Word: putin
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Russia's voters appear to have more realistic expectations of the post-communist era than many American commentators. While op-ed pages in the U.S. sound dire warnings about President Vladimir Putin plunging the country back into the dark days of Stalinism, Putin looks set to win upward of 80 percent of the vote in Sunday's presidential election. One voter who plans to give the president her vote told the New York Times why: "At least he isn't making things worse...
...President Bush, after his first meeting with Putin three years ago, claimed to have looked into the eyes of his Russian counterpart and "gotten a sense of his soul," deciding that Putin was a man he could trust. But for many other Western commentators from all ends of the ideological spectrum, Putin is more akin to a risen ghost from Russia's nasty past. His government's relentless campaign to squelch political opposition and silence independent media; its hounding of the "oligarch" business tycoons whose control over vast swathes of the economy create a potential alternative power center...
...Russia has built the nuclear energy infrastructure that has allowed Iran to pursue its strategic ambitions, and it may have helped arm Saddam Hussein long after UN sanctions forbade it. Putin recently instructed his defense industry to pursue technologies that would allow Russian missiles to confound the Bush administration's planned missile-defense shield, thereby maintaining the deterrent capability of Moscow's own strategic arsenal. The arrest late last year of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, owner of the massive Yukos oil company, was interpreted by some as a sign that the former KGB colonel-turned-President even planned to reassert state control...
...unenthusiastic comments of so many Putin voters show, there may be an epic gap between the expectations of Western commentators and of ordinary Russians. In an analysis in Foreign Affairs, Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Shleifer argue many of these Western critics have simply projected unreasonable expectations of Russia's post-communist era. They maintain that contemporary Russia's mix of authoritarianism and democracy, its nationalist disposition and even its levels of corruption and criminality put in very much on a par with states of equivalent economic status. Russia's strategic nuclear missile fleet may have once made it a geopolitical...
...THINK DEMOCRACY IS FARING IN RUSSIA UNDER VLADIMIR PUTIN? Very badly. Most of the attributes of an open society are now eliminated, because you don't have an effective opposition in parliament. You don't have an independent mass media. And the owners of capital have been put on notice that they must toe the line or else...