The current model of double-headed czardom of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin has become increasingly authoritarian. Despite numerous commitments under international law, the government has tightened controls on political life, civil society, and the media. Disruption of political opposition's activities, restricting access to state-controlled TV, human right violations, such as the beating of demonstrators who support the Russian constitution, murder of journalists and anti-corruption activists, disappearance and torture, abuse of the legal system for monetary and political gain, all illustrate this negative trend. Putin, a former penniless KGB agent, is now billionaire, thanks to kickbacks!
Medvedev has just signed a decree firing Moscow Mayor Yury Luzkhov after 18 years on the job. The sacking comes after months of minor scandals and open mudslinging from both men. The 74-year-old Luzkhov was dismissed, because he has lost the confidence of the Russian president. He had long faced allegations of corruption over the business activities of his wife, construction billionaire Yelena Baturina, and he had been accused by preservationists of destroying important historic buildings in the city center.
Basil Venitis points out Igor Sechin, a former Soviet military interpreter, is the leader of the siloviki clan of nationalist, exmilitary and security service officers fighting to maintain a big state role in the Russian economy. Sechin is now a deputy prime minister overseeing Russia's vast energy and metals sectors, the world's biggest, and oligarchs snap to attention in his presence.
Centralization is the major weakness of a system that Putin established. He curtailed the regions' autonomy, and built a pyramid of power, in which responsibility was always delegated upwards. The measure by which the governors and regional leaders were to be judged was not efficiency, but loyalty. Those who displayed enough loyalty were given the freedom to pursue their own private business affairs and did not have to fear an opposition or a critical press, because their freedoms had been increasingly curtailed by Putin.
Venitis notes Russia cultivates ties with terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah and provides military and diplomatic support for rogue states such as Syria, Turkey, North Korea, and Venezuela. Russia is in non-compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention. The Strategic Posture Commission asserts Russia is no longer in compliance with its Presidential Nuclear Initiatives commitments. Moscow's tactical nuclear weapons arsenal is four times larger than that of the U.S.
Eurokleptocrats and Russokleptocrats are in cahoots with Orthodox mafias and Orthodox oligarchs. The three main Orthodox mafias are the Tambov gang from St. Petersburg and Izmaylovskaya gang and Solntsevskaya Brotherhood from Moscow. Their activities focus on political corruption, church corruption, protection money, blackmail, drugs trade, shipping, commodity trade, and natural resources. Orthodoxy's circle of tycoons, such as aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, banking magnate Vitaly Malkin, and shipping magnates, have been investigated by Europol for involvement in crimes of Eurokleptocrats. Venitis points out Russokleptocrats use the Orthodox Church to control Russians and influence Orthodox Christians all over the world.
Faced with a simmering, underground opposition, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has expanded the powers of the country's Federal Security Service(FSB). The security services are now able to issue individuals of whom they are suspicious with official warnings, inviting them to precautionary talks with the FSB to prevent the possibility of the citizen committing a criminal act against the country's security in the future. Refusing or failing to attend these precautionary talks could lead to a fine of 1,500 euros or detention for as long as 15 days.
There is a big difference between the Soviet era and today's Russia. The Soviet state spread the atmosphere of fear to prevent emergence of politics and people's participation in it. Today, the key for the state authorities is to make sure people are not interested in politics. A person who doesn't care about politics or the situation with human rights in Russia may live a comfortable life without ever encountering an FSB officer. What suffers the most is democracy in Russia; the Kremlin is interested in stability, not democracy.
Protection of private property in Russia is weak. The judicial system is unpredictable, corrupt, and unable to handle technically sophisticated cases. The country's own president, Dmitry Medvedev, a law professor by training, repeatedly admitted as much. Contracts are difficult to enforce, and an ancient antipathy to them continues to impede foreign investment and Russian integration into the West. Mortgage lending remains underdeveloped and violations of intellectual property rights continue to be a serious problem.
Twenty years after the collapse of the Communist utopia, Russia is still suffering from a hangover after the brutal, giddy but doomed attempt by Marxist dictators and their massive party and repressive apparatus to create a Soviet Union based on a socialist system in which the market and private property were to be abolished and the state would create and equitably distribute all wealth.
Old habits die hard. Ex-communist spies who are running Russia expropriated and destroyed YUKOS, the most transparent and successful energy company there. Its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and his staff are facing a second trial for crimes most observers agree he never committed nor physically could have committed. Even Vladimir Putin's own former and current ministers testified as much.
While Putin and his KGB's crony kleptocracy worked well enough while oil prices were rising, Putin's distribution of Russia's oil rents created neither moral nor economic value. Now that oil prices have fallen from their 2008 highs, the many flaws in Putin's cronyist economic model have been exposed.
In his second term as president(2004–2008), Putin routinely violated private property rights, confiscating and renationalizing large formerly state-owned corporations that had been privatized after the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin put his old KGB cronies and other state officials in charge of Gazprom, Transneft, Rosneft, Russian Technologies, state banks, and other large firms.
Putin's old buddies may have been successful as spies, but they have made a hash of these businesses. Big state corporations accounted for much, if not all, of the decline in Russia's GDP last year. Their leaders do not know how to run a company, which leads to poor financial results, huge state subsidies, miserable services, and enormous corruption. Medvedev made his assault on state-run corporations a hallmark of his presidency, even calling for their privatization, but due to his political weakness, so far he has accomplished little.
The FSB, Russia's domestic intelligence agency, wants to force Internet service providers to remove undesirable websites. A law also requires these providers to install hardware at their own expense that allows the FSB, with a judge's authorization, to keep track of the websites people visit and the e-mails they write.
Since the Kremlin has brought almost all major television stations under its control over the last decade, and since newspapers and magazines have low circulations, and are often owned by oligarchs with close ties to the government, it has been left to the bloggers to exercise the checks-and-balances function traditionally performed by the media. Even tabloids such as the Komsomolskaya Pravda have praised bloggers as the Fifth Estate.
No comments:
Post a Comment