"Russia will soon be a one party state"

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by GePap

So Russians watch CSPAN? And if they make parlimetary speeches, I am sure the Putin allied press will give them lots of airtime....

Its not an ideal bully pulpit, but I presume its somewhat harder to silence someone who can give a speech in parliament. Note well, there are still anti-Putin publications.

Except this isn't Israel, or the US, or France, or Britain. Its Russia.

Obviously, but some of the dynamics of coalition politics is probably common to all. Israeli politics is probably particularly apropos, not only cause Israel has a relatively unstable party system (very much so compared to UK, and somewhat so compared to 5th Republic France) but cause its political culture is largely rooted in pre-1918 Russian opposition politics. A culture in which fine ideological distinctions are treasured. The point is, merging parties may not even be the pragmatic thing for the liberal leaders to do, and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they understand their own voters better than you or I do.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by GePap
Except this isn't Israel, or the US, or France, or Britain. Its Russia.

Actually, it's Sparta!

[Dinner]

Putin's 'Jackals'
By Andreas Umland (Wallsteet Journal)

The campaign for Russia's parliamentary elections this Sunday is nasty and tense. Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia coalition, found himself jailed for five days earlier this week after peacefully marching in Moscow. Other opposition parties were denied access to media and harassed. The Kremlin pulled out all the stops to make sure the United Russia party, and its top candidate President Vladimir Putin, win resoundingly.


None of that is particularly surprising. But the Russian leader's speech last week, at the "Forum of Supporters of Vladimir Putin," was. It could mark a turning point in post-Soviet affairs. Mr. Putin used the well-choreographed United Russia rally, the high point of his campaign, to make his most pointed attack yet on democrats and democracy.

In his Nov. 21 address, Mr. Putin was clearly referring to Russia's politically weak but still visible liberal movement when he mentioned those "who are, unfortunately, still within the country, who skulk around [kto shakalit u] foreign embassies, foreign diplomatic offices, counting on the support of foreign foundations and governments, and not on the support of their own people." (Shakal means jackal in Russian, and shakalit was used here as a metaphorical verb to describe the nature of the politicians' and human-rights activists' contacts with Western governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Russia.)

Mr. Putin further specified who he means: "Those who, in the 1990s, held high posts." He warned that "you can find their names among the candidates and sponsors of some parties." According to President Putin, they are "those who, in the most difficult moment, during the terrorist intervention into Russia [from Chechnya], treacherously called for negotiations, in fact for collusion with terrorists, with those who killed our children and women, speculating in the most unscrupulous and cynical way on the victims. In short, these are all those who, towards the end of the past century, led Russia to mass poverty, [and] ubiquitous bribe-taking."

The idea that a number of liberal politicians like Boris Nemtsov, Anatoly Chubais or Yegor Gaidar, who held -- by no means all, and rarely the most important -- government posts in the 1990s, are solely responsible for the deep socioeconomic crisis of that decade has been a common theme in Russian public discourse ever since the start of reforms launched after the Soviet Union's collapse. There is little novelty in this accusation.

However, Mr. Putin added a new wrinkle by accusing them of working for foreign powers and betraying Russia, and especially with his regret that these politicians are "still within the country." To be sure, these ideas aren't all that original either. But until now they were the preserve of the extreme right as well as the increasingly nationalist communist movement -- politicians like the rabble-rouser Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party.

As to who might be the gray eminence behind the allegedly criminal liberals, Mr. Putin didn't specify. Yet his past speeches, particularly his attack on the U.S. at an international security conference in Munich in February, suggest that he has the amerikantsy foremost in mind.[size =8] For many Russians today, Americans are to blame for almost everything that is bad in and outside the former Soviet Union.[/size]

In Western democracies, politicians also say bizarre things, especially when campaigning for office. Russia is not a Western democracy. The institution that dominates Russian society today is the Kremlin's "vertical of power" -- a combination of formal and informal controls and curbs which is rather different from the checks and balances in democratic states. This vertical of power has President Putin at the top. It extends not only to the federal government and United Russia party, but also to other parties, regional and local governments, big business, civil society and mass media. One reasonably suspects that it also exerts influence on the court system, the police and academia.

In this election, Mr. Putin is not campaigning against real competitors on a level playing ground. While the formal rules of the voting on Dec. 2 itself may be observed scrupulously, neither the electoral process as a whole nor public politics in general is fair. Under President Putin, Russia has gone back to a Byzantine form of state-society relations where the so-called national leader is beyond criticism -- a semidivine figure who determines where the country goes and whose utterances decide what's permissible and what's not.

