Keep Putin from power
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If you want to keep a person that is like Putin, there are many factors that need to be adressed.
1. Stop the Corruption
2. More fair, open and honest privatisation, should be gradual
Less Nato expansionism might also help in that i would make Russia feel more secure in their relationship with the West. On the other hand it might encourage russia to fill the gap.
In hindsight i think Nato and the Eu should have been more openly against corruption and theft in Russia.
Easy, have Zyuganov win the 1996 Presidential elections and bring the communists back.
I... don't mean to start ranting. Truly, I don't. But, the corruption thing... it became a defense after the fact for the autocratic measures El Presidente Putin used to seize power. It's a bit like saying bad train schedules had something to do with Mussolini coming to power. Also, NATO and EU had no incentive to stop corruption because the corrupt guys were the ones making things happens in Russia and keeping it humming. In a country where there were no laws, but plenty of unwritten rules, the corrupt big boys were the ones keeping the country operating at a given level. They were unpopular but palatable to the Western Civilization. The alternative popular-to-the-Russians choices at the time were:
1. The refried Soviet gimmick of Zyuganov, who really was a nostalgia act propelled by pensioners and misty memories. He was scary on paper to the West in that he kept hammering Soviet speak, but was about as imaginative as Brezhnev, minus the charm, speaking prowess, organization skills or the dashing good looks.
2. The clown prince of fascism Zhirinovsky, who was fantastic at scaring people in the West, but no one could picture occupying anything but a toilet seat after debauching himself and writing (unintentionally?) pseudo-homo-erotic paeans to Russian lads.
3. The Insider with Name Value. Primakov was this for a red hot second, but he looked too obvious a replacement to Yeltsin, so good ole' Uncle Boris had his legs cut out from him. Basically, Yeltsin did to Primakov from Johnny Carson used to do guys who were mentioned as possible replacement for him as the host of The Tonight Show in the Hollywood papers.
Compared to those three... it was better to ladle caviar down the gaping maw of Yeltsin's tennis buddies and relatives and stuff their pockets and purses with cash and letting corrupt guys run things at a certain level.
But, if Items 1 and 2 kept Western diplomats at night (and oh Lord what hacks they - the diplomats - were, oh dear Lord), Item 3 is what kept Yeltsin breathing funny after sauna. Towards the end of Yeltsin's horrorshow, it became a popular parlor game which Moscow big wig with a vaguely ethnic sugar daddy and mob ties would take over for the boy from the Urals. Trouble was, Yeltsin was a real boy from the Urals. He lost fingers due to smashing an unexploded hand grenade on a dare. He nearly died running rolling logs in the middle of a river in a thaw. And he also stood up to Gorby in '87 and withstood the verbal assault of every single political patron he had at the time. He had what the Russians called "character." And so as a giant middle finger to those parlor game playing Moscow lads, he picked a St. Petersburg shit-heel - Putin, a KGB Colonel in the land where there are more generals than soldiers in all of Italy. I can almost picture him sitting there, laughing, painfully and breathing funny, as he figures out the best way to stick it to folks who were asking him how he felt each day in the hopes he would die in front of them so they could seize power.
Putin was not an inevitability of history. He is an after-belch. Yeltsin's after-belch.
@Greg Grant
That was utterly hysterical. Though what would be the aftereffects if Putin dying before taking office (and I meant in a legitimately natural way like a car accident.)
That was utterly hysterical. Though what would be the aftereffects if Putin dying before taking office (and I meant in a legitimately natural way like a car accident.)
Anaxagoras
Banned
When he is a teenager, he slips while walking down stairs, hits his head, and dies.
Thanks.
I am not exactly sure. I would like to explore that, or see someone write it up. Primakov definitely gets a seat at that table, if not at its head. Another fellow who will be heard from is Berezovsky. As hard as it is remember now, in March of '99, Primakov was the crazed anti-corruption maven, going after all those shady fellows and being the Andropov to Yeltsin's Brezhnev.
