Putin to Nation: Vote for Me Or Else!

AFP reports:

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday warned Russians to vote for him in parliamentary elections this weekend or face the country’s “disintegration”. He also appearing to confirm he would step down next year, in a televised address to the nation ahead of the elections on Sunday.

Urging voters to back his United Russia party, Putin warned that the liberal opposition which governed Russia after the 1991 Soviet collapse wanted to “return to a time of humiliation, dependency and disintegration.”

“We should not allow back into power the people who… want to change and muddle Russia’s development plans,” he said.

Putin, 55, warned against the “dangerous illusion” of believing his legacy was safe. United Russia is forecast to win easily two thirds of seats in the State Duma. The tiny liberal parties are not expected to win a single seat and complain they are victims of heavy handed Kremlin tactics.

Analyst Nikolai Petrov, at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, said Putin’s speech was meant to “point out enemies and raise fear.”

Although as president he cannot actually take a Duma seat, Putin heads the electoral list of United Russia, which is presenting the parliamentary election as a referendum on the ex-KGB officer’s highly popular rule. The television address had been closely watched for any sign of Putin’s plans after he completes his second term next year and is required to step down. The only hint he gave was to say that “the result of the parliamentary elections will, without a doubt, set the tone for the elections for a new president.” That appeared to confirm that Putin will not seek to override a constitutional ban on seeking a third consecutive term in a March 2 presidential vote. However, Putin has repeatedly said he intends to retain a major role, prompting speculation that he might hang on to power, or at least retain influence through a handpicked successor.

Putin is sure to win on Sunday, but needs a large turnout if he is to claim a popular mandate for retaining power in some way, Petrov said. “Since Putin has said he’ll build his future on the basis of this vote, and turned the vote into a referendum on himself, then he needs a vote of confidence,” Petrov said. Controversy over the fairness of Sunday’s polls was growing amid what Kremlin opponents describe as a crackdown aimed at fixing the election results.

Garry Kasparov, the chess legend turned bitter Putin opponent, was to be released after being jailed for five days for public disorder during a banned protest march in Moscow on Saturday.

President George W. Bush said he was “deeply concerned” at the breakup of the rallies in Moscow and elsewhere in the country over the weekend. EU countries and Amnesty International also criticised the Kremlin.

Nikita Belykh, leader of the liberal SPS party, wrote to supporters in a Internet message that “dictatorship threatens the country,” Echo of Moscow radio station reported. Belykh said some 25 million copies of campaign materials had been confiscated by police around the country. Another SPS leader, Boris Nemtsov, who has declared a bid in next year’s presidential election, has come under stinging personal attacks in Kremlin-friendly media. “As soon as we declared that we were going into hardline opposition, the ruling party and Putin personally has declared war against us,” Belykh said.

In an address to foreign ambassadors in the Kremlin on Wednesday, Putin pledged to uphold democratic standards on Sunday, the fifth parliamentary vote since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. “We know the value of real democracy and are interested in holding elections that are honest, of the utmost transparency and open, without flaws or shortcomings,” he said. However, Putin also warned the world to keep out of Russia’s business. “I need to repeat — we will not allow this process to be corrected from the outside,” Putin said.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) earlier this month called off its election monitoring mission for the Russian elections, citing a lack of cooperation from Moscow, something that Russia denies.

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Tory, Tory, Tory! British Conservatives Warn of Russian Balkan Invasion

The Telegraph reports:

Western forces, which could include British troops, must be sent into the Balkans to prevent Russia sparking a new European war, according to David Cameron [pictured]. Speaking in Washington, the Conservative leader will issue a stark warning that Russia’s increasingly assertive foreign policy is jeopardising Britain’s national security. Mr Cameron fears a diplomatic and military crisis could arise over Kosovo, the province of Serbia which has effectively been a United Nations protectorate since Nato invaded to stop ethnic cleansing by Serb forces in 1999. The ethnic Albanian government of Kosovo is threatening to declare independence from Serbia on Dec 10. Moscow is backing Serbian attempts to block the declaration, while the United States and the European Union are in favour.

“Let me make it clear: there could be a new crisis in the Balkans by Christmas,” Mr Cameron will say in a speech to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank. “That is a direct threat to our national security, and we must therefore take decisive action now to prevent it. We need to reinforce the military presence in the region now, by drawing on some of Nato’s dedicated operational reserve, to prevent trouble later.”

Nato members take it in turns to provide a reserve force to back up the alliance’s K-For peacekeeping force in Kosovo. The reserve is currently led by a battalion of Italian troops with a German battalion next in line to deploy. But from Jan 1, Britain takes on responsibility for providing the “lead-ready” battalion for the reserve, putting British troops first in line to deploy.

Tory officials made clear last night that Mr Cameron was not calling for the deployment of extra British troops above and beyond those already committed to the Nato Reserve force. But they also said that the Tory leader had not made his call lightly, saying it was a measure of how seriously he takes the need to prevent more instability in the region. British diplomats privately share Mr Cameron’s fears of a Balkan crisis, but ministers have stopped short of proposing a further military deployment, and the Tory leader’s call could dramatically increase the diplomatic stakes over Kosovo. But he will insist that intervention is vital to British national interest because instability in the Balkans could bring a wave of immigrants to Bitain, and make the region a breeding ground for al-Qaeda. He will say: “Instability in the Balkans, with all the dangers that would bring, would be a threat to us all.”

The last British troops in the Balkans, a 600-strong force of Welsh Guards, left Bosnia in March. Since 2003, a handful of British military officers and police personnel have been in Kosovo training and advising local security forces. Mr Cameron will make his speech as part of a visit to meet President George W Bush in an encounter designed to rehabilitate the Conservatives after years of isolation in Washington. Mr Cameron’s 45-minute private meeting with Mr Bush at the White House will heap more misery on Gordon Brown as he faces the mounting scandal over party funding and increasingly poor opinion polls.

