#3
Vremya MN,
October 26, 2001
THE PRESIDENT'S LONELINESS
President Putin has the courage to make unpopular decisions
Author: Dmitry Shusharin
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]
SOMETIMES THE PEOPLE DON'T AGREE WITH THE PRESIDENT, OR EVEN UNDERSTAND HIM. PUTIN IS SUPPORTING THE US OPERATION IN AFGHANISTAN, WHILE SHUTTING DOWN RUSSIAN MILITARY BASES ABROAD. IS THIS ENOUGH TO MAKE A REAL OPPOSITION TO PUTIN EMERGE IN RUSSIA?
The National Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) has published results of a survey conducted in Moscow. Four hundred Muscovites were approached: 56% disapprove of the air strikes on Afghanistan, and 41% approve. In follows that in backing the United States and its allies, the president of Russia is going against the majority... Of respondents, of course, not the population.
It should be noted first and foremost that the scope of the poll was fairly modest. Secondly, 41% is not a small minority. Thirdly, and importantly, had Russian rulers always abided by the wishes of the majority, there would have been no Peter the Great's reforms, abolition of serfdom, etc. And we would not have been eating potatoes.
Democracy does not mean referendums every month. By the way, this mechanism is totalitarian because societies can be authoritarian and totalitarian too, not only states. Democracy means that ballots are not exactly frequent, actually infrequent, but on the matter that really counts: whether or not citizens entrust the head of state (ruling party) with making decisions, unpopular decisions included.
It is the so-called "vital" decisions that are unpopular as a rule, the decisions that alter the place of a given nation in the world and affect ethnic self-identification. Everything Putin has been doing since September 11 are this kind of decisions. A politician who can do so should be prepared for political and human loneliness which may be short or may be long, actually longer than his political career and even life are.
Vague irritation with the fact that Russia "is surrendering to America" (this is what a great many politicians and political functionaries think, those who will never catch up with the president) remains vague for the time being. But... How come the leading news websites provide articles hinting that the Americans themselves arranged the terrorist acts or that the US president and bin Laden have common business interests?
Something else is happening as well. "Fighters against the regime" gathering around Berezovsky talk about "a split within Putin". They feel uncomfortable. They and the nonplussed generals.
But functionaries should not feel panic yet, and the opposition should not yet be glad. What is happening is but a beginning of new discords and conflicts, debates over post-war Afghanistan the closest of them. Russia is doomed to be a super power even in the world whose shaping we witness nowadays. Abandoning the legacy of the old world - bases in Cuba and Vietnam, inflexibility in the matter of missile defense, and NATO-phobia, claims for dominance on the post-Soviet territory - all this merely reinforces Russia's positions.
The negotiations with Aslan Maskhadov are the only incomprehensible thing. What's it all about? Is it another Khasavyurt agreement? Or a trap in which the opposition hopes to ensnare the president?
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