Berezovsky loomed large over proceedings because he was the most obviously Jewish of the lot and that made a country like Russia feel funny. The Russian looking no-neck thugs wearing John Gotti Gucci suits they could rationalize. But a Jewish businessman who does not disguise his lust for power and money made quite a few folks reach for their inner Cossack whip and think pogrom. And yet, in spite of it, or because of it, Berezovsky was a force to be reckoned with. He, in a lot of ways, made Putin. Thinking that he could use him to trim the opposition. Berezovsky would be someone Primakov would have to address one way or another.
Another man with a seat at the table would have been Luzhkov. Luzhkov was the mayor of Moscow, and to me he was Moscow. A pudgy puffball of cunning guile who could make his wife the sole female billionaire in Russian history and at the same time appear on day time TV discussing how one wore one's cloth cap in the '50s in Moscow, demonstrating with obvious delight how to doff it if heading out for a fist fight, returning from a good date, or heading out with the lads to race pigeons. Luzhkov kept Moscow humming and although he had not a snowball's chance in Hell of every going past that, he had to be consulted. It is axiomatic in Russian politics that a good mayor or "governor" is necessarily compromised by shady deals to do his job well, but that he is also precluded from taking power at national level for much the same reason. It is odd, I know, but in essence one is allowed to run roughshod over everyone at a certain level, but in return one could not then get past that certain level.
The Economist reading fellas and the KGB Young Turks would have to be addressed as well. Primakov's anti-corruption drives motivated those within his circle to do much the same, and there were many among the younger generation who regarded that as reckless. One does not air one's dirty laundry in public. And that is precisely what Primakov and his allies in FSB (KGB's eventual successor) and MVD (Ministry of the Interior) did. It was embarrassing to read about military and civilian police prosecutors going after corruption at the national airline (Aeroflot) in the Guardian and the New York Times. And not economically conducive. Corrupt Russia does not make for a good headline to help bring in businessmen from prim countries. The young turks were solidly anti-democratic, anti-American and pro-order. It seemed to them that what Primakov did was not make things easier for the pro-order side of things. Stepashin probably illustrated this faction, but was not its leader. Though for a red-hot second he looked it.
What I strongly believe would occur if Putin does not come to power:
No War in Chechnya. Afghanistan loomed in the nightmares of Primakov and his generation and some of the younger KGB types as well. The idea of getting into a ground war in a Muslim mountainous region was furthest from their thought. Stepashin was glad handing Dagestani chieftains and talking containment of Chechnya. Primakov, a KGB operative most familiar with the Middle East, had an abiding fear of instigating an Islamic unrest. This is a man who studied the Iranian Revolution with a fine tooth comb (though his conclusions on its causes were far from brilliant, I vividly recall reading his newspaper interview defense of Ayatollah and Islamic counter-Revolution because the Shah's wife's relatives were sponsoring avant-garde theater in Tehran and that was provoking unrest due to said theater simulating sex on stage. Face palm). If Primakov is in the inner circle, Chechnya does not get re-invaded.
All else is up for grabs. It depends on who wins power, and where the winds blow.
Zhironovsky wrote a book. I cannot recall the title of it now, but in the midst of meandering nonsense and terrible prose there were passages that made me howl with laughter. In one inspired stream of consciousness diatribe he lamented the loss of Russian girls to the degenerate Western businessmen who doll 'em up and have their fiendish ways with them, and then spends several paragraphs the effect this terrible affliction had on the good-natured handsome simple Russian lads that would have made George Takei go, "oh my." I can't do it justice. But I remember reading it and thinking it was Walt Whitman-esque longing.
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You seem to be very knowledgble about Russia. Do you think that Putin could have reformed russia into a better, stronger country, more similar to Finland?
Thank you for the compliment. I don't think Putin wanted to reform anything. His is a crabbed mind of a middle of the road KGB official whose career highlight is getting a post in East Germany (the further one got from Soviet Union as a KGB operative, the more skills and political connections one had). Putin's mindset is a cast iron Soviet mindset. He can only define things by Soviet conceptions and he wanted a world where United States sits on one end, isolated and fearful, and mighty Soviet Russia sits on the other, ruling the roost over a coalition of lesser nations. All else was means to that goal. He has a knee-jerk hatred of democracy because his is a Soviet mind that associates democracy with a break down of order, anti-social societal permissiveness and weakness.
