ARTICLE: "A Chess Champion Unites Disparate Critics of Putin: Kasparov Tries to Turn Kremlin's Crackdowns To Political Advantage," by Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2007, p. A1.
The move and countermove:
The Kremlin channels dissent into parties that limit their criticism to lower-level officials, and hounds any party that tries to run without Kremlin approval. There remains a reservoir of angry but muffled voices. Mr. Kasparov, as a celebrity who refused to shut up, has managed to unify them to some degree.
That, to me, sounds like a Nobel Peace Prize in the making, but get behind Sistani, I say, because he's saving lives big-time in Iraq.
No, I don't expect Kasparov to dislodge Putin's crowned successor, but the sheer reality that he's been able to unite the opposition is a modest step forward. When this evolution moves into something more recognizable as rough pluralism, Russia's establishment and its opposition will move beyond the dregs/stars of the Soviet system, or the last generation of KGB versus the last generation of celebrities/poseurs. But we're a good generation from that generation appearing, or the people who've worked within the successor system for their entire careers and want to improve it.
Stability and growth set that sort of ambition in motion. Putin, in retrenching from the wild days of Gorby's political unraveling of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin's economic unraveling of the centrally-planned economy, has provided that and only that, but it's enough for now.
Yes, the country is full of old farts who'll tell you it's all been a disaster, but the harsh truth is those were old dogs whose only new trick learned has been to drink themselves into early graves rather than change. Don't mourn them or the system. It was a journey well worth enabling.
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Comments (3)
Um, Tom? The sharply higher death rates reach into people in their thirties. Its not just "old farts" who have paid the price of "reform" with their lives. Couple that with birth rates dropping to a bit more than half their 1992 level by the time Putin took over, and you have a demographic catastrophe that exceeds Stalinism and approaches WWII.
That's what you're brushing off here, and our refusal to realize and acknowlegewhat "reform" has really meant will poison US-Russian relations for years.
Posted by RKKA | June 21, 2007 5:33 AM
Your one-note is acknowledged, but comparisons to Stalinism and WWII are just plain indefensible and display a stunning ignorance of history.
You need another pony or another pasture.
Blaming Russia's bottoming-out (with the rebound already begun) on "reforms" is simplistic in the extreme.
The Soviet Union was long shielded from markets and liability. When Russia was suddenly thrust into that world, the country found that much of what it owned was useless, much of what it made was useless, and much of what it knew was useless. Decades of pushing pregnancies yielded to a demographic decline by volition. Comparing that to the tens of millions killed by Hitler or Stalin is nonsense.
What caused Russia's collapse was 70 years of socialism, not reforms, which merely pulled the curtain back on that vast human tragedy. Watching Russia emerge from that disastrous period is like watching America recover after the Civil War or China after the Cultural Revolution: it's a good 25 year shadow.
Socialism was a huge menace to life, liberty, happiness, and wealth in the USSR, just like it was everywhere else.
Russia's population now heads toward a number it can sustain rather than one artificially manufactured by the state. That is not a tragedy. It is a reality Russia imposed on itself.
Saying the reforms caused the collapse is like accusing the chemo of creating the cancer. It plays into silly stabbed-in-the-back fantasies that some in Russia entertain, preferring to blame the USSR's collapse on outsiders. Indulging such fantasies should be avoided at all costs.
Posted by Tom Barnett | June 21, 2007 11:59 AM
Looking at it another way, RK, what's the greater tragedy for a parent?
The child he/she chooses not to have because of economic worries or ennuie (sp?)?
Or the child he/she couldn't have because one or both of them got hauled off to Siberia, or to a police station execution chamber? Or the child he/she did have that died in a state-sponsored famine?
Posted by Michael | June 21, 2007 3:55 PM