Ex KGB head-honcho Vladmir Putin is the sort of person Russia can well do without. And the West doesn't need a Putin-lead Russia as an ally either. The direction of Putin's actions smacks of the bad old days of the USSR's dictators.
"No one expected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s dominant United Russia party to do as well in Sunday’s parliamentary elections as it has in the past. Indeed, the Kremlin was so nervous about United Russia losing seats in the Duma that it unleashed its prosecutors on the respected Russian independent vote-monitoring organization Golos (it was fined $1000 a few days ago for procedural violations), and Western election observers now say the vote was “neither free nor fair.” Even so, the extent of United Russia’s decline is startling: it drew slightly less than 50 percent on Sunday, down from the more than 64 percent of the vote it got in 2007.
There are many reasons for the growing disillusionment with Putinism, among them the way Putin announced earlier this fall that current president Dmitry Medvedev would step aside in the March 2012 presidential elections so that he could run largely unopposed. But there also seems to be an increasing sense among Russian voters that the Kremlin has done nothing to stop pervasive corruption and that its own behavior is often above the law. To understand the extent of the problem, observers might do well to watch German filmmaker Cyril Tuschi’s provocative new documentary about jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which began showing in Russia and the United States just days before the election and is now at New York’s Film Forum.
In its portrait of the protagonist and his prosecution and imprisonment in 2003, Khodorkovsky is a stark reminder of the capricious ways in which the Russian leadership has enriched itself at the expense of ordinary Russians; it is also a revealing expose of the way the Kremlin has continually bent the legal system to serve its purposes. Tuschi told me in an interview that the timing of the film’s release in Russia, on the eve of the Duma vote, was coincidental. (He had originally conceived of the film as a fictional drama about the conflict between Khodorkovsky and Putin.) But the Kremlin apparently saw things differently. Although several major cinemas in Russia initially agreed to show “Khodorkovsky,” many later backed out, reportedly because of pressure from Russian authorities."
Continue to read this piece from The New York Review of Books here.
"No one expected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s dominant United Russia party to do as well in Sunday’s parliamentary elections as it has in the past. Indeed, the Kremlin was so nervous about United Russia losing seats in the Duma that it unleashed its prosecutors on the respected Russian independent vote-monitoring organization Golos (it was fined $1000 a few days ago for procedural violations), and Western election observers now say the vote was “neither free nor fair.” Even so, the extent of United Russia’s decline is startling: it drew slightly less than 50 percent on Sunday, down from the more than 64 percent of the vote it got in 2007.
There are many reasons for the growing disillusionment with Putinism, among them the way Putin announced earlier this fall that current president Dmitry Medvedev would step aside in the March 2012 presidential elections so that he could run largely unopposed. But there also seems to be an increasing sense among Russian voters that the Kremlin has done nothing to stop pervasive corruption and that its own behavior is often above the law. To understand the extent of the problem, observers might do well to watch German filmmaker Cyril Tuschi’s provocative new documentary about jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which began showing in Russia and the United States just days before the election and is now at New York’s Film Forum.
In its portrait of the protagonist and his prosecution and imprisonment in 2003, Khodorkovsky is a stark reminder of the capricious ways in which the Russian leadership has enriched itself at the expense of ordinary Russians; it is also a revealing expose of the way the Kremlin has continually bent the legal system to serve its purposes. Tuschi told me in an interview that the timing of the film’s release in Russia, on the eve of the Duma vote, was coincidental. (He had originally conceived of the film as a fictional drama about the conflict between Khodorkovsky and Putin.) But the Kremlin apparently saw things differently. Although several major cinemas in Russia initially agreed to show “Khodorkovsky,” many later backed out, reportedly because of pressure from Russian authorities."
Continue to read this piece from The New York Review of Books here.
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