I'm an American. Republican democracy came to my nation by winning a war against the British Empire. Democracy is therefore associated in my country with winning and success and self-determination. To a Soviet man, democracy came to their nation when their empire fell apart due to weakness. To many Russians of Putin's age and older, democracy was not a harbinger of success, but the mantra of the enemy of the Cold War that plunged their country into a downward spiral of terrible economy and foreign domination. So the knee-jerk anti-democratic rhetoric and actions found a welcome audience in many parts of Russia.
I really cannot stress enough how pedantic and average is Putin's mindset. In the West, we tend to see the people across the ring from us as mythic. Their plotting must be Shakespearean. Their rise to power full of Byzantine scheming. And their evil plans Wagnerian in scope. It really does hurt our feeling sometimes, I feel, to acknowledge that our opponents are journeymen who knocked out a host of nobodies and just happened to have been in the gym the day they got called up to fight some aging slumping champ in a dying promotion and that's why they're walking around with a belt.
The one guy in Putin's posse that actually wanted reform as we in the West would define it, based on the tea leaves read by experts, was Medvedev. He was the only one not to praise the dead Soviet regime to the Heavens at any opportunity. He talked about Stalin's crimes when asked, and did so without resorting to the immediate defense of Uncle Joe by then saying, "Whatever else must be said about him, he did win The War." And for his troubles he got his chain yanked and demoted and Putin strolled back in, freshly shot full of Botox and ready for the limelight once again.
I don't think Primakov wanted anything resembling reform as I would define it either, but he might have been less of a disaster than Putin, or more. I am not sure what the democratic reformers in Russia in the Yabloko coalition could have done, but I would have liked to have seen them given a chance to try.
Growing up, I remember my history teachers glossing over the 1905 Russian Revolution and the February 1917 Revolution. When they would talk of them at all it was to simply put them into the context of the October Revolution. It wasn't until I got into college that I actually started reading about the men and women involved in those two other often overlooked events and I was stunned. The Constitutional Democratic Party, derided and reduced to their informal title "Kadets" by their enemies and glib pro-Soviet newspapermen, had an agenda that could have made Russia into a constitutional democracy on par with Britain. Their success was of course a chance thing, but still, it made me exploree. I found in those forgotten revolutions highly motivated reformers and people who wanted a better Russia as we in the West would define it. They were heady times and these people talked of big changes and weighed their pros and cons. They were dreamers, but also realists. These people knew their history and talked of possibility of Robespierre and Napoleon arising in Russia and how to mitigate against them. I was shocked, elated and then depressed by reading through it. Here was a blueprint for a successful Russia without wholesale slaughter of Stalin's purges or the horrific suffering unleashed by Lenin and his minions. Here was a democratic Russia that had a seat at the family of nations without having to resort to a Cossack's whip and Siberia. It was a gut punch to realize none of these bright men and women got a chance.
So, the non-cynical part of my brain would like to believe that from those Yabloko intellectuals in 1999 could arise someone who could have made Russia into something other than a tyrannical one party state fueled by nationalist horseshit, parades and paranoia.
That's my hope.
Well, according to a not-insignificant chunk of people with anti-Putin/anti-current-Russian-government views, Vladimir Putin (and/or the rest of the Russian government) is a deep-undercover agent who was put in power by the C.I.A. to serve the West’s interests.
Observe:
Excerpt from What will happen to Crimea after Russia’s collapse by Ivan Lensky
Excerpt from An Open Letter to Putin – The Enemy of The Motherland And Traitor Of The Russian People by Col. Shendakov M. Anatolyevich
(The bolding is present in the original text and not my highlights)
Excerpt from a NewsOne interview with Ukrainian journalist Dimitriy Gordon (start watching at ~11:10 mark)
Excerpt from Meet Yevgeny Fyodorov, The Russian Lawmaker Who Wants More Western Sanctions by Tom Balmforth
So the answer to the challenge is simple – just have the C.I.A. agents in 1980s East Germany pick someone else to be the future leader of post-Soviet Russia
EDIT: fixed typo.
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