The legend is:
Kruschev was busy denouncing Stalin at a public meeting when a voice shouted out “If you feel this way now, why didn’t you say so then?” To which the Soviet leader thundered “Who said that?” There was a long and petrified silence which Kruschev finally broke. “Now you know why.”
And apparently the tradition lives on:
On Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin announced he would strip Russia’s 89 regions of much of their authority and electoral legitimacy. On Tuesday, not one of the leaders of those regions said a public word of protest.
On the contrary, there were words of praise.
“It is constructive and productive,” Murat M. Zyazikov, the president of Ingushetia, said in a telephone interview, embracing a proposal that would leave him serving at the will not of his impoverished electorate in southern Russia, but of the president in faraway Moscow.
If there were any lingering doubts about Mr. Putin’s grip on power, the reaction to his sweeping proposal to overhaul Russia’s political system – replacing, for instance, the election of governors, presidents and other regional leaders with presidential appointments – swept them away.
A headline in the newspaper Izvestia called it the “September Revolution,” equating Mr. Putin’s consolidation of power to this country’s most famous October, almost 87 years ago. And yet the second day of the revolution passed with barely a murmur of protest, even among those affected most.
Washington is objecting in carefully measured statements:
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that “we have concerns” about Mr. Putin’s actions, and that he planned to ask Russian officials to explain the moves.
But, according to some chap named Michael Berglin in Pravda, Russia’s not looking for a dialog:
Putin was elected to oversee and lead a country that had no constitution, no money, a military that was half dead, and an infrastructure that was not far behind. Putin’s job would have made hash out of lesser men.
Putin is also faced with police corruption, narcotics, the mafia, and Chechnya. He met with Bush, and somehow Bush seemed to have gotten the idea Putin was begging for advice, counsel and leadership from Bush. Well, Bush is not in a position to make comparisons and he can’t manage the US, let alone telling Putin how to manage Russia.
Putin is confronted with something Bush has not had to face as Russia has been hit by terrorists more than any country in the world. Bush knew 9/11 was coming; Putin got blind sided every time.
The separation between the two leaders has been building since Putin was at Bush”s ranch in Texas. Call it personality clash, call it what ever you want to call it. There remains cooperation between Russia and the US – that is also true. But I think Putin decided to be his own man and lead Russia without some Texan telling him how to run things.
“Bush knew 9/11 was coming?” Do share….
Now, there are some brave Russians voicing dissent:
Still, there were some voices of dissent on Tuesday. Mr. Ryzhkov and two members of United Russia elected from local districts, Aleksandr Y. Khinshtein and Konstantin F. Zatulin, appeared at a news conference to criticize the parliamentary proposal, though not, they emphasized, Mr. Putin himself.
“Even during Stalin’s time, even during Soviet times, all deputies were formally elected,” Mr. Zatulin said. “It allowed concrete people to solve concrete problems. This is a return to czarist times.”
But don’t hold out much hope you’ll hear much from them in the future.
Paging Francis Fukuyama…Mr. Fukuyama, Please pick up the nearest red courtesy phone.
Mr. Fukuyama is on the other phone confessing to FUBAR in Iraq.
If you wish to hear the date of the end of history, please dial 11-09-2000.
If you wish to speak to a customer service rep, do so quickly because we’re going to fire his butt soon, since the original plan of canceling his health insurance and hoping he would die peacefully and with no expense to us, has clearly failed.
If you wish to hear in exquisite detail what the future holds for the U.S., please read the Republican Party’s platform, which you may access by dialing 666.
If you refuse to believe that the literal-minded people of the Republican Party would literally believe their own words and carry them out to their literal ends, which they hold to be absolute truth, please hang up and reconsider just about everything.
;)!
re: the “Bush knew” in Pravda… The online version of it is muuuuuuuuuuuuuch worse than the print version when it comes to just making things up or repeating unproven conspiracies.
As for those who dissent, umm, how to put this? The liberal deputies and officials you see quoted in our press are extremely adept at playing to our fears and misconceptions. A return to tsarist times? Hardly.
There are already 7 “super-governors” who “oversee” the formally elected regional governors. Yeltsin himself had a tendency to sack and replace these officials himself (not to mention his attack on the Supreme Council in 1993).
I can’t remember if the upper house is elected or appointed by governors now, but it’s a meaningless, irrelevant body with little day-to-day legislative power.
Calling the proposed Duma electoral reforms undemocratic is odd because so many recognized democracies already use the system that Putin proposed.
Russia has a mostly unfettered print media. Ryzhkov isn’t any braver than the analysts and opinion writers who rip Putin everyday in the papers.
I’m not inclined to be nearly as worried about the “loss of Russian democracy” because there never has been any meaningful Russian democracy in the first place. What existed under Yeltsin was an anarchic free-for-all that offered little positive to the vast majority of Russians. I am convinced that about the only way that Russia will get anywhere is by concentrating power to squeeze out locally-based kleptocrats. If you want to see the kind of havoc the weakness of the bureaucracy (and yes, it is extremely weak) creates read this. It is, sadly, a pretty common occurrence.
“I am convinced that about the only way that Russia will get anywhere is by concentrating power”
This is the diluted purified essence of a call to totalitarianism.
By which I naturally mean ‘undiluted’. Unfortunately, my coffee was diluted so I’m incomprehensible.