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Putin Puts the Boot In

For someone who claims to be wildly popular as a “national leader,” Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s recent actions are inexplicable. They’re the actions of a weak, cowardly tinpot who fears he can be ousted at any second. And they’re not enough to satisfy him. At the eleventh hour before the elections, the Moscow Times tells us that he’s embarked on a second round of crackdowns on foreign elections observers, wiping out the token presence he previously allowed, and he’s arranged for Nashi — that’s right, his own Hitler youth cult — to conduct the exit polling at the ballot stations. Now that is what you call leaving nothing to chance!

First, the observer crackdown:

The country’s only group of independent election observers has been forced to reduce its activities ahead of weekend elections after coming under intense pressure from the authorities. Golos, a nongovernmental organization that receives EU and U.S. funding, has had to suspend its activities in the Samara region amid a criminal investigation that it says is politically motivated. The head of Golos’ two offices in the region, Lyudmila Kuzmina, has been charged with installing unlicensed software on the group’s computers. The investigation means that Golos, which has branches in 40 regions, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, will not be able to monitor the vote in Samara, Kuzmina said. More important, she said, it signals that the Kremlin is doing its best to squash criticism of the State Duma elections Sunday. “The goal of the authorities is to conduct the elections so quietly that you can’t hear a mosquito,” Kuzmina said by telephone from Samara. “We remain the only troublesome mosquito buzzing in the silence.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had never heard of Golos, so it was difficult to comment on the case. Peskov said, however, that Kuzmina’s accusations “don’t correspond with reality. The Kremlin’s task is to conduct the elections legally and with maximum transparency,” he said by telephone. But Peskov told foreign reporters at a meeting Tuesday night that President Vladimir Putin was referring to some foreign-funded NGOs involved in political activities when he spoke of greedy “jackals” taking orders from foreign patrons during a speech last week. Peskov refused to identify any of the NGOs, saying it was a job for law enforcement officials.

Samara police are helping the local branch of the Federal Registration Service investigate whether Golos’ offices failed to follow their charter and improperly spent money on communications equipment. Kuzmina herself has been barred from leaving Samara while she awaits trial on the software charges. Other organizations critical of the Kremlin have also faced charges of using unlicensed software this year, including a Chechen NGO and a regional office of Novaya Gazeta. The use of unlicensed software is widespread but rarely prosecuted. Vadim Malikov, the acting head of the registration service’s Samara branch, did not specify Golos’ purported violations in a written response to questions. He said only that Golos had committed “repeated legal violations” and “charter violations … detected during planned inspections.”

Police carried out the first inspection May 10, hours after Kuzmina criticized Samara authorities on Ekho Moskvy radio for detaining opposition activists who were distributing leaflets about a Dissenters’ March. Police seized all the office computers. Kuzmina said the police had told her that “investigative information” had meant that it was necessary “to check the economic activities” of the NGO. The next day, on May 11, police sealed the office for a week and on May 18 closed it for three months for what they described as fire-safety violations. Later that month, a burst pipe flooded the office, destroying stacks of paperwork.

Golos activists continued working from home until the office reopened Sept. 10. But they have suspended all activities since Sept. 19, when the police began a new, monthlong check. In the meantime, the Federal Registration Service suspended the activities of Golos’ other office for six months and asked a regional court to close it. Police charged Kuzmina in late October, but the case has yet to be sent to court. “Out of this fact, I draw the conclusion that the main aim is to put pressure on me,” Kuzmina said. Kuzmina has been involved in public activities since the early 1990s and helped set up Samara branches for Yabloko, the Union of Right Forces and the Democratic Party.

Nationwide, Golos has been monitoring the media and interviewing party members, NGO activists and ordinary people about the Duma elections since July. It has examined, among other things, whether parties are being granted fair access to state media and public awareness about the elections. In late October, Golos issued a report of campaign violations by various parties. The group, which disclosed the findings at a news conference with Transparency International and the Information Policy Fund, also said politicians and parties were using their official positions or ties to government institutions to influence the outcome of the elections more than they had done before the 2003 Duma vote.

Golos plans to open a media center at the Independent Press Center in Moscow to collect and distribute information about voting violations Sunday. It will release additional information during the week after the vote. Besides Golos activists, Russians expected to observe the elections belong to political parties and Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth group. Golos was founded in 2000 as an association of NGOs dedicated to protecting voters’ rights and developing civil society. It has received foreign funding since the beginning, Golos executive director Lilia Shibanova said at a news conference last month.

For the past three years, Golos has been operating on a $2.3 million grant from the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, and USAID, a U.S. government agency, Shibanova said. Its previous backers have included two U.S.-based organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, nonprofit organization aimed at strengthening democratic institutions around the world, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, a private foundation, a Golos spokeswoman said. Golos’ founders include the Moscow Helsinki Group, led by human rights pioneer Lyudmila Alexeyeva; the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, a regional NGO; the Women’s Information Net, an independent nonprofit organization; and the Youth Union of Lawyers, a national NGO. Golos is a member of the Public Chamber’s coordinating council and the European Net of Elections Monitoring Organizations. Kuzmina, who denied wrongdoing, expressed hope that Golos would overcome its difficulties in Samara. “I will fight to the end,” she said. “We mustn’t allow them to shut us down, because once we allow that …” her voice trailed off into silence.

Then, the Nashi outrage:

Up to 20,000 activists from Nashi Vybory, a spinoff from the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi, will conduct exit polls nationwide during Sunday’s State Duma vote. “Dec. 2 is a test both for us and for the youth of Russia,” Olesya Pelageina, the group’s spokeswoman, said Wednesday, explaining that Nashi Vybory had been out trying to encourage young people to vote since June. Two other bodies will be polling voters Sunday: the state-run All-Russia Center for Public Opinion Monitoring, or VTsIOM, and the Public Opinion Foundation, or FOM, which also has strong ties to the state. Nashi Vybory, or “Our Elections,” cooperates with one party — United Russia — and supports the course of President Vladimir Putin, yet remains completely independent, Pelageina said. It is an independent entity from Nashi, she said. Because Nashi is a volunteer movement, carrying out the polling will not require any funding, Pelageina said. She added that local authorities were providing rooms in municipal buildings as operational centers for the polling activities free of charge.

