consider that I don’t give a flying monkeys about whatever trivial, fictional or purely nominalist distinction between anarchy and chaos he has in mind.
I the matter of public opinion Gabriel is sadly correct.
The majority of Russians did demand “order” and were not much concerned with how this was achieved (such sayings as “liberty is the parent, not the child, of order”, however true they may be, would be lost on them). Indeed millions of Russians even wanted a return to Marxism (either not knowing or not caring about the tens of millions of murders).
Of course there is still a lot of crime in Russia – but the media (now under government influence) either plays it down or concentrates on noble Putin’s fight against it.
Of course our own dear “Financial Times” (the paper of what the Marxists called “Finance Captial” and whose journalists provided so many agents of influence for the K.G.B. over the years) often has a similar attitude.
The problem is far broader than just electing a KGB spy president.
The Russians said they hated Boris Yeltsin, gave him single-digit approval in polls, but then when he plucked Putin out of obscurity they voted for him like lemmings, with no debates and with the only serious opposition being Communist. The West laughed when Yeltsin said Putin would succed him, then it happened.
The Russians elected former Poliburo members in to the first Duma and they failed to create any viable political party to challenge the Communists.
They have turned a blind eye to the obliteration of independent television, to the destruction of local political authority (Putin now appoints governors and mayors), to the revival of the Soviet national anthem (it played for Russia at the Turin olympics, it was written to glorify Stalin).
And we in the West have not called them to account. We’ve crossed our fingers and hoped for the best, just like Chamberlain did at Munich. Now, we get what we deserve, a renewed neo-Soviet nightmare.
Putin is systematically murdering the members of the Kovalev Committee that tried to investigate the Kremlin’s involvement in the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings and going after journalists like Politkovskaya. The question is, who’s next and how long will it take for us to wake up to the need for action this time?