Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005
From: Sergei Roy <sergeiroy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Putin's Power
Putin's Power
The president should morph out of his bureaucratic integument and put together a
political machine capable of leading Russia along the path of ¬ if not
greatness, then modest prosperity and opportunity for all. But ¬ he won't.
By Sergei Roy
You remind me of a man. ¬ What man? ¬ The man with the power. ¬ What power? ¬ The power of hoo-doo. ¬ Who do? ¬ You do! ¬ Do what? ¬ Remind me of a man. ¬ What man? ¬ The man with the power.
These days, Putin reminds quite a few people of a man with the power of hoo-doo-you-do. Do what? Oh, a lot. Do away with freedom and democracy in Russia. Bring back a police state run by the siloviki; that is, establish an authoritarian regime of the Stalinist type (the dimmer critics say that it has already been established, has proved dysfunctional, and is on the point of collapsing). Expand the campaign against certain oligarchs to sweep through the whole country, so that no man of property, and ultimately no citizen of any sort, will feel safe from persecution and imprisonment. And so on and so forth.
All a lot of poppycock. One does not have to be a political genius to recognize this talk for what it is ¬ propaganda warfare waged out of the most ulterior of motives. Critics within the country aim to save their political skin and/or ill-gotten wealth, theirs and their masters'; critics from the outside are either driven by practically innate Russophobia or by their vision of a uniform world marching under the banner of American democracy (not to be confused with plain democracy), a step to the side is escape, we shoot without warning ¬ a world in which a sovereign, let alone great, Russia has no place.
Putin and his crew have done a lot to revive Russia's sovereignty, to stop its disintegration, its slide toward a situation in which it would be a mere geographical notion, a hodgepodge of territories run by multinationals' puppets. This achievement has been dubbed "restoring the power vertical" ¬ not a very apt phrase, spin-wise, we will agree. But ¬ a police state? A return to one-party rule? Or, as some on the Kasparov-type lunatic fringe keep yelling, a fascist state? Even if Putin wished to achieve these awful things, he just could not do them, and he has been neither able nor fool enough to wish to do them ¬ as anyone living with the hard, very hard facts of Russian life knows.
The "police state" mumbo-jumbo is probably the most graphic example. In the years of Yeltsin-style "freedom and democracy" the RF police structures lost most of their professional cadre and, in the catch-as-catch-can spirit of the times, turned into bands of racketeers and mercenaries selling their services to the highest bidder ¬ the oligarchs or, failing that, ordinary businessmen large and small, including the unsavory businesses of prostitution, drug and weapons trafficking, smuggling, etc. According to the Levada Center's recent poll, 75 percent of Russia's citizens fear police violence.[1] That this army of bandits in shoulder straps will, or indeed can, be the platform on which to build an effective police state ¬ like that of Stalin, Franco, Hitler or Pinochet ¬ is a senseless, agitprop lie. If Putin really wanted to build a police state, he would have had to build a parallel force loyal to himself and then disband the existing one (something that Ukraine's President Yushchenko, the blue-eyed boy of the West, has started to do). Yet in the six years in power Putin has made not a single move toward establishing a Praetorian Guard of his own, merely relying on law-based (though not too effective) cleaning-up of police ranks like you might observe in any so-called civilized country. Putin clearly expressed his own ¬ and the people's ¬- attitude toward the country's police force in his last state of the nation address, where he said that folks nowadays cross to the other side of the street on seeing a policeman. A statement like that does not look like the first step toward building a police state ¬ to anyone with a grain of sense, that is.
As mentioned above, this about the police state is merely a graphic instance of the nonsense being spouted about the current state of affairs in Russia. On the positive side, the issue demonstrates at least two characteristic features of the Putin rule that he will most likely wish to pass on to his successor, to make Operation Successor a success: (1) Putin is averse to tough, arbitrary, revolutionary measures that might smack of abuse of power, sticking instead to cautious, evolutionary, and in any case formally law-based maneuvers; (2) in selecting the targets of his critique or attack, Putin takes care to be on the side of the angels or, in political parlance, to be on the same wavelength as the electorate. The People, putting it plainly.
Actually, as personal observation and numerous polls show, vast masses of Russian citizens would not mind living in a police state at all, provided it is the right kind of police, one that bashes the criminals, the extortionists posing as the police of today, the oligarchs, the bosses of various description, and generally the privileged. Start a conversation with any member of the underprivileged classes (like old-age pensioners and others living below the poverty line, now numbering around 40 percent of the population, according to some counts), and you will most likely hear a fervent wish for a Stalin-like leader.