The national leader's choice of words, therefore, can't be dismissed as mere electoral hyperbole, soon to be forgotten. Instead, Mr. Putin has opened a Pandora's Box by suggesting, implicitly, that his liberal opponents are traitors, foreign agents and enemies of the Russian people who should leave the country. He has legitimized the paranoid, conspiratorial and Manichean theories spread by Russia's ultranationalists on the Internet, in newspapers and in books during the past 15 years.

Russia's fanatically anti-Western political activists and journalists, one suspects, will now start to elaborate on how exactly the apparent will of their national leader is to be implemented. The "For Putin" movement, an offshoot of the United Russia campaign, has already adopted his use of the word shakalit by naming a new video on the liberal opposition "Shakaly" (Jackals) -- which conveniently, and dangerously, dehumanizes Mr. Putin's opponents. The legions of nationalists in Russia's parties, editorial boards and universities can now, invoking the president's wishes, call for cleansing Russia of the West's "agents of influence," as the liberals are called in the extremist press today. While Mr. Putin and his entourage might not yet plan to deport en masse Russian opposition figures, this is what public opinion may, at one point, ask them to do.

That bolded and enlarged part just so reminded me of Serb I had to share.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119637357869308481.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[Pekka]

But when it's all said and done... I mean it's their country, they can do what they want to do with it. If they want to make Putin dear leader, by all means... if that's what they want, then that's what they'll do and that's that. It really isn't my concern.

[Dinner]

I think the point is the system has been rigged.

[Pekka]

So? If that's what they want, fine. Of course it's still open to outside criticism. I'm not saying we can't say anything about it.

Is this somehow a surprise anyway? Do you think that for example Putin Youth is something that spontaneously just came to be? It couldn't be more organized. There's so much propaganda it makes your head spin. Not saying we don't have propaganda, because we do.

It's such BS argument anyway that the public opinion is that they want him, because the public opinion is created to begin with. Honest elections are long gone in most countries.

[The Vagabond]

Putin committed a huge mistake, at all imaginable levels, by permitting himself (actually ever for the first time!) to speak like that about the liberal leaders of the 1990s. I wonder if Putin would have said anything similar if Yeltsin had still been alive.

The leaders of the Union of Right Forces commited an equally huge mistake by going to the streets together with the lunatic Kasparov and the nazi-bolshevik Limonov.

By doing this, both Putin and the liberal leaders have mutually annihilated a good part of their respectability. They just seem to get on an hysterical spiral. Well, for Putin, it's the first time when he's got to really participate in an election campaign. The two times he got elected a president, he just reaped the rewards of his huge rating without the need of doing the dirty business of agitation. But the Union of Right Forces is more experienced than that... Everything indicates that at first they had an informal agreement with the Kremlin, but then it got out of control.

[Wezil]

Russians will get to democracy by the time the rest of us move on from it. The country has historically been at least a generation behind the west and they appear to relish that prospect still.

[BeBMan]

Hey, did you guys notice? Putin leads the polls. What a surprise. So he's Happy Putin again

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7124027.stm

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Serb
The day after tommorow for the first time in my life I will vote for Putin, not for Commies as I usually do.
And you know why? Because he pisses you off.

There is a sucker born every minute. Putin says you either vote for him and accept is autocratic ways or TEH EVIL WEST WINS!!!! The sad and funny part is so many Russians actually believe that hog wash.

It is nothing more then classic nationalistic jingoism and attempts to create a siege mentality when no such siege exists. Putin just wants normal Russians to focus all their energies on an imaginary foreign enemy instead of paying attention to the government's own thuggish behavior at home.

[Saras]

Originally posted by Oerdin


There is a sucker born every minute. Putin says you either vote for him and accept is autocratic ways or TEH EVIL WEST WINS!!!! The sad and funny part is so many Russians actually believe that hog wash.

It is nothing more then classic nationalistic jingoism and attempts to create a siege mentality when no such siege exists. Putin just wants normal Russians to focus all their energies on an imaginary foreign enemy instead of paying attention to the government's own thuggish behavior at home.

Q
F
T

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Oerdin
There is a sucker born every minute. Putin says you either vote for him and accept is autocratic ways or TEH EVIL WEST WINS!!!! The sad and funny part is so many Russians actually believe that hog wash.

If we replace
Putin = Bush
Evil West = Terrorists
Russians = Americans
will the quote still be accurate?

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by MarkG
If we replace
Putin = Bush
Evil West = Terrorists
Russians = Americans
will the quote still be accurate?

Your petty US hatred makes you a boring one trick pony.

I forget where are all the great greek achievements in the last 2000 years?

[PLATO]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov

Your petty US hatred makes you a boring one trick pony.

QFT

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov

I forget where are all the great greek achievements in the last 2000 years?

Greece peaked early. It's been all downhill since then.