As for the training and know-how to sample the voting accurately, experienced public opinion analysts will be on hand to check the results of the exit polls, Pelageina said. Three activists will be on hand for Sunday’s vote at each of more than 1,200 polling stations in 53 regions. The rest will provide “operational support” at regional headquarters, she said. VTsIOM, which is working for Channel One television and has the largest financial and organizational resources of the three pollsters, will send two or three interviewers to each of 1,200 polling stations in 57 regions, according to information on its web site. It hopes to have managed to talk to 120,000 voters after they have cast their ballots by Sunday evening and will hand preliminary results to the television channel, which will announce them after 9 p.m. FOM, classified as a noncommercial organization, will poll around 80,000 voters, said Veronika Perevezentseva, its spokeswoman.

The independent Levada Center, as usual, will not be at the polls because it does not have the “huge resources” required, said Oleg Savelev, its spokesman. “Its too complex and expensive a process,” Savelev said. “It requires expenditures somewhere in the millions of dollars, not rubles.” Asked about Nashi Vybory’s plans, he labeled the exercise “a big show.”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin HEARTS Stalin

Bloomberg reports:

Josef Stalin may have been cruel, but he was first and foremost a great leader.

That rewriting of the history of the ruthless Soviet dictator who killed millions of real and imagined enemies comes from a new manual for Russia’s high-school teachers endorsed by President Vladimir Putin. The book exemplifies Russia’s growing nostalgia for its bygone superpower days — a sentiment Putin stokes at every turn in his quest for political hegemony.

Russia feels that it was “humiliated during the 1990s, when it lost its international weight,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, who edits a quarterly journal for the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow. “Our leaders now believe it is necessary to consolidate the nation.”

Putin, 55, may achieve that goal on Dec. 2, when parliamentary elections will likely make his United Russia party almost as powerful as the Communists were in the USSR. Much of his overwhelming popularity stems from his ability to reinvigorate Russia’s patriotic pride. He has gained support by confronting the West with Cold War zeal and has paid little price for clamping down on dissent with similar intensity.

Putin, who was a career officer in the KGB, calls the Soviet Union’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” After members of an Arctic expedition laid Russia’s claim to the region’s oil and gas last August, he gave them a hero’s welcome at his residence outside Moscow, reminiscent of the triumphant homecoming Stalin hosted in 1938 for the Soviet Union’s first North Pole explorer.

15 Million Victims

Stalin ruled as head of the USSR’s Communist Party from 1922 until he died in 1953. His security forces routinely imprisoned or executed people suspected of disloyalty. During the Great Terror of 1937-38, when the purges peaked, about 1.5 million people were arrested and 700,000 shot, according to Memorial, a Russian human-rights group. In all, at least 15 million people died in labor camps or were killed, Memorial says.

Millions more perished from famine after widespread state confiscation of farm land, or collectivization. Tens of thousands of others died of hunger or exposure when Stalin deported entire ethnic groups to Central Asia, including Chechens and Crimean Tatars accused of collaborating with invading Germans in World War II.

No Enumeration

The new teachers’ manual — “A Modern History of Russia 1945-2006,” — refers to the purges without enumerating the victims, specifically mentioning only 2,000 killed in the late 1940s.

While it calls Stalin’s rule “cruel” and says he engaged in “political repression,” it also declares him the USSR’s “most successful leader” because his tactics transformed the country into an industrialized counterweight to America’s military and economic might.

“The result of Stalin’s purges was a new class of managers capable of solving the task of modernization at a time of a shortage of resources, loyal to the executive power and faultless from the point of view of discipline,” the manual says.

Many Russians already view Stalin favorably. In a May poll by the independent Levada Center in Moscow, 54 percent said Stalin — who defended the nation from Hitler’s armies and ultimately led it to victory in World War II — did “more right than wrong.” Half deemed him a “wise leader.”

At a meeting with teachers at his residence in June, Putin said the new manual will help instill young people with “a sense of pride” in Russia. He argued that Stalin’s purges pale in comparison to America’s atomic bombing of Japan. “We shouldn’t allow anyone to impose a feeling of guilt on us,” he told the teachers.

`All That Is Best’

Putin elaborated at a memorial for Stalin’s victims on Oct. 30, at a firing range near Moscow where 20,000 people were executed during the Great Terror: While Russians should “keep alive the memory of tragedies of the past, we should focus on all that is best in the country.”

Mikhail Gorbachev, 76, the Soviet Union’s last leader, criticized attempts to portray Stalin’s era as a “a golden age” and urged Russians not to forget the “terrible lessons of history” at a 70th anniversary conference on the Great Terror in September.

The new manual is less kind to another Russian leader — Boris Yeltsin, the country’s first post-Soviet leader and Putin’s predecessor. It says his weak policies allowed the West to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe.

A Children’s History

The manual was written by Alexander Fillipov, the deputy director of the National Center for Foreign Policy, a research group that does consulting work for Putin’s government. Fillipov also is writing a children’s history book that, starting in September, state schools will use to replace older texts that remember Stalin less fondly. One currently in use chronicles the Great Terror, estimating that 2 million perished in 1935-39.

Fillipov, who declined to be interviewed, told the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that his manual is needed to counter foreign “propaganda.” Similarly, Putin says some Russian history books are biased because their authors received Western grants.

Arseny Roginsky, Memorial’s chairman, is troubled by Stalin’s new cachet among influential Russians. “They want schoolchildren to be proud of their Soviet past and to forget that these victories were achieved at the expense of people’s blood,” he said. Roginsky’s father died in 1951 while imprisoned by Stalin’s forces.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Piontovsky Slams Putin’s "Willing Serfs"

Writing for Transitions Online, Andrei Piontkovksy, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., tells it like it is: “The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin.” His word for Putin: “Mutant.”

If reform comes to Russia, it’s not likely to come from the propertied class, which has signed on to a particularly deformed social contract.

Liberal defenders and apologists of Vladimir Putin’s regime, from Carnegie analyst Dmitry Trenin in Russia to George W. Bush in the United States (who recently ascribed to the Russian people “a kind of basic Russian DNA, which is a centralized authority”), trot out a pet argument that migrates from one publication to another.

