Will A Regime Change Occur in Russia?

This blog often looks at the parallels between the misrule of Russian dictator and would be tsar, Vladimir Putin, and the lies and tactics used by Adolph Hitler in the lead up to World War II and the Holocaust.  Like Hitler, Putin uses claims of encirclement by a hostile west to play to the fears and xenophobia of the Russian people while seizing increased dictatorial powers for himself.  He has used the claim of protecting Russians living beyond Russia's borders as an excuse to invade Crimea and Ukraine akin to what Hitler did to justify invading Poland and Czechoslovakia.  And he has demonized gays much as Hitler demonized Jews.  While some fear that Putin may push the world to war, others think that Putin's demise may be approaching - a welcome prospect.  Here are excerpts from a op-ed in the New York Times:

Graham Allison, director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, warned of a growing risk of nuclear war. But they offered a contrasting explanation.

“When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia was on its knees,” they wrote. “But since Vladimir Putin took over in 1999, he has led a recovery of Russia’s sense of itself as a great power.”

These two strands of the Kremlin narrative — recovery on one hand; encirclement on the other — have been fashioned to appeal to the Russian people and used to justify more than 15 years of authoritarian rule. But both strands are suspect. In the early 1990s, Russians rose up against Soviet authoritarianism. The first — and last — popularly and fairly elected president, Boris N. Yeltsin, had a mandate to pursue the true national interest of catching up with the advanced, democratic West.

The situation in Ukraine now, after a popular uprising against a corrupt, authoritarian regime, resembles Russia then.

Tragically for Russia, from the mid-’90s an oligarchic bureaucracy monopolized oil and gas exports and has used the profits to purchase luxuries and homes in the West. The general population, meanwhile, has remained under the custody of a K.G.B.-style state security and propaganda apparatus.

For a decade, the rising price of oil provided soaring growth and veiled the inherent deficiency of the regime. In reality, Russia’s government is simply incompatible with the reforms needed for sustainable economic development, which demands liberalization and competitiveness.

When the petrodollar windfall dried up, that reality reasserted itself. Today, the nation is truly on its knees — beneath a leader who cannot be changed, and as hostage to the capricious price of oil and a gluttonous military-security complex.  

Sooner or later, economic hardship will awaken the people, too.

This year alone, Russians have suffered a 3 percent loss in real disposable income (6.4 percent year on year). In the 12 months to April, exports — vital for providing foreign currency — fell 33.9 percent, and imports shrank 40.8 percent. The outlook is very poor.

Like their Soviet predecessors, the Kremlin’s present rulers see the example of the democratic West, above all the United States, as a threat. Instead of preaching a Communist-style supremacy, most realize that their regime will be uncompetitive in the long run. Yet the oligarchs cling to power as long as possible through intimidation and disinformation, seeking to undermine Western norms, from human rights to business transparency and international law.

 

[T]he potential of American soft power and leadership, together with a strong response from European countries and Ukraine, is far from exhausted. Economic sanctions have bitten, magnifying the regime’s inefficiency.

The firmness of the West in protecting the sovereignty of Ukraine and restoring its territorial integrity is a prerequisite not only to rein in the Kremlin’s aggressive impulses, but also to engage Russia in a constructive dialogue on a broad agenda.

Regime change in Russia is inevitable, maybe imminent. But the West should not bet on that eventuality or make it a policy goal. The Russian people will rise up again, but the path to a sustainable democracy and stable economy will be challenging. The West should be ready to help then.

What the Western democracies must do now, for Russia and for themselves, is prove that they will defend their values and international law.

I hope the author is correct and that Putin's days in power will soon end - for the good of Russia and the world.  Putin is but the latest in Russia's failed dictators who have held the country back and harmed the Russian people.

