By Bogdan Kipling
WASHINGTON: The communists may have been banished from the Kremlin, but many of the Soviet-era thugs remain. Earlier this month — a year after he ordered his Federal Security to crack down on foreign non-government organisations operating in Russia — the increasingly paranoid Vladimir Putin let it be known that the United States is in the avant garde of the enemies he sees everywhere.
Russia grew rich on oil and gas exports after the United States and Western Europe bailed out its dumpster economy a decade ago. Now, the autocratic former KGB operative is throwing his weight around — price-gouging Western European and former Soviet-bloc nations for the natural gas and petroleum their economies so desperately need.
This is the same man whose eyes and soul President Bush gazed into at the start of his presidency and pronounced them brimming with good will.
Ah, well! Fast-forward six years and Putin appears to be on the verge of a launching a sequel to the long-playing Cold War. Not a comforting thought when you consider that the Kremlin is hording thousands of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons and its treasury is overflowing with billions of US dollars and euros.
Putin has never been much of a democrat. Boris Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, he started out running Mother Russia as if he were a direct descendant of Peter the Great. Now he seems to be morphing into Ivan the Terrible.
Russian democrats and entrepreneurs were hopeful that Putin would put Russia in the express lane to democracy and free-market capitalism when he came to power in 1999. Now many, including such international causes celebre as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are languishing in frozen Siberian gulags.
A year ago I had a long talk with Irina Yasina, director of Open Russia, a non-government organisation attempting to teach democracy in a land where a communist dictatorship had ruled for 75 years.
We want to be a “normal country”, she said, and her plain words cut to the heart of the Putin problem. She, and millions of Russians like her, want normality. Vladimir Putin wants an aberration. He is promoting a form of Borscht-style fascism — no matter what it says on the label.
Yasina’s simple, humane goal should not be a dream. It is the natural right of normal people. As for the Western democracies, they now have no excuse for not seeing reality. On the contrary, they should be speaking up whenever Putin or his minions in Russia’s state-controlled press brag about their brand of democracy.
The best counters to such blatant propaganda are Russia’s countless Irina Yasinas. If Putin’s democracy is genuine, why is she still dreaming of a “normal country”?
She laid it out a year ago. Putin, she told me, was about to sign a law that would ban non-governmental organisations from accepting foreign donations.
Open Russia, Yasina’s NGO, ironically was set up and supported by Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon now serving an eight year sentence in Siberia — and facing yet more jail time. In effect, Open Russia, courageous enough to speak truth to power, is out of business. One of its crimes: weakening the state and social cohesion.
Putin would have us believe that modern Russians long for the traditional knout — the medieval whip that kept the serfs cowed for centuries. Sadly, he still gets away with such tummy-rot among far too many Western diplomats, journalists, scholars and business leaders — just as he gets away with his crude threats and outright blackmail. He has Europe by the throat because he has the oil and gas Europe must have or freeze in the dark.
A couple of weeks ago, he attended a conference on defence and military strategies in Munich and took the occasion to resume Russia’s Cold War harangues against the United States.
The arrogance derived from his tightening grip on power apparently allowed him to forget that America and its allies could have killed Russia off nine years ago when it was a bankrupt, helpless cripple. Instead, the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Germany and Japan, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank poured billions of dollars into Moscow’s empty coffers to keep Russia’s head above water.
So much for Vladimir Putin’s ‘foreign enemies’. As for the domestic kind, the chained Mikhail Khodorkovsky languishes in Siberia and Irina Yasina, suffering from multiple sclerosis, finds her vision of a ‘normal country’ indefinitely postponed. — Halifax Chronicle Herald/MCT
* Bogdan Kipling is a Washington-based columnist for the Canadian newspaper Halifax Chronicle Herald.