What is most important for Russia right now is not abstract “democracy” but the development of capitalism, they say. A growing middle class of property owners with a vested interest in security for their property will ultimately demand the establishment of liberal institutions. There is nothing fundamentally new or specific about this, the argument goes. Any freedom, as the history of the world testifies, begins with freedom for the barons and gradually extends down, to finally include the ordinary Joe in the street. So a middle class of property owners in Russia will come with time, we are to believe, to recognize its rights and introduce liberal institutions in Russia. This extremely popular theory ignores the actual nature of Russian capitalism. The right to property in Russia is entirely conditional on the property owner’s loyalty to the Russian government.

The system is tending to evolve, not in the direction of freedom and a post-industrial society, but rather back toward feudalism, when the sovereign distributed privileges and lands to his vassals and could take them away at any moment. The only difference is that, in today’s Russia, what Putin is distributing and taking away is not lands but gas and oil companies.

VICE, INSTITUTIONALIZED

Over the last 10 to 15 years, a mutant has evolved in Russia that is neither socialism nor capitalism but some hitherto-unknown creature. Its defining characteristics are a merging of money and power, the institutionalization of corruption, and domination of the economy by major corporations, chiefly trading in commodities, that flourish at the expense of the administrative resources they have privatized.

Eight years of Putin’s presidency have finally dispelled the illusion that this mutant would somehow wither away of its own accord, yielding to a dynamic, transparent market economy. All that was supposedly needed was for the Duma to adopt a number of liberal bills and for a number of wicked oligarchs to be replaced by good, bushy-bearded, Russian Orthodox oligarchs. It has not withered away and continues to obstruct the country’s modernization and its leap forward into the post-industrial age. This is gendarme-bureaucratic capitalism with the Father of the Nation at its head.

Putin did replace some of the Yeltsin generation of oligarchs by new, “patriotically oriented” scions of the intelligence services and, in a major way, by that great collective oligarch, the bureaucracy and its armed units, the security agencies. Putinism and the politico-economic model that it has engendered amaze us by their sheer esthetic and intellectual squalor, but we can live with that. The real problem is that they are totally inefficient and only exacerbate the innate vices of Russian capitalism, the criminal merging of wealth and government power and the institutionalization of corruption.

Such a model of a petro-state cannot deliver consistent economic growth, overcome the enormous gulf between rich and poor in society, or ensure a breakthrough to post-industrial society. This model of provincial capitalism dooms Russia to economic degradation, marginalization, and, in the final analysis, to implosion. It will not survive for decades, as the Stalin and Brezhnev models did, and indeed it may be that in this Putin backwater Russia is destined finally to run out of historical time.
Our remarkable compatriot, the westward-looking writer Peter Chaadaev, expressed the thought almost 200 years ago that Russia’s historical role seemed only to be to serve as a warning to other peoples of what they should not, under any circumstances, do themselves. We seem to have been providing this service, with masochistic zeal, for the past 200 years. Another great thinker, the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, could never have imagined in 1944, when he wrote his famous ***The Road to Serfdom,*** that, in addition to the two roads to serfdom that he described, fascism and communism, there could be a third, along which people would be led under the banner of von Hayek himself.

In one of Vladimir Putin’s studies stands a small bust of von Hayek. This is not solely for the recruitment of foreign investors, who sometimes visit the office. Vladimir Vladimirovich sincerely seems to believe himself to be quite the liberal reformer, as his advisers keep assuring him he is.

But the result of his eight years in power is what the Soviet-KGB bureaucracy dreamed of when it invented perestroika in the mid-1980s. Twenty years down the line, what has been achieved? A total monopoly of political power, just as before; enormous personal fortunes, which were off limits to it before; and a completely different lifestyle (some of them bask in Courchevel, some in Sardinia). Lastly, and most agreeably of all, they are no longer burdened with any kind of social responsibility. They no longer need to parrot that “the goal of our life is the happiness of ordinary people,” a piece of hypocrisy they found nauseating even then.

WRONG MODELS

The Putin Project is also the long-standing aspiration of “liberal” economists to find a Russian Pinochet who will introduce liberal reforms with an iron fist. Their faith in the Pinochet approach was constantly strengthened by the example of a whole succession of countries where it was supposedly implemented successfully: Chile, and certain of the states of East and Southeast Asia.

But what these countries were implementing by authoritarian methods was the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, a task very effectively accomplished by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin 60 or 70 years ago and, also not in the most humane manner, in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The problem Russia faces today, of breaking through to a post-industrial society, simply cannot be resolved by these methods. This became evident from the experience of the very Asian tigers and dragons that our authoritarian liberals refer us to. In South Korea the model had run out of steam by the late 1990; it is wholly unsuited to the post-industrial development of a society.

We face an additional very serious drawback: we are rich in raw materials and energy resources. This combination of authoritarian bureaucratic power with an abundance of resources is disastrous for Russia’s development, because it deprives the bureaucracy of any feedback from reality. This results in its complete corruption and decay, which is something we can see happening day by day.

Russia’s golden million live as no Russian elite has ever lived before. More than that, in terms of conspicuous consumption they far exceed the golden million of any developed state. The Russian golden million are true supporters of the Putin regime that requires, in return for making a fairy tale come true, only the purely nominal membership fee of total political loyalty. In this milieu, no new perestroika is ever going to happen; or if it does, then, as in the case of the USSR, only when it is far too late.

The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin. Unless, of course, we find the courage within ourselves to turn off this road, in which case the entire Putin period will lodge in our historical memory as a final inoculation against the philosophy of serfdom.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Piontovsky Slams Putin’s "Willing Serfs"

Writing for Transitions Online, Andrei Piontkovksy, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., tells it like it is: “The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin.” His word for Putin: “Mutant.”

If reform comes to Russia, it’s not likely to come from the propertied class, which has signed on to a particularly deformed social contract.