But they wish in vain. Russia's political class, whatever its innumerable faults, has learned a lesson or two from 20th-century history: once you set the machine of terror in train, there is no stopping it until it has cut great swathes through both the political class and the masses, not to mention external imbroglios. So, whatever various clowns on the Russian political scene and outside may froth at the mouth about, neo-Stalinism or even quasi-Stalinism is a 100 percent nonstarter in these parts.
Putin's tyrannical aspirations brushed aside, one may consider a milder form of the ailment, his "authoritarianism" or, as the more cautious critics of the "Putin regime" put it, a lack of checks and balances in Russia's present-day system of governance. Here, too, I must disagree: there are plenty of checks on Putin's power, though not all of them are for the good of the country.
The hardest of the facts to be taken into account is this: there are many loci of authoritarian power in present-day Russia, and Putin's authoritarianism is not strong enough to crush a single locus, let alone all or several. The most he can do is take cautious legal and/or bureaucratic steps to curb the power of those loci ¬ always choosing such steps that echo the people's wishes and are sure to find support, however dumb or muted, among a majority of the people.
Locus one: the regional barons, the governors and presidents of ethnic republics, the mayors of cities and other officialdom down to the humblest, itchy-fingered district uprava. In Soviet times, these were known as vlast' na mestakh, or local power machines, ostensibly permeated with Communist ideology but actually wielding nothing more ideological than power and property (the Party's collective property, with individual owners replaceable and dispensable, but property nevertheless). Since the fall of the Soviets, these local power machines have reestablished themselves with a vengeance. Clan-based, they have grown a hundred times more corrupt and crime-ridden than in the old days, and openly exploitative of the people's masses and their regions' natural wealth. Politically, these are authoritarian regimes, sometimes tyrannical ones, with all opposition brutally suppressed, as in Kalmykia or Bashkiria (please bear in mind that these two are just random examples). This is an aspect of life in Russia that is generally out of the news (except for the more outrageous scandals) and outside the range of analysts' attention, which mostly focused on the Kremlin ¬ only very few of us live behind those grand walls.
Now, could Putin do much to expand his policies, Stalinist or otherwise, to these fiefdoms? Anyone who has watched the feeble goings-on of his "plenipotentiaries" (what a misnomer!) in the federal districts knows the answer. The barons indulged in their feudal antics, the "plenipotentiaries" murmured disapproval or offered suitable advice, and there it ended. True, thousands of provincial legislative acts have been rewritten to do away with blatant contravention of federal laws and the Federation's Constitution, especially in the ethnic republics, but life on paper and life in the raw have never had much in common in Russia ¬ "paper can stand anything," says the proverb. Bumaga vsyo sterpit.
By "reorganizing" the Federation Council, Putin curbed the regional barons' ambition to run the entire country, but that was certainly not enough: within their fiefdoms, the provincial barons still did pretty much as they liked, whatever the refreshed legislation might say. Putin had to kick St. Pete Governor Vladimir Yakovlev upstairs, to dislodge him from the northern capital and install there a Putin loyalist, Valentina Matvienko. Gubernatorial administrations (say, in Tver, Primorye, or Stavropol) were awash in criminal proceedings, yet their governors thrived. There were persistent rumors in the press and on the Internet of, say, governors going on a drunken binge for a couple of weeks, the machinery of local governance grinding to a halt ¬ and what could the big bad Czar do, take a stick to the culprits, like his hero, Peter the Great, used to? It was just not the done thing any longer, more's the pity. Need one mention that the local princes' alcoholic indiscretions were probably the czar's (and the people's) least concern: there was also the matter of dipping into public funds as if it were their own pocket, the meteoric enrichment of their wives and other relatives (some of them making the Forbes' Magazine's top billionaire list while others took good care to escape being listed), and similar frolics.
Something had to be done, and a year ago Putin did it, introducing virtual appointment of governors instead of their "election by popular vote." This elicited a sustained howl of protest from those certified defenders of democracy, the liberal media owned by their even more liberal, if somewhat oligarchic masters. An onslaught on the constitutional principle of federalism, cried the howlers; but somehow, as one watched characters like Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov perform on TV, Lenin's immortal, alliterative phrase "political prostitute" inevitably came to mind ¬ for surely these characters knew that those "elections by popular vote" had long turned into exercises in "dirty technologies" that as often as not brought to power individuals who would do credit to any correctional facility in the land.
