Is it mistaken and/or unpatriotic for the Russian opposition to seek the help of the U.S. State Department and Congress with its struggle against Putin’s Kremlin? For Russia’s Moskovskij Komsomolets, Mikhail Rostovsky verbally spanks Russia’s ‘liberal opposition’ for not doing its own ‘dirty work’ and complaining to the U.S. State Department about Kremlin officials who belong on the ‘Magnitsky list’ – named for a Russian lawyer working for a U.S. company who, after exposing massive Kremlin corruption, was apparently prompted to die in a Russian prison.
From the Kremlin-friendly Moskovskij Komsomolets, Mikhail Rostovsky writes in part:
How do oppositions function in other self-respecting countries? They try hard to convince their own populations that something is amiss in the current government. It’s not for nothing that the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote back in 1925, “We Soviets have our own pride: we look down our noses at the bourgeoisie.”
Why agonize, reason our “regime-fighters,” if there is an easier way? One can simply sit down at a desk and pen a missive to the U.S. Congress or American State Department: “Russian official X is scum through-and-through, and a sworn enemy of democracy. Please add him to the [Magnitsky] black list. Signed, a loyal supporter of Russian democracy Y.”
Even people who could without exaggeration or sarcasm be called the conscience of the nation have succumbed to a belief in the miracle-working power of Ostap Bender’s slogan, “The foreigners will help us!”
The desire to use the U.S. Congress as a weapon in Russia’s domestic political struggle is largely a gesture of desperation on the part of our opposition. It is a recognition that all other methods have been tried and failed. But I clearly feel a tinge of schadenfreude in all this: now let us see our enemies jump and weave as if on a hot skillet!
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