Liberal defenders and apologists of Vladimir Putin’s regime, from Carnegie analyst Dmitry Trenin in Russia to George W. Bush in the United States (who recently ascribed to the Russian people “a kind of basic Russian DNA, which is a centralized authority”), trot out a pet argument that migrates from one publication to another.

What is most important for Russia right now is not abstract “democracy” but the development of capitalism, they say. A growing middle class of property owners with a vested interest in security for their property will ultimately demand the establishment of liberal institutions. There is nothing fundamentally new or specific about this, the argument goes. Any freedom, as the history of the world testifies, begins with freedom for the barons and gradually extends down, to finally include the ordinary Joe in the street. So a middle class of property owners in Russia will come with time, we are to believe, to recognize its rights and introduce liberal institutions in Russia. This extremely popular theory ignores the actual nature of Russian capitalism. The right to property in Russia is entirely conditional on the property owner’s loyalty to the Russian government.

The system is tending to evolve, not in the direction of freedom and a post-industrial society, but rather back toward feudalism, when the sovereign distributed privileges and lands to his vassals and could take them away at any moment. The only difference is that, in today’s Russia, what Putin is distributing and taking away is not lands but gas and oil companies.

VICE, INSTITUTIONALIZED

Over the last 10 to 15 years, a mutant has evolved in Russia that is neither socialism nor capitalism but some hitherto-unknown creature. Its defining characteristics are a merging of money and power, the institutionalization of corruption, and domination of the economy by major corporations, chiefly trading in commodities, that flourish at the expense of the administrative resources they have privatized.

Eight years of Putin’s presidency have finally dispelled the illusion that this mutant would somehow wither away of its own accord, yielding to a dynamic, transparent market economy. All that was supposedly needed was for the Duma to adopt a number of liberal bills and for a number of wicked oligarchs to be replaced by good, bushy-bearded, Russian Orthodox oligarchs. It has not withered away and continues to obstruct the country’s modernization and its leap forward into the post-industrial age. This is gendarme-bureaucratic capitalism with the Father of the Nation at its head.

Putin did replace some of the Yeltsin generation of oligarchs by new, “patriotically oriented” scions of the intelligence services and, in a major way, by that great collective oligarch, the bureaucracy and its armed units, the security agencies. Putinism and the politico-economic model that it has engendered amaze us by their sheer esthetic and intellectual squalor, but we can live with that. The real problem is that they are totally inefficient and only exacerbate the innate vices of Russian capitalism, the criminal merging of wealth and government power and the institutionalization of corruption.

Such a model of a petro-state cannot deliver consistent economic growth, overcome the enormous gulf between rich and poor in society, or ensure a breakthrough to post-industrial society. This model of provincial capitalism dooms Russia to economic degradation, marginalization, and, in the final analysis, to implosion. It will not survive for decades, as the Stalin and Brezhnev models did, and indeed it may be that in this Putin backwater Russia is destined finally to run out of historical time.
Our remarkable compatriot, the westward-looking writer Peter Chaadaev, expressed the thought almost 200 years ago that Russia’s historical role seemed only to be to serve as a warning to other peoples of what they should not, under any circumstances, do themselves. We seem to have been providing this service, with masochistic zeal, for the past 200 years. Another great thinker, the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, could never have imagined in 1944, when he wrote his famous ***The Road to Serfdom,*** that, in addition to the two roads to serfdom that he described, fascism and communism, there could be a third, along which people would be led under the banner of von Hayek himself.

In one of Vladimir Putin’s studies stands a small bust of von Hayek. This is not solely for the recruitment of foreign investors, who sometimes visit the office. Vladimir Vladimirovich sincerely seems to believe himself to be quite the liberal reformer, as his advisers keep assuring him he is.

But the result of his eight years in power is what the Soviet-KGB bureaucracy dreamed of when it invented perestroika in the mid-1980s. Twenty years down the line, what has been achieved? A total monopoly of political power, just as before; enormous personal fortunes, which were off limits to it before; and a completely different lifestyle (some of them bask in Courchevel, some in Sardinia). Lastly, and most agreeably of all, they are no longer burdened with any kind of social responsibility. They no longer need to parrot that “the goal of our life is the happiness of ordinary people,” a piece of hypocrisy they found nauseating even then.

WRONG MODELS

The Putin Project is also the long-standing aspiration of “liberal” economists to find a Russian Pinochet who will introduce liberal reforms with an iron fist. Their faith in the Pinochet approach was constantly strengthened by the example of a whole succession of countries where it was supposedly implemented successfully: Chile, and certain of the states of East and Southeast Asia.

But what these countries were implementing by authoritarian methods was the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, a task very effectively accomplished by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin 60 or 70 years ago and, also not in the most humane manner, in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The problem Russia faces today, of breaking through to a post-industrial society, simply cannot be resolved by these methods. This became evident from the experience of the very Asian tigers and dragons that our authoritarian liberals refer us to. In South Korea the model had run out of steam by the late 1990; it is wholly unsuited to the post-industrial development of a society.

We face an additional very serious drawback: we are rich in raw materials and energy resources. This combination of authoritarian bureaucratic power with an abundance of resources is disastrous for Russia’s development, because it deprives the bureaucracy of any feedback from reality. This results in its complete corruption and decay, which is something we can see happening day by day.

Russia’s golden million live as no Russian elite has ever lived before. More than that, in terms of conspicuous consumption they far exceed the golden million of any developed state. The Russian golden million are true supporters of the Putin regime that requires, in return for making a fairy tale come true, only the purely nominal membership fee of total political loyalty. In this milieu, no new perestroika is ever going to happen; or if it does, then, as in the case of the USSR, only when it is far too late.

The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin. Unless, of course, we find the courage within ourselves to turn off this road, in which case the entire Putin period will lodge in our historical memory as a final inoculation against the philosophy of serfdom.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Piontovsky Slams Putin’s "Willing Serfs"

Writing for Transitions Online, Andrei Piontkovksy, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., tells it like it is: “The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin.” His word for Putin: “Mutant.”

If reform comes to Russia, it’s not likely to come from the propertied class, which has signed on to a particularly deformed social contract.

