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#13 - JRL 9134 - JRL Home
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005
From: "Jerry Hough, Ph.D." <jhough@duke.edu>
Subject: Re Putin

Surely Putin was uttering a stupidity if he really meant that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of this century. But, as Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local. Putin surely was not dumb enough to believe his statement literally, but he understood its domestic implication: if Boris Yeltsin was almost solely responsible for the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century, he himself was a political catastrophe on that scale. Some day we need to accept that Yeltsin continued to rule throughout Putin's first term on the Chinese Communist model. Khordovkovsky was not, in the words of AFP, a paragon in fair business dealing, but was Yeltsin's second secretary who also was swindling Westerners. The other "oligarchs" had similar role, and now Putin is selecting his own Secretariat. Putin seems to be moving on the next stage in his consolidation of power.

Thus far in his second term--really his first term--Putin has been treating Yeltsin as Brezhnev treated Khrushchev after his overthrow. The statement about the geopolitical catastrophe suggests that the end of the Khorodokovsky trial means he is ready to go after Yeltsin more openly. If so, scholars as scholars can only applaud the information that may be forthcoming, but scholars as human beings must hope that Putin will go no further than Stalin's exile of Trotsky, not his later show trials.