So, if Russia's unity is the goal, this was a step in the right direction. But was it a revolutionary, tyrannical or, say, authoritarian move? No, it was none of these things. Just a cautious, bureaucratically convoluted stratagem to deal with Russia's centuries-old problem of territorial fragmentation into appanage principalities. Its limitations are obvious, and they were set down by Putin himself: his choice of head of a region has to be approved by the territory's legislative assembly. He can of course overcome the assembly's resistance by proposing one and the same candidate three times, but he will do so at his own peril.
So far, all his nominations have been uncontested; in regions predominantly populated by Russians he might even quarrel with the regional legislative assembly (though he has not, so far; not once) because he knows that the people in those regions will always support him against their immediate oppressors, the local bosses. But quarrel with the assemblies of the 21 ethnic republics? Not on your life; the specter of yet another Chechnya, even a feeble replica of it, would not let him do anything so foolish.
Putin goes to inordinate lengths of caution in this area, nominating, say, Nikolai Fyodorov as president of Chuvashia for a fourth consecutive term. To take another example, I do not see him doing anything drastic to remedy the patently absurd situation in Bashkortostan, where Bashkirs, the third largest population group in the republic, after Russians and Tatars, fill all the more or less significant rungs in the bureaucratic hierarchy and own all its major assets. The human rights situation in Kalmykia cries to high heaven, but I doubt that Putin will give its khan, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a thousand times deserved, long overdue kick in the you know what. There was just one instance of an ethnic republic's head retiring, after an earnest discussion in the Kremlin, but that was President Aleksandr Dzasokhov of Northern Ossetia in the wake of the Beslan tragedy, and Putin's decision in this case was well in tune with the expressed wishes of the people of Ossetia.
Leaving these ethnic preserves aside (no one knows for how long), things are changing, if ever so slowly. Regional clans, with their centrifugal tendencies and strong links with the shadier element of society, are feeling the squeeze already, here and there. Six of the newly appointed/elected governors have clear federal, Moscow-centered affiliations (Duma Vice Speaker Georgy Boos, not yet approved by the assembly at the moment of writing, will be the seventh). The appointment of Moscow's Vice Mayor Valery Shantsev to the governorship of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast was, by universal accord, nothing short of bureaucratic genius: the oblast capital is the country's third largest city but, perhaps even more importantly, Shantsev obviously switched sides, crossing over from the Luzhkov team to Putin's.
OK, so Putin will replace not six or seven but all of 67 Russian-dominated regional heads, leaving 21 ethnic republics alone ¬ more or less. Will the former become his satrapies? Will the newly appointed governors perform like trained seals? The obvious question to ask is, why should they? Once appointed, the governors are assured at least one term in office during which they will exercise all their constitutional rights not bothering their heads too much about what Putin may say ¬ and Putin has recently spoken out in favor of expanding those rights, a sentiment immediately echoed by Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov. The name of the game is delegation of responsibilities; it is in the nature of this game for the center to shove as many responsibilities and as few means of fulfilling them as possible from the federal to the regional level, while the regions' task is the direct opposite. Call it a tug of war or checks and balances ¬ the process is there; it is not an ideal process (politics rarely are), but any sentient citizen will concur that it is a vast improvement on Yeltsin's policy vis-à-vis the regions: "take as much sovereignty as you can swallow" ¬ a sure way to the country's disintegration, rack and ruin, as real life experience has shown.
Now for the other locus of authoritarian power: the industrial barons, popularly known as the oligarchs. This is not the place to either denounce them for grabbing inordinately huge chunks of the country's riches when they were up for grabs, or to defend them against the demoniac machinations of the siloviki. There is the simple existential fact that the oligarchs run sectoral empires: oil, iron and steel, machine-building, banking, etc.; and empires cannot be run on other than authoritarian principles, nor can they exist other than by aggressively expanding. Which they naturally do, and woe betide anyone who stands in their path.
The state, in the shape of the Yeltsin regime, spawned the oligarchs, appointing them, not quite altruistically, owners of those enormous chunks of property. Now the Yeltsin regime is gone, leaving behind a colossal gap between the very few but enormously rich and the impoverished masses, an indigent class of public sector workers, a ruined countryside, a population dying out at the rate of a million a year, etc. etc. ¬ who in Russia doesn't know the litany?
Now, something obviously had to be done, to prevent Russia from slipping into a situation similar to that of Nigeria or Angola ¬ oil-rich but apparently forever steeped in misery. What could be done? Nothing miraculous. It was enough for the oligarchs to pay more of their earnings into the treasury and invest more of their profits in the country's industries and social welfare.
