Many at home and abroad hoped that a few years of heavy-handed rule by sinister strongmen would be the price of freedom and security.
They were wrong. The costs of Putin’s KGB putsch have been colossal. Russia today is the epitome of bullying and crookedness.
The independent media have shrivelled, with television in particular coming almost completely under the authorities’ control.
Almost every channel for complaint and dissent is blocked. Judicial and bureaucratic harassment, as well as physical threats, deter all but the bravest from speaking out. The authorities increasingly use forcible incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, the most loathsome weapon in the Soviet arsenal of repression, against their critics.
Putin’s rhetoric sounds jarringly like Khrushchev’s
Putin does not hide his designs. Not since the flamboyant Nikita Khrushchev, who threatened to “bury” the United States by launching Third World “wars of national liberation,” has a Russian leader so viciously lambasted America as an out-of-control superpower.
We must not cave in to the spookocracy in the Kremlin
The Russian government was last week accusing the British Council of being “a nest of spiesâ€. Paradoxically, the Russian government is itself a nest of spies. President Putin, soon to morph into a prime minister after more fixed elections in March, is but the most prominent former spy. The two most powerful people under him, Sergei Ivanov, the deputy prime minister, and Igor Sechin, the deputy chief of staff, are from the security services. Russia’s largest oil company, its largest shipbuilding company, Aeroflot, the airline, and the railway network are dominated by spooks. The management of the vast and ubiquitous Gazprom, with its holdings in TV, publishing and banking as well as energy, is also dominated by spooks. Russia is not a dictatorship, not a conventional autocracy: it’s a spookocracy.
No related posts.