Liberal defenders and apologists of Vladimir Putin’s regime, from Carnegie analyst Dmitry Trenin in Russia to George W. Bush in the United States (who recently ascribed to the Russian people “a kind of basic Russian DNA, which is a centralized authority”), trot out a pet argument that migrates from one publication to another.

What is most important for Russia right now is not abstract “democracy” but the development of capitalism, they say. A growing middle class of property owners with a vested interest in security for their property will ultimately demand the establishment of liberal institutions. There is nothing fundamentally new or specific about this, the argument goes. Any freedom, as the history of the world testifies, begins with freedom for the barons and gradually extends down, to finally include the ordinary Joe in the street. So a middle class of property owners in Russia will come with time, we are to believe, to recognize its rights and introduce liberal institutions in Russia. This extremely popular theory ignores the actual nature of Russian capitalism. The right to property in Russia is entirely conditional on the property owner’s loyalty to the Russian government.

The system is tending to evolve, not in the direction of freedom and a post-industrial society, but rather back toward feudalism, when the sovereign distributed privileges and lands to his vassals and could take them away at any moment. The only difference is that, in today’s Russia, what Putin is distributing and taking away is not lands but gas and oil companies.

VICE, INSTITUTIONALIZED

Over the last 10 to 15 years, a mutant has evolved in Russia that is neither socialism nor capitalism but some hitherto-unknown creature. Its defining characteristics are a merging of money and power, the institutionalization of corruption, and domination of the economy by major corporations, chiefly trading in commodities, that flourish at the expense of the administrative resources they have privatized.

Eight years of Putin’s presidency have finally dispelled the illusion that this mutant would somehow wither away of its own accord, yielding to a dynamic, transparent market economy. All that was supposedly needed was for the Duma to adopt a number of liberal bills and for a number of wicked oligarchs to be replaced by good, bushy-bearded, Russian Orthodox oligarchs. It has not withered away and continues to obstruct the country’s modernization and its leap forward into the post-industrial age. This is gendarme-bureaucratic capitalism with the Father of the Nation at its head.

Putin did replace some of the Yeltsin generation of oligarchs by new, “patriotically oriented” scions of the intelligence services and, in a major way, by that great collective oligarch, the bureaucracy and its armed units, the security agencies. Putinism and the politico-economic model that it has engendered amaze us by their sheer esthetic and intellectual squalor, but we can live with that. The real problem is that they are totally inefficient and only exacerbate the innate vices of Russian capitalism, the criminal merging of wealth and government power and the institutionalization of corruption.

Such a model of a petro-state cannot deliver consistent economic growth, overcome the enormous gulf between rich and poor in society, or ensure a breakthrough to post-industrial society. This model of provincial capitalism dooms Russia to economic degradation, marginalization, and, in the final analysis, to implosion. It will not survive for decades, as the Stalin and Brezhnev models did, and indeed it may be that in this Putin backwater Russia is destined finally to run out of historical time.
Our remarkable compatriot, the westward-looking writer Peter Chaadaev, expressed the thought almost 200 years ago that Russia’s historical role seemed only to be to serve as a warning to other peoples of what they should not, under any circumstances, do themselves. We seem to have been providing this service, with masochistic zeal, for the past 200 years. Another great thinker, the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, could never have imagined in 1944, when he wrote his famous ***The Road to Serfdom,*** that, in addition to the two roads to serfdom that he described, fascism and communism, there could be a third, along which people would be led under the banner of von Hayek himself.

In one of Vladimir Putin’s studies stands a small bust of von Hayek. This is not solely for the recruitment of foreign investors, who sometimes visit the office. Vladimir Vladimirovich sincerely seems to believe himself to be quite the liberal reformer, as his advisers keep assuring him he is.

But the result of his eight years in power is what the Soviet-KGB bureaucracy dreamed of when it invented perestroika in the mid-1980s. Twenty years down the line, what has been achieved? A total monopoly of political power, just as before; enormous personal fortunes, which were off limits to it before; and a completely different lifestyle (some of them bask in Courchevel, some in Sardinia). Lastly, and most agreeably of all, they are no longer burdened with any kind of social responsibility. They no longer need to parrot that “the goal of our life is the happiness of ordinary people,” a piece of hypocrisy they found nauseating even then.

WRONG MODELS

The Putin Project is also the long-standing aspiration of “liberal” economists to find a Russian Pinochet who will introduce liberal reforms with an iron fist. Their faith in the Pinochet approach was constantly strengthened by the example of a whole succession of countries where it was supposedly implemented successfully: Chile, and certain of the states of East and Southeast Asia.

But what these countries were implementing by authoritarian methods was the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, a task very effectively accomplished by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin 60 or 70 years ago and, also not in the most humane manner, in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The problem Russia faces today, of breaking through to a post-industrial society, simply cannot be resolved by these methods. This became evident from the experience of the very Asian tigers and dragons that our authoritarian liberals refer us to. In South Korea the model had run out of steam by the late 1990; it is wholly unsuited to the post-industrial development of a society.

We face an additional very serious drawback: we are rich in raw materials and energy resources. This combination of authoritarian bureaucratic power with an abundance of resources is disastrous for Russia’s development, because it deprives the bureaucracy of any feedback from reality. This results in its complete corruption and decay, which is something we can see happening day by day.

Russia’s golden million live as no Russian elite has ever lived before. More than that, in terms of conspicuous consumption they far exceed the golden million of any developed state. The Russian golden million are true supporters of the Putin regime that requires, in return for making a fairy tale come true, only the purely nominal membership fee of total political loyalty. In this milieu, no new perestroika is ever going to happen; or if it does, then, as in the case of the USSR, only when it is far too late.

The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin. Unless, of course, we find the courage within ourselves to turn off this road, in which case the entire Putin period will lodge in our historical memory as a final inoculation against the philosophy of serfdom.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Piontovsky Slams Putin’s "Willing Serfs"

Writing for Transitions Online, Andrei Piontkovksy, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., tells it like it is: “The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin.” His word for Putin: “Mutant.”

If reform comes to Russia, it’s not likely to come from the propertied class, which has signed on to a particularly deformed social contract.

