Twenty years to the day since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin and launched the program of modernization known as perestroika, Russia has not stopped changing. You don't even need to go there to see that.
In a window on the screen where I'm writing this article, I have the online version in Cyrillic of the daily newspaper Izvestia. There are links to celebrity gossip Web-pages, and a voting site where you can select your candidate for the person most responsible for destroying the Soviet Union.
It is not just Izvestia's content and approach that are new. When Gorbachev took the helm of the Communist party in March 1985, the paper belonged to the Soviet government. Now it is the privately owned plaything of Vladimir Potanin, a Murdoch-like media tycoon and one of the richest oligarchs in Russia.
Yet while the newspaper-of-record seriousness of the old Izvestia has given way to consumerism and interactive reader-friendliness, is the new paper bolder politically? Not much, to judge by what happened after the massacre of close to 200 children in the Beslan school siege last year. Izvestia accused officials of lying and bungling and suggested the authorities had to share the blame with the hostage- takers. But when the Kremlin complained, Potanin sacked the editor and softened his paper's anti-government tone.
The episode touched the central questions of post-communist Russia. Have the shifts in property ownership really brought democracy? Is the new economic elite any less intertwined with those who hold power in the Kremlin than party managers were in the Leonid Brezhnev period? Do ordinary Russians feel more in charge of their lives under the new capitalist system than they were under Soviet communism?
In recent months, most western discourse on Russia has focused on the alleged revival of dictatorial tendencies at the top. Two versions clash. President Vladimir Putin's defenders define the issue as order versus chaos. They characterize Boris Yeltsin's rule as a time of zigzags and loose government in which the rulers of Russia's regions developed so much power that the country was in danger of falling apart.
Hence the need for Putin to take control in the centre, and to finish the war in Chechnya with victory rather than through talks.
Where Yeltsin negotiated with the republic's last moderate leader, Aslan Maskhadov, Putin hounded him and this week obtained his death.
Western critics see the issue as democracy versus authoritarianism. But they also contrast Yeltsin and Putin, claiming the freedoms brought in by Russia's first president are being reversed by his successor. They cite the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsk (the major shareholder in the country's biggest oil firm), the state takeover of the last independent TV networks and a new law allowing the Kremlin to nominate the candidates from whom regional governors are elected.
Combined with Putin's appointment of army and security service officers to top political and managerial posts, these moves certainly amount to a tightening of what Russians call the "power vertical".
Yet they pale against the similarities between Yeltsin and Putin; there is far more continuity than many of Putin's critics care to admit.
The intermingling of business and politics, the green light the Kremlin gives to crony privatization schemes, the selective blind eye turned to tax fiddles and corruption and the use of pressure on judges go back to the Yeltsin era.
Russia's switch to democratic freedoms preceded former president Boris Yeltsin. It was Gorbachev who introduced contested elections, permitted independent political parties, created a parliament, abolished censorship, ended the Communist party's "leading role" and gave Russians the right to travel freely outside the country. The retreat began two years after he and perestroika were driven from the stage.
In their eagerness to prevent a return to communism in the mid- 1990s, western leaders and the advisers they sent to Moscow confused the introduction of capitalist institutions with democracy. As long as Yeltsin took steps towards "reform", by which they meant the fastest feasible switch to market economics, and the privatization of as many state assets as possible, anything was tolerated on the political front.
When Russian members of parliament hesitated to authorize further change after the lifting of price controls launched hyperinflation, destroying people's savings and impoverishing the middle class, Yeltsin closed parliament and rewrote the constitution so as to strengthen the powers of the president.
When it looked as though a disappointed electorate might choose a Communist for president in 1996, albeit one who accepted multiparty pluralism and advocated only a mild review of the privatization scandals, the west backed Yeltsin and the oligarchs to use their control of TV to shut out or distort opposition views. Many Russian "liberals" who complain of Putin supported Yeltsin's illiberal campaign for re-election then.
The key issue for contemporary Russia is whether some sense of civic responsibility can be revived. The social paternalism of the Soviet system in the years after Josef Stalin's terror ended has given way to a policy of dismantling almost every form of welfare. Free education and health are being replaced by fee-paying and privatization. The government is abolishing the subsidies that kept housing costs low.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian pensioners have taken to the streets in recent months to protest at having free transport and other benefits switched to cash payments, which they rightly fear will either be delayed or not keep up with inflation. This comes at a time when income inequalities have already widened enormously.
By now it may be too late to break from the Yeltsin-era equation that the less democracy there is, the easier it is to ram through rightwing economic changes. Putin is making it harder for independents to get elected to the Duma and raising the threshhold for smaller parties.
Although the anti-communism of the 1990s has slackened slightly, as polls show increasing numbers of Russians are disillusioned with the "reform" process, it looks unlikely that a social democratic option can emerge any time soon.
There are moments in history when America has turned its back on its principles and withdrawn from past commitments in service of higher goals. For example, US-Soviet Cold War competition compelled America to make a range of deals with unsavory and undemocratic figures across Latin America and Africa in service of geostrategic aims. The United States overlooked mass atrocities against the Bengali population in modern-day Bangladesh in the early 1970s in service of its tilt toward Pakistan, a relationship the Nixon administration deemed critical to its larger aims in developing relations with China. Then, of course, America switched diplomatic recognition
The international women’s soccer match between Taiwan and New Zealand at the Kaohsiung Nanzih Football Stadium, scheduled for Tuesday last week, was canceled at the last minute amid safety concerns over poor field conditions raised by the visiting team. The Football Ferns, as New Zealand’s women’s soccer team are known, had arrived in Taiwan one week earlier to prepare and soon raised their concerns. Efforts were made to improve the field, but the replacement patches of grass could not grow fast enough. The Football Ferns canceled the closed-door training match and then days later, the main event against Team Taiwan. The safety
The National Immigration Agency on Tuesday said it had notified some naturalized citizens from China that they still had to renounce their People’s Republic of China (PRC) citizenship. They must provide proof that they have canceled their household registration in China within three months of the receipt of the notice. If they do not, the agency said it would cancel their household registration in Taiwan. Chinese are required to give up their PRC citizenship and household registration to become Republic of China (ROC) nationals, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said. He was referring to Article 9-1 of the Act
Strategic thinker Carl von Clausewitz has said that “war is politics by other means,” while investment guru Warren Buffett has said that “tariffs are an act of war.” Both aphorisms apply to China, which has long been engaged in a multifront political, economic and informational war against the US and the rest of the West. Kinetically also, China has launched the early stages of actual global conflict with its threats and aggressive moves against Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan, and its support for North Korea’s reckless actions against South Korea that could reignite the Korean War. Former US presidents Barack Obama
RSS