Did they do so? Do they do so, even now? Funny questions. One bought Chelsea and a plane better equipped than US Air Force One, another started buying up Duma deputies and whole parties, not to mention the media. True to their nature, they behaved in an arrogant, aggressive way. They heard talk of revision of privatization results, of a more equitable distribution of natural (God-given) rent, and they took measures to hedge their bets and crush the opposition ¬ which just happens to be the president.
And what did the president do? Behave like Stalin in 1937? That's silly talk befitting US senators (correction: some US senators) and Carnegie endowed "analysts," not sober observers of the Russian scene. Putin got hit below the belt when his Duma majority was threatened by the deputies selling out wholesale to the oligarchs and especially one particular oligarch. With their kind of money, and given the current political mores, the oligarchs could buy the Duma building in Okhotny Ryad from cellar to attic, with all its contents ¬ animal, vegetable and mineral.[2]
What could Putin do to prevent that? Shake his finger at the miscreants? Throw all the oligarchs in the pokey? This last would meet with fervent approval of the masses, but it was clearly impossible. Not because Putin was too westernized, or too much of a liberal (though in my view he is both), or cared too much for Western opinion (though he does, I believe). There was the simple matter of economic realities: re-nationalization or simply revision, even very cautious revision, of the (patently illegal) results of the 1990s privatization would throw all economy out of kilter.[3] That would mean the end of hard-won stability and a plunge into yet another Time of Troubles. Time of Troubles, a Smuta, is yet another ghost that throws a massive scare into any Russian's soul, after an almost uninterrupted century of it. Putin apparently is not westernized enough, or not despot enough, to meet this ghost unflinchingly.
So he did the other thing; metaphorically speaking, he shook his finger at the oligarchs; he gave a signal that he meant business. A couple of oligarchs were kicked out of the country, and Mr. Khodorkovsky got what he had been asking for so impudently, fully believing that the West would cover his backside whatever fraud, tax-evasion, and wholesale purchase of politicians he might commit.
Result, the more brazen "tax optimization" schemes have been dropped like so many hot potatoes, some companies' capitalization increased twenty-fivefold overnight, while politicians suddenly realized that being too openly in the oligarchs' pay might not be conducive to their continued good health ¬ not because Putin might put them where they belong, but because of what the oligarch-hating masses might do to their careers.
There came a wave or realization (even by Mr. Khodorkovsky, or his speech writers) that the country was swinging to the left, and it was better to swim with the current than be left high and dry. Hence the ludicrous picture of the oligarch-paid SPS and Yabloko parties joining forces, in their hatred of the "Putin regime," not just with the paunchy Communist Party functionaries but even with Limonov's egg-throwing National Bolsheviks, with their endearing slogan "Stalin¬Beria¬GULAG!"
Preposterous though the alliance of all Putin-hating forces might be, to dismiss them as unworthy of notice would be plain stupid. The oligarchs still hate to pay those taxes, even that fiscal joke, the flat, 13 percent income tax; they still fear that someone (most likely Putin, they reckon) may act on the tons of materials gathered by the Audit Chamber, the intrepid Yuri Boldyrev and, last but by no means least, the General Prosecutor's Office ¬ and lock them up for years and years or drive them out of the country. Not all of them, perhaps, but selective application of such measures does not make them less feared. The oligarchs' billions are still theirs, they still have the same purchasing power, and Putin has to be constantly on the qui vive, not to be fatally stabbed in the back.
The January mass protests against the monetization of social benefits showed a graphic picture of how that could be done. First the liberal wing of the cabinet miscalculated disastrously the cost of the reform ¬ it eventually cost four times as much as initially planned.[4] Then, when the masses began to roil, there was no lack of funds to pay the activists organizing pickets, rallies and chains of angry OAPs across the country's thoroughfares. The demos and road blocks were particularly well-organized in Khimki, a satellite town of Moscow, and generally well-informed political scientist Sergei Kurginyan stated, during a round table discussion of these events at Literaturnaya gazeta: "I know precisely who paid for Khimki, I am just not saying."[5]
So what we have here is a curious alliance of hungry masses and fat cats paying for organizing their protest, and it is a serious check on Putin's "authoritarianism," especially as he has recently seen how this improbable mechanism proved its efficacy in as diverse countries as Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kirgizia. One can but hope that Putin has learned one all-important lesson from these: you can be as Western-inclined and liberal as you please, but take care to keep in the people's good graces. In short, go easy and watch your ratings. And he is safe ¬ as long as he has oil revenues to play with and does nothing exorbitantly stupid, in the way of reform or any other. With his latest move ¬ allocating some $4 billion for healthcare, education, utilities, housing, and agriculture ¬ he has shown that he is very well attuned to the electorate's expectations and has covered this flank more or less effectively.