Liberal defenders and apologists of Vladimir Putin’s regime, from Carnegie analyst Dmitry Trenin in Russia to George W. Bush in the United States (who recently ascribed to the Russian people “a kind of basic Russian DNA, which is a centralized authority”), trot out a pet argument that migrates from one publication to another.

What is most important for Russia right now is not abstract “democracy” but the development of capitalism, they say. A growing middle class of property owners with a vested interest in security for their property will ultimately demand the establishment of liberal institutions. There is nothing fundamentally new or specific about this, the argument goes. Any freedom, as the history of the world testifies, begins with freedom for the barons and gradually extends down, to finally include the ordinary Joe in the street. So a middle class of property owners in Russia will come with time, we are to believe, to recognize its rights and introduce liberal institutions in Russia. This extremely popular theory ignores the actual nature of Russian capitalism. The right to property in Russia is entirely conditional on the property owner’s loyalty to the Russian government.

The system is tending to evolve, not in the direction of freedom and a post-industrial society, but rather back toward feudalism, when the sovereign distributed privileges and lands to his vassals and could take them away at any moment. The only difference is that, in today’s Russia, what Putin is distributing and taking away is not lands but gas and oil companies.

VICE, INSTITUTIONALIZED

Over the last 10 to 15 years, a mutant has evolved in Russia that is neither socialism nor capitalism but some hitherto-unknown creature. Its defining characteristics are a merging of money and power, the institutionalization of corruption, and domination of the economy by major corporations, chiefly trading in commodities, that flourish at the expense of the administrative resources they have privatized.

Eight years of Putin’s presidency have finally dispelled the illusion that this mutant would somehow wither away of its own accord, yielding to a dynamic, transparent market economy. All that was supposedly needed was for the Duma to adopt a number of liberal bills and for a number of wicked oligarchs to be replaced by good, bushy-bearded, Russian Orthodox oligarchs. It has not withered away and continues to obstruct the country’s modernization and its leap forward into the post-industrial age. This is gendarme-bureaucratic capitalism with the Father of the Nation at its head.

Putin did replace some of the Yeltsin generation of oligarchs by new, “patriotically oriented” scions of the intelligence services and, in a major way, by that great collective oligarch, the bureaucracy and its armed units, the security agencies. Putinism and the politico-economic model that it has engendered amaze us by their sheer esthetic and intellectual squalor, but we can live with that. The real problem is that they are totally inefficient and only exacerbate the innate vices of Russian capitalism, the criminal merging of wealth and government power and the institutionalization of corruption.

Such a model of a petro-state cannot deliver consistent economic growth, overcome the enormous gulf between rich and poor in society, or ensure a breakthrough to post-industrial society. This model of provincial capitalism dooms Russia to economic degradation, marginalization, and, in the final analysis, to implosion. It will not survive for decades, as the Stalin and Brezhnev models did, and indeed it may be that in this Putin backwater Russia is destined finally to run out of historical time.
Our remarkable compatriot, the westward-looking writer Peter Chaadaev, expressed the thought almost 200 years ago that Russia’s historical role seemed only to be to serve as a warning to other peoples of what they should not, under any circumstances, do themselves. We seem to have been providing this service, with masochistic zeal, for the past 200 years. Another great thinker, the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, could never have imagined in 1944, when he wrote his famous ***The Road to Serfdom,*** that, in addition to the two roads to serfdom that he described, fascism and communism, there could be a third, along which people would be led under the banner of von Hayek himself.

In one of Vladimir Putin’s studies stands a small bust of von Hayek. This is not solely for the recruitment of foreign investors, who sometimes visit the office. Vladimir Vladimirovich sincerely seems to believe himself to be quite the liberal reformer, as his advisers keep assuring him he is.

But the result of his eight years in power is what the Soviet-KGB bureaucracy dreamed of when it invented perestroika in the mid-1980s. Twenty years down the line, what has been achieved? A total monopoly of political power, just as before; enormous personal fortunes, which were off limits to it before; and a completely different lifestyle (some of them bask in Courchevel, some in Sardinia). Lastly, and most agreeably of all, they are no longer burdened with any kind of social responsibility. They no longer need to parrot that “the goal of our life is the happiness of ordinary people,” a piece of hypocrisy they found nauseating even then.

WRONG MODELS

The Putin Project is also the long-standing aspiration of “liberal” economists to find a Russian Pinochet who will introduce liberal reforms with an iron fist. Their faith in the Pinochet approach was constantly strengthened by the example of a whole succession of countries where it was supposedly implemented successfully: Chile, and certain of the states of East and Southeast Asia.

But what these countries were implementing by authoritarian methods was the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, a task very effectively accomplished by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin 60 or 70 years ago and, also not in the most humane manner, in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The problem Russia faces today, of breaking through to a post-industrial society, simply cannot be resolved by these methods. This became evident from the experience of the very Asian tigers and dragons that our authoritarian liberals refer us to. In South Korea the model had run out of steam by the late 1990; it is wholly unsuited to the post-industrial development of a society.

We face an additional very serious drawback: we are rich in raw materials and energy resources. This combination of authoritarian bureaucratic power with an abundance of resources is disastrous for Russia’s development, because it deprives the bureaucracy of any feedback from reality. This results in its complete corruption and decay, which is something we can see happening day by day.

Russia’s golden million live as no Russian elite has ever lived before. More than that, in terms of conspicuous consumption they far exceed the golden million of any developed state. The Russian golden million are true supporters of the Putin regime that requires, in return for making a fairy tale come true, only the purely nominal membership fee of total political loyalty. In this milieu, no new perestroika is ever going to happen; or if it does, then, as in the case of the USSR, only when it is far too late.

The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin. Unless, of course, we find the courage within ourselves to turn off this road, in which case the entire Putin period will lodge in our historical memory as a final inoculation against the philosophy of serfdom.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Piontovsky Slams Putin’s "Willing Serfs"

Writing for Transitions Online, Andrei Piontkovksy, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., tells it like it is: “The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin.” His word for Putin: “Mutant.”

