Putin the Czar

Just in from the Chin:

President Putin in Russia is no democrat. Since his rise to power, he has taken a series of steps to consolidate his reign, most significant of which is the destruction of free-press and targeted legal campaigns against his personal enemies.

Recently, he has put another one of the economic "oligarches", Khodorkovsky, a oil giant who financed the parliamentary opposition, out of business and into jail. According to both Center for Strategic and International Studies and The Economist, Putin’s move is not directed against private property. Instead, it is what Putin at his KGB days have been used to: political assassination thinly guised under the mantle of legality. The Economist mentioned that two other oligarches had been dispatched by Putin in the same way. CSIS says plainly: "What is at stake is the future direction of Russia and Putin’s presidency. What is clear is another blow has been dealt against the rule of law in Russia".

Other less obvious occurrences are equally unnerving, including the mysterious circumstances under which leading a leading parliamentarian against Putin has died last year. There were nothing actually mysterious about the death per se. He was shot to death by a professional assassin. What was mysterious is the fact that they have not been found, and prior to the murder, the court had prosecuted other leading parliamentarians opposed to Putin’s presidency with dubious charges of corruption and connections with the mafia. The old Soviet National Anthem had been resurrected from its death, alone with another law that penalizes those who failed to pay respect to the flag and anthem by not standing up at the music’s procession. All these have been closely followed by The New York Times last year.

Militarily Putin showed vigorous interest in the conquest of Chechenya. Furthermore, he has been shielding war criminals from jurisdiction, despite the outrage of international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. The conduct of Russian army in Chechenya has degraded from strategically justified use of terror and brutality to wanton rape and pillage, so much so that Russian domestic groups had been rallied against those outrages. President Putin and his cabinet, however, have been indifferent. Recent polls have consistently demonstrate that average Russians have a high opinion of Lenin, Stalin, and Peter the Great; reputation of reformist such as Alexander II and Gorbachev, on the meanwhile, has sunk to obscurity. The Russian soil, so it seems, is ripe for another autocrat.