We thus come to the third and most important locus of political power -- the People, said to be the supreme source of ALL power in the country. This is naturally a lot of political hooey: we have seen how a well-organized minority of a few thousand or tens of thousands can decide the fate of millions and tens of millions, whereupon those millions start scratching their heads trying to understand what it was that had hit them, while the leaders of the minority, fangs dripping, go for each other's throats (textbook example, Ukraine).
We will agree that this kind of scenario, so eagerly discussed by slavering Russophobes like Anders Aslund, is currently ruled out for Russia ¬ not just because Putin has cowed the oligarchs and ingratiated himself with the masses, but because, as indicated above, both the masses and the oligarchs fear a Smuta and value the present stability dearly ¬ so much so that the more radical element among the masses resort to baseball bats to bring the "revolutionaries" to their senses, as in the recent skirmish in Avtozavodskaya, where Limonov's National Bolsheviks suffered a few fractured skulls as a token of what would happen to them on a larger scale if their orange rhetoric carried them too far.[6]
The real problem lies elsewhere, and the all-important questions here could be formulated as follows: (1) Is there a way to combine Putin's power and people's power? (2) Should this prove possible, what would be the vector of such combined forces or, putting it in plainer language, where would ¬ or should ¬ Putin lead the people?
As far as the people's masses are concerned, the answer to this last question is easy: they want "social justice," the more of it, the better. In politer terms, a more equitable distribution of the national wealth is an obvious desideratum ¬ not just for the masses, but for the "elite" as well. Experience shows that, with a 6:1 gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor, a country is dangerously near a crisis. In today's Russia, the ratio is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15:1. Russia's "elite" should be grateful to the sense of apathy that envelops the poor, their ingrained habit of living on next to nothing, and a fear, also ingrained and already mentioned here a couple of times ¬ the fear of Smuta. Yet this cannot go on indefinitely, as the smarter element in the elite should recognize; someone has to defuse this landmine, and Putin is the natural candidate for the job (or so at least the masses seem to believe).
Another point on which the masses and Putin are in consensus is, the masses want jobs, even meagerly paid jobs (though it would be an exaggeration to say that they want them more than "social justice"). By introducing the jobs theme, however, we enter the whole wide field of economics, and here the wishes of the masses are more diffuse; all they can do is vote for the czar and hope that some day he will somehow achieve some of the good things he has been talking about in one TV opportunity after another: restructure the economy (the raw materials sector can absorb only a tiny fraction of the job seekers), launch long overdue programs for building and rebuilding the infrastructure, promote medium- and small-size enterprises, make domestic producers more competitive, etc. etc. (see any of Putin's ¬ or, for that matter, Yeltsin's ¬ state-of-the-nation addresses).
The people, or the more thinking element among the people, want all these things (the less thinking masses just want the prices to stay low and their pensions and wages, if any, to grow higher and higher). Judging by the approval ratings, they expect Putin to deliver these nice things, and to that extent they support him. But is there a mechanism to convert that support into political power which would enable the man to overcome all those "checks" and really achieve all the above ¬ and a great deal else? In my view, there isn't. Popular acclaim for an individual is not a political mechanism. Even Yeltsin, at the start of his rule, had an effective mechanism for translating popular support into power ¬ just recall those mammoth rallies in Manezhka. I don't quite see a hundred thousand strong rally yelling "Pu-TIN! Pu-TIN!", the way they yelled Yeltsin's name during his confrontation with the Communist rule.
In the end, it was the Yeltsin regime that smashed the masses into submission and exploitation, harnessing them with the double yoke, described above, of the regional and industrial barons and leaving them unable to form either effective trade unions or an incorruptible and effective political party or parties. What Putin has in the way of a political support machine ¬ the United Russia party ¬ fully suits his Yeltsinite origins. It is a party of the nachalstvo, the bosses, extremely good at looking out after its own interests but not much else.
Now, what could ¬ or should ¬ Putin do on handing over the reins of power to his well-selected and vetted successor? I guess we are all more or less agreed that, for Putin, a four-year absence from the presidency is just an interlude ¬ for the simple reason that there is no one, absolutely not one person on what is known as the "political Mount Olympus," who could outshine him in terms of stature, popularity, and record of service to the country. So a return is practically inevitable ¬ but how will he spend the interlude?
