Saturday, Dec. 11, 2004 3:10 p.m. EST
Albats: No One Dares Criticize Putin
Despite his claim to be a friend of democratic government, Russian President Vladimir Putin is reviving the iron control the Kremlin exercised under the brutal Soviet regime, crushing all opposition and stifling voices of dissent to prevent the emergence of any potential rivals.
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So writes Yevgenia Albats, a professor of political science at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics, who also has a doctorate in government from Harvard University.
In a scathing article in tomorrow's Washington Post the courageous Albats pens a meticulously detailed indictment of the Soviet-style Putin regime now plunging the nation deeper and deeper into what can only be described as a dictatorship-in-the-making.
Putin, Dr. Albats writes, "has slowly and systematically extended the state's control over society and tightened its grip on Russia's most important institutions." His aim, she says, is to solidify his power and prevent any potential rivals from challenging him.
According to Dr. Albats:
Putin has "obliterated the media, leaving almost no room for criticism or dissent. All the national television networks are under strict government control ... editors are summoned to the Kremlin on a weekly basis to be given outlines of what news should be covered and what should not, which guests should be invited to appear on which (pre-recorded) shows and for how many seconds, and which should not. Nothing goes live; spontaneity would be dangerous."
She cited the case of one editor who displeased Putin by running the picture of a dead child in a story about the hostage crisis in Beslan. He was fired.
The result: "No one dares criticize Putin or his politics to a nationwide audience. Thus, the Kremlin can prevent the emergence of an alternative to Putin who might challenge his politics."
Putin "has abolished the system of checks and balances, turning the parliament into a body of yes men, by exploiting Russia's weak party system and manipulating media campaign coverage, determining which candidates get favorable news coverage and which do not."
"He used the fear sown by the Beslan attack to abolish the democratic election of governors. Now he is going to appoint leaders of the 88 regions, violating the essence of the federation making up Russia," a move that would be similar to the president of the United States appointing the governors of all 50 states.
Albats says Putin has gone after the academic community, citing the cases of "scientists Igor Sutyagin (15 years of hard labor for analyzing publicly available information) and Valentin Danilov (14 years in a high-security labor camp, without the possibility of pardon, for selling scientific information that his defenders say is in the public domain)." Their crime? Alleged treason.
He has targeted business, ladling out "the nation's most lucrative properties and intimidating any businessmen" who seek too much power and independence for themselves. "We are reminded of this when we periodically see Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, sitting in a cage in a courtroom."
She cites the case of Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos Oil, who was arrested more than a year ago on charges of tax evasion and has been in prison ever since. She explained that Yukos, the nation's largest and most successful company, is slowly being destroyed. "In a matter of two weeks," she writes, "its major assets are to be acquired for one-third their market value by the state gas monopoly Gazprom."
One of Putin's motives for publicly and fiercely backing current Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, visiting Ukraine on two occasions to publicly promote his presidential campaign, was that he feared that if Yanukovych's opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, won power it would serve as an example to the Russian people that a freedom-loving, democratically elected candidate could successfully challenge and oust a totalitarian ruler.
Putin has used the nation's security forces to implement his policies, she warns, saturating the Kremlin bureaucracy with former and current officers of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor.
"Many people thought that these new strong hands would do something about the corruption of the Yeltsin years," she wrote. "They did. Things got worse: The cost of bribes went up by at least 30 percent. 'They even charge us [former colleagues] more than Yeltsin's guys did,' a retired KGB general who is now in a financial business told me in astonishment. "
It's all about control, Albats explained, noting that ex-KGB man Putin is "a man of control," having spent much of his life in the dreaded Gestapo-like secret police that protected the Communist dictatorship.
Putin recognizes the dangers of democracy to his dictatorial rule and "is taking every precaution to ensure that true democracy never exists in his land" and "intends to reassert control over all aspects of Russian life, turning the country back into "an ultra bureaucratic state, where bureaucrats are answerable to no one but themselves, in the time-honored Soviet tradition."
At the very heart of Putin's policy, Albats notes, is the belief expressed by Komsomolskaya Pravda, a widely circulated newspaper closely connected to top officials, that the goal is "to reinstitute a great empire feared by everyone in the world," just as the U.S.S.R. was.
She asks: "So, what is in the cards for us? If my reading of Russian politics is any good, we should expect much tougher policies coming from the Kremlin, both domestically and internationally, and a growing resistance to them in Russian society."
She adds: "Clearly, change won't come from the outside. Russians should not expect any help from big or small brothers in the West. The task of making the country free is in our own hands. I need to believe we can do it."
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