If reform comes to Russia, it’s not likely to come from the propertied class, which has signed on to a particularly deformed social contract.

Liberal defenders and apologists of Vladimir Putin’s regime, from Carnegie analyst Dmitry Trenin in Russia to George W. Bush in the United States (who recently ascribed to the Russian people “a kind of basic Russian DNA, which is a centralized authority”), trot out a pet argument that migrates from one publication to another.

What is most important for Russia right now is not abstract “democracy” but the development of capitalism, they say. A growing middle class of property owners with a vested interest in security for their property will ultimately demand the establishment of liberal institutions. There is nothing fundamentally new or specific about this, the argument goes. Any freedom, as the history of the world testifies, begins with freedom for the barons and gradually extends down, to finally include the ordinary Joe in the street. So a middle class of property owners in Russia will come with time, we are to believe, to recognize its rights and introduce liberal institutions in Russia. This extremely popular theory ignores the actual nature of Russian capitalism. The right to property in Russia is entirely conditional on the property owner’s loyalty to the Russian government.

The system is tending to evolve, not in the direction of freedom and a post-industrial society, but rather back toward feudalism, when the sovereign distributed privileges and lands to his vassals and could take them away at any moment. The only difference is that, in today’s Russia, what Putin is distributing and taking away is not lands but gas and oil companies.

VICE, INSTITUTIONALIZED

Over the last 10 to 15 years, a mutant has evolved in Russia that is neither socialism nor capitalism but some hitherto-unknown creature. Its defining characteristics are a merging of money and power, the institutionalization of corruption, and domination of the economy by major corporations, chiefly trading in commodities, that flourish at the expense of the administrative resources they have privatized.

Eight years of Putin’s presidency have finally dispelled the illusion that this mutant would somehow wither away of its own accord, yielding to a dynamic, transparent market economy. All that was supposedly needed was for the Duma to adopt a number of liberal bills and for a number of wicked oligarchs to be replaced by good, bushy-bearded, Russian Orthodox oligarchs. It has not withered away and continues to obstruct the country’s modernization and its leap forward into the post-industrial age. This is gendarme-bureaucratic capitalism with the Father of the Nation at its head.

Putin did replace some of the Yeltsin generation of oligarchs by new, “patriotically oriented” scions of the intelligence services and, in a major way, by that great collective oligarch, the bureaucracy and its armed units, the security agencies. Putinism and the politico-economic model that it has engendered amaze us by their sheer esthetic and intellectual squalor, but we can live with that. The real problem is that they are totally inefficient and only exacerbate the innate vices of Russian capitalism, the criminal merging of wealth and government power and the institutionalization of corruption.

Such a model of a petro-state cannot deliver consistent economic growth, overcome the enormous gulf between rich and poor in society, or ensure a breakthrough to post-industrial society. This model of provincial capitalism dooms Russia to economic degradation, marginalization, and, in the final analysis, to implosion. It will not survive for decades, as the Stalin and Brezhnev models did, and indeed it may be that in this Putin backwater Russia is destined finally to run out of historical time.
Our remarkable compatriot, the westward-looking writer Peter Chaadaev, expressed the thought almost 200 years ago that Russia’s historical role seemed only to be to serve as a warning to other peoples of what they should not, under any circumstances, do themselves. We seem to have been providing this service, with masochistic zeal, for the past 200 years. Another great thinker, the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, could never have imagined in 1944, when he wrote his famous ***The Road to Serfdom,*** that, in addition to the two roads to serfdom that he described, fascism and communism, there could be a third, along which people would be led under the banner of von Hayek himself.

In one of Vladimir Putin’s studies stands a small bust of von Hayek. This is not solely for the recruitment of foreign investors, who sometimes visit the office. Vladimir Vladimirovich sincerely seems to believe himself to be quite the liberal reformer, as his advisers keep assuring him he is.

But the result of his eight years in power is what the Soviet-KGB bureaucracy dreamed of when it invented perestroika in the mid-1980s. Twenty years down the line, what has been achieved? A total monopoly of political power, just as before; enormous personal fortunes, which were off limits to it before; and a completely different lifestyle (some of them bask in Courchevel, some in Sardinia). Lastly, and most agreeably of all, they are no longer burdened with any kind of social responsibility. They no longer need to parrot that “the goal of our life is the happiness of ordinary people,” a piece of hypocrisy they found nauseating even then.

WRONG MODELS

The Putin Project is also the long-standing aspiration of “liberal” economists to find a Russian Pinochet who will introduce liberal reforms with an iron fist. Their faith in the Pinochet approach was constantly strengthened by the example of a whole succession of countries where it was supposedly implemented successfully: Chile, and certain of the states of East and Southeast Asia.

But what these countries were implementing by authoritarian methods was the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, a task very effectively accomplished by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin 60 or 70 years ago and, also not in the most humane manner, in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The problem Russia faces today, of breaking through to a post-industrial society, simply cannot be resolved by these methods. This became evident from the experience of the very Asian tigers and dragons that our authoritarian liberals refer us to. In South Korea the model had run out of steam by the late 1990; it is wholly unsuited to the post-industrial development of a society.

We face an additional very serious drawback: we are rich in raw materials and energy resources. This combination of authoritarian bureaucratic power with an abundance of resources is disastrous for Russia’s development, because it deprives the bureaucracy of any feedback from reality. This results in its complete corruption and decay, which is something we can see happening day by day.

Russia’s golden million live as no Russian elite has ever lived before. More than that, in terms of conspicuous consumption they far exceed the golden million of any developed state. The Russian golden million are true supporters of the Putin regime that requires, in return for making a fairy tale come true, only the purely nominal membership fee of total political loyalty. In this milieu, no new perestroika is ever going to happen; or if it does, then, as in the case of the USSR, only when it is far too late.

The road we are following is the Third Road to Serfdom, and there shall be no fourth, because this is a system that will bring Russia to ruin. Unless, of course, we find the courage within ourselves to turn off this road, in which case the entire Putin period will lodge in our historical memory as a final inoculation against the philosophy of serfdom.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !