The Truth About Russia
May 17th, 2008
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Pajamas Media has a must-read on the situation in Russia. A few excerpts:
Perhaps best known for throwing a glass of juice in the face of ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky during a debate on a TV talk show in 1995 (and getting away with it, at a time when Zhironvsky was at his most menacing), Boris Nemtsov has long been the golden boy of post-Soviet Russia, the country’s best imitation of JFK. Granted, even the actual JFK left much to be desired — so a Russian knock-off is hardly likely to save the world. But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is tsar — and a white paper he recently published assessing the accomplishments and failures of the Putin administration deserves close attention.
Ant is is a fascinating document indeed:
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 come up with is crude repression.
Scholarly and mercilessly thorough, Nemtsov’s paper systematically dismantles the claimed achievements of the Putin regime and paints a picture of failure and looming disaster that is genuinely disturbing to read, not least because of the dispassionate and clinical tone that the author adopts. It is, in his own words, meant to be “a sober and realistic analysis of how our lives have changed during the years of Putin’s rule.”
AND:
He writes “the police state has to be dismantled and human dignity returned to the people.” But he doesn’t even say how to wrest power from Putin, much less to undo his authoritarian regime. But such criticism is beside the point. Russia can’t begin to reform until the people of the country have agreed that reform is needed, which they can’t do until they’ve been told the true facts, and Nemtsov knows that because of Putin’s crackdown they simply don’t. Indeed, they can’t even buy his book in bookstores, and most can’t access the Internet, which is increasingly under siege from Putin as well, as we’ve previously reported.
Read it all. Because it’s clear from this article that the truth about Russia will be known outside of Russia — but it won’t be inside of Russia.
Cartoon by Paresh Nath, National Herald, India
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Vladimir Putin, Russia. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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