Vladimir Putin: Russia's Increasingly Anti-American Would Be Tsar

Some scoff at my drawing of parallels between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.  Yet parallel's do exist, most particularly in the use of the excuse of "protecting ethnic Germans and, in the case of Putin, Russians outside of the mother country.  Another parallel might be Putin and say Ivan the Terrible since Putin seems to increasingly see himself as a new Tsar.  The irony is that Communism, the system Putin helped to enforce during his KGB days, destroyed Tsarist Russia and set back the nation economically by many decades. A piece in the New Yorker that looks at former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, also looks at Putin's dangerous delusions of grandeur and growing anti-Americanism.  Here are excerpts:

When, after the Medvedev interregnum, Putin returned to power, in 2012, he perceived the anti-Kremlin protests as an echo of Kiev. The demonstrators had no clear ideology, no leaders. They did not extend much beyond the urban creative and office classes. They had neither the coherence nor the staying power of the protesters on other squares—Taksim, Tahrir, Maidan, Wenceslas. All the same, Putin could not countenance them. What he loathes, his former aide Gleb Pavlovsky told me, is spontaneity in politics. “Putin is anti-revolutionary to his core,” he said. “What happened in Kiev”—on Maidan, in 2014—“was for him absolutely disgusting.”

An avid reader about tsarist Russia, Putin was forming a more coherent view of history and his place within it. More and more, he identified personally with the destiny of Russia. Even if he was not a genuine ideologue, he became an opportunistic one, quoting Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Nikolai Berdyayev, and other conservative philosophers to give his own pronouncements a sense of continuity. One of his favorite politicians in imperial Russia was Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister under Nicholas II. “We do not need great upheavals,” Putin said, paraphrasing Stolypin. “We need a great Russia.” Stolypin had also said, “Give the state twenty years and you will not recognize Russia.” That was in 1909. Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in Kiev, in 1911. But Putin was determined that his opportunity not be truncated: “Give me twenty years,” he said, “and you will not recognize Russia.”

And so now, instead of nurturing the business and creative classes in the big cities, he turned on them. He vilified them on TV; he weakened them with restrictions, searches, arrests, and selective jail terms. He sided now with the deeply conservative impulses, prejudices, and habits of mind of the Russian majority. “There was an idea to gain the support of the majority, to distinguish it from the minority,” Boris Mezhuev, a conservative columnist at Izvestia and the editor of the Web site politconservatism.ru, told me. “This was done harshly.”

Putin’s speeches were full of hostility, lashing out at the West for betraying its promises, for treating Russia like a defeated “vassal” rather than a great country, for an inability to distinguish between right and wrong. He denounced the United States for its behavior in Hiroshima and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Libya. He cut off adoptions to America, claiming that “our” babies were being abused by cruel and heedless foreigners. The West was hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and dissolute, according to Putin, so he strengthened his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church to reëstablish “traditional Russian values.” He approved new laws on “non-traditional” sexual practices—the so-called “anti-gay propaganda” laws. 

An ideology, a world view, was taking shape: Putin was now putting Russia at the center of an anti-Western, socially conservative axis—Russia as a bulwark against a menacing America. “Of course, this is a conservative position,” he said in a speech last year, “but, speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyayev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”

One reason that McFaul was surprised by the assault on him is that he thought he was being careful in his ambassadorial role. He never went to demonstrations. He steered clear of Alexei Navalny.
Still, he was hardly a quiet American. Hillary Clinton had called for U.S. diplomats to use social media, and he was especially ardent, maintaining an active presence, in both Russian and English, on Facebook and Twitter. The young liberal intelligentsia loved McFaul for his openness, his availability. Putin’s people thought his behavior bewildering, adolescent, and hostile.

The imagery of Putinism, with its ominous warnings against political chaos and outside interference, has long been in evidence. All you have to do is watch television. In 2008, state television broadcast a cheesy docudrama called “The Destruction of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium,” which was hosted and produced by Tikhon Shevkunov, a Russian Orthodox priest whose church, the Sretensky Monastery, is just down the street from Lubyanka, K.G.B. headquarters. Shevkunov, who has known Putin for many years, is widely rumored to be the Russian President’s dukhovnik, his spiritual adviser. The film purports to be a history of the Byzantine Empire’s fall at the hands of the perfidious West, and not, as scholars have it, to the Ottoman Turks, who conquered Constantinople in 1453.

Such phenomena are now common fare. The airwaves are filled with assaults on the treachery of Russian liberals and American manipulations. Dmitri Kiselyov, the head of Russia Today, Putin’s newly created information agency, and the host, on Sunday nights, of the TV magazine show “News of the Week,” is a masterly, and unapologetic, purveyor of the Kremlin line. With his theatrical hand gestures and brilliantly insinuating intonation, he tells his viewers that Russia is the only country in the world that can turn the U.S. into “radioactive dust,” that the anti-gay-propaganda laws are insufficiently strict, and that Ukraine is not a real country but merely “virtual.”

