Pulling Up the Roots
From today’s Observer comment section: And yet Mr Putin has his defenders in the West, including business people in Britain who want to invest in Russia. Mr Putin, they argue, has at least brought stability after the kleptocratic chaos of the Nineties. He is managing a transition to democracy, Putin apologists say, that, in a country the size of Russia, can only be done cautiously and with a firm hand. We must hope that is true. But there is no evidence for it. Observer Business today carries a bleak assessment of Russia’s media landscape, where free speech is ruthlessly curtailed. Far from nurturing a fledgling democracy, Mr Putin is pulling up its roots. More after the cut.
From the Observer:
The shadow of Stalin that hangs over Mr PutinLeaderSunday December 2, 2007The ObserverWriting in the Sixties about Josef Stalin’s atrocities, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: ‘We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future’.Russian President Vladimir Putin is an acolyte of the system that sent Solzhenitsyn into exile. He got his political education in the KGB. He suppresses political dissent, detects anti-Russian conspiracy in the West with paranoid zeal and despises civil society when it is not subservient to him. He is an admirer of Stalin. He has cultivated in Russia a collective denial of the enormous crimes perpetrated by the USSR against its own people. Today, Russians will vote in a parliamentary election rigged to create a one-party, rubber-stamp legislature loyal not to the country’s democratic constitution, but to Mr Putin personally.And yet Mr Putin has his defenders in the West, including business people in Britain who want to invest in Russia. Mr Putin, they argue, has at least brought stability after the kleptocratic chaos of the Nineties. He is managing a transition to democracy, Putin apologists say, that, in a country the size of Russia, can only be done cautiously and with a firm hand. We must hope that is true. But there is no evidence for it. Observer Business today carries a bleak assessment of Russia’s media landscape, where free speech is ruthlessly curtailed. Far from nurturing a fledgling democracy, Mr Putin is pulling up its roots.Britain has little choice but to deal with Russia. We buy its natural resources and, with an enlarged EU that includes the Baltic states and Poland, we are part of an economic entity that borders Mr Putin’s empire. But we must be under no illusions about the sort of state and the sort of man we are dealing with.In the Sixties, Solzhenistyn was warning of the dangers inherent in preserving the Soviet system. He did not foresee that it would fall, but then, within a generation, start to be restored.But he was prescient none the less: ‘When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers,’ he wrote, ‘we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.’