Roughly, two scenarios are possible.
(a) Putin goes in for the power-behind-the-throne bit, installing a Fradkov-like puppet and pulling the strings for all he is worth. Politically, he uses the already established United Russia party mechanism ¬ somewhat refurbished, of course, but basically remaining what it is now, a party of the nachalstvo, the top dogs. It is my view that under this setup none of the worthy goals outlined above will be achieved for decades, if ever. It will always be a case of too little too late, patching up a few things here, oiling a rusty mechanism there ¬ until the oil and gas, or the people's patience, run out, and I just would rather not look further into the future than that.
(b) Putin morphs out of his bureaucratic integument, jumps in, feet first, into the crowded left- and center-left area of Russian politics, and puts together a political machine capable of leading Russia along the path of ¬ if not greatness, then economic and every other revival, modest prosperity and opportunity for all. This would signify nothing short of a revolution in the Russian elite, a change-over from the current setup in which practically every member of the ruling class, while sucking the blood of Russia, has built a bridgehead in the West and is ever ready to strike camp and move out, if the going gets tough. A political mechanism of this kind would represent at long last a viable opposition to the existing establishment and be doomed to a crushing victory at the next election. With lots of new and patriotic blood in the elite, the leadership might tackle not only the glaring problems of today, such as the unspeakable demographic situation or crime and corruption, but even those that are swept way under the carpet now, like the problem of Russia as a divided nation, with 25 million Russians (more like 30 million, if you count "Russian speakers") living beyond the newly drawn borders of their mother country.
Now for the $64000 question: will he or won't he? Go for scenario B, I mean? It would be highly probable if the impossible happened, the radical-liberal wing of Russia's political spectrum, headed by a Kasyanov-type character, won the elections, and Putin were driven into opposition by force of events. Alas, even if Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Nevzlin & Co. were allowed to take over every single TV channel, radio station and newspaper in the land, the probability of their victory in a moderately free and fair election would be a big fat zero. The most bizarre versions of Operation Successor are possible, given the electorate's total disenchantment with the political class as a whole, but the spawning of a victorious force by the oligarchs¬ No, we had better leave these Freudian fantasies to the "analysts" already in the pay of those same oligarchs and other interested parties.
Here I come to the saddest part of my exposé, for the crucial decision obviously devolves on Putin himself ¬ and I just do not believe Putin to be made of the stuff of greatness. A move like the one outlined in Scenario B calls for a man of the stature of Roosevelt or Churchill or De Gaulle, a great leader or just a tough one. Putin is merely a good ¬ perhaps very good ¬ public servant, and we in Russia are very lucky to get even someone like him. Blame it on the Soviet system, with its "negative selection," or any other factor, but there is no escaping the fact itself. Russia, by the way, is not alone in this fix: as we observe Blair lying his head off in parliament, Berlusconi nimbly evading criminal proceedings, and George W. Bush any time, anywhere, curious phrases flit through one's mind: "hollow men. stuffed men. Headpiece filled with straw." And, like another poet said, "We do not choose the times, we live and die in them." The same goes for the leaders we live and die with.
Sadly, it looks like Plan B will have to wait for a stronger man ¬ and a stronger people. Looking into one's crystal ball, one doesn't see either emerging any time soon. No one reminds one of a man with the power of hoo-doo.
[1] See Izvestia 29 August 2005
[2] For documentary evidence of Khodorkovsky's plans to do just that, see http://lj.rossia.org/users/drz/17041.html
[3] It fills one's heart with unholy glee to observe that voracious adventuress, Yulia Timoshenko of Ukraine, and her no less rapacious cohorts ignore such an obvious consequence of starting a wholesale re-division of property.
[4] The dismal quality of this country's economists (and their foreign, Aslund-type advisers) is one of the many curses besetting the land. Recall how Yegor Gaidar estimated the rise in prices after his price liberalization of January 1, 1992. They would grow 1.5, 2 or 3 times, he predicted very publicly, on national TV, for all the country to hear. In harsh reality, they rose a hundred- and at times a thousand-fold.
[5] See Literaturnaya gazeta 24 February -- 1 March 2005, p.3. Kurginyan's reticence will appear natural to anyone who remembers Paul Khlebnikov or a thousand other similar episodes.
[6] Note that in my previous article, published just a couple of weeks prior to the Avtozavodskaya scuffle ("Scenario for Russia or Provocation?"), I predicted just such an outcome to any "revolutionary" adventures targeting the "Putin regime."