Putin the Girly Man, Afraid of his Own Shadow
Filed under: Russia
Meet Boris Nemtsov.
From March 1997 to August 1998, he was former Russian President Boris Yeltsin's deputy prime minister for energy. Nemtsov made a name for himself when he led a protest action in Soviet Russia in 1986, at the age of 27, to block the construction of a nuclear reactor in his home town of Sochi. He then tried to run for parliament, but was blocked by the Communist Party.
A few years later, as the Soviet regime began to collapse and Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization policies took hold, Nemtsov tried again to enter parliament, and this time succeeded. When the USSR collapsed, he was appointed the first non-Communist governor of the Nizhny Novogorod region, and subsequently won the first-ever election to that post. This position also meant he entered the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's parliament. He quickly won international praise for his effective policymaking in Nizhny Novgorod, and was soon brought in to the presidential administration.
Scapegoated by Yeltsin for Russia's economic collapse of the late 1990s, Nemtsov then formed his own political party, the "Union of Right Forces," and they won nearly six million votes in the December 1999 parliamentary elections. Soon, however, proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin was in power and Nemtsov, along with all the other liberal parties, were squeezed out of the parliament.
Nemtsov joined the "Other Russia" opposition protest movement, and on November 25, 2007 he was arrested for taking part in an unauthorized street protest. He declared himself a candidate for president in 2008, withdraw his candidacy in support of liberal former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who was then forced off the ballot by the filing of criminal charges.
A few months ago, Nemtsov also withdrew from the Other Russia group. He did so because he was about to publish a white paper reviewing the accomplishments of the Putin administration during its two terms in office, a document that would include strong criticism of Putin's record, and did not wish to bring the Kremlin's ire down upon the organization.
My blog La Russophobe has translated Nemtsov's paper from the original Russian and made it available in PDF and HTML format. Now, writing in the Moscow Times, author Richard Lourie (A Hatred For Tulips and Sakharov: A Biography) states that "all Russian bookstores have reportedly refused to carry [Nemtsov's work], whose title has been variously translated as 'Putin: The Results' and 'Putin: The Bottom Line.'"
In other words, it's classic Soviet-era censorship. Despite his pretensions of courage and power, Putin is afraid of Nemtsov just the way the Tsar feared Pushkin and the Politburo feared Solzhenitsyn. They're afraid mere words will bring them down. And the only response they can make is crude repression.
The parallels between Soviet Russia and Putin's Russia are indeed frightening. The Moscow Times also reports that a whole new class of dissidents is being created in Russia, and they are fleeing the country to find safe havens in places like Ukraine in order to avoid being jailed or murdered. One example is "Olga Kudrina, 24, [who] was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for a May 2005 stunt in which she and another National Bolshevik [Party] member hung a banner from the now-demolished Rossiya Hotel reading 'Putin, Quit Your Job' and for participating in a 2004 break-in at the Health and Social Development Ministry. She failed to show up for her sentencing in May 2006, instead fleeing to Ukraine."
If you can get three and a half years in a barbaric Russian prison cell for telling Putin to quit, imagine what the sentence would be if you suggested he do something even more unpleasant.
How are these circumstances any different from what we saw occurring in the USSR? How is it possible that Russians can plunge headlong into exactly the same nightmare that has already destroyed them?
What we are seeing is a level of foolishness and outrage that is unprecedented in human history.
NOTE: To comment on this post for publication, write to: kimzigfeld@gmail.com
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