Kiselyov eclipses Bill O’Reilly, and as a theoretician of conspiracy he shames Glenn Beck. He tells his viewers that, in Ukraine, fascists abound, the U.S. State Department underwrites revolution, and “life is not worth a single kopeck.” But he insists, “The presentation of me as a minister of propaganda is itself a form of propaganda.”

Nearly a quarter century after the fall of empire, Putin has unleashed an ideology of ressentiment. It has been chorussed by those who, in 1991, despaired of the loss not of Communist ideology but of imperial greatness, and who, ever since, have lived with what Russians so often refer to as “phantom-limb syndrome”: the pain of missing Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic states; the pain of diminishment. They want revenge for their humiliation.

The world, for Dugin, is divided between conservative land powers (Russia) and libertine maritime powers (the U.S. and the U.K.)—Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage. The maritime powers seek to impose their will, and their decadent materialism, on the rest of the world. This struggle is at the heart of history. For Dugin, Russia must rise from its prolonged post-Soviet depression and reassert itself, this time as the center of a Eurasian empire, against the dark forces of America. And this means war. Dugin rejects the racism of the Nazis, but embraces their sense of hierarchy, their romance of death. “We need a new party,” he has written. “A party of death. A party of the total vertical. God’s party, the Russian analogue to the Hezbollah, which would act according to wholly different rules and contemplate completely different pictures.”

There is much more to the lengthy article which I encourage readers to read in full.  If some of the foregoing carries a sense of deja vu, it's because it sounds much like what the Nazi regime did in Germany in the 1930's.  We all know how that turned out and how many millions of lives were lost.  Would that Russians listening to Putin's storyline would wake up and draw the parallels and realize that Putin could lead them to a state like Germany's in 1945.  Putin needs to go.  The sooner the better.

4 Reasons Why Putin Is Already Losing in Ukraine

As noted yesterday, after speaking with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin by telephone, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Barack Obama that Putin did not seems to be in touch with reality.  Such is the way of tyrants and one need only look at figures such as Hitler and Stalin who harmed millions while living in their own insane, paranoid alternate worlds.  The irony in Putin's case is that - if Russia and the world are lucky - he may be hastening his own ultimate demise.  A piece in Time looks at four things that are occurring which despite Putin's initial military success may spell long therm disaster for this dangerous egomaniac. Here are article excerpts:

In the coming days and weeks, Putin will have to decide how far he is prepared to take this intervention and how much he is prepared to suffer for it. It is already clear, however, that he cannot emerge as the winner of this conflict, at least not when the damage is weighed against the gains. It will at best be a Pyrrhic victory, and at worst an utter catastrophe. Here’s why:

1. At home, this intervention looks to be one of the most unpopular decisions Putin has ever made. The Kremlin’s own pollster released a survey on Monday that showed 73% of Russians reject it. In phrasing its question posed in early February to 1,600 respondents across the country, the state-funded sociologists at WCIOM were clearly trying to get as much support for the intervention as possible: “Should Russia react to the overthrow of the legally elected authorities in Ukraine?” they asked. Only 15% said yes — hardly a national consensus.

That seems astounding in light of all the brainwashing Russians have faced on the issue of Ukraine. For weeks, the Kremlin’s effective monopoly on television news has been sounding the alarm over Ukraine. Its revolution, they claimed, is the result of an American alliance with Nazis intended to weaken Russia. And still, nearly three-quarters of the population oppose a Russian “reaction” of any kind, let alone a Russian military occupation like they are now watching unfold in Crimea.

Monday’s survey suggests that the influence of Putin’s television channels is breaking down. The blatant misinformation and demagoguery on Russian television coverage of Ukraine seems to have pushed Russians to go online for their information. And as for those who still have no Internet connection, they could simply have picked up the phone and called their panicked friends and relatives in Ukraine.

Even the adherents of the Communist Party, who tend to feel entitled to all of Russia’s former Soviet domains, said with a broad majority — 62% — that Russia should not jump into Ukraine’s internal crisis.

In Monday’s survey, 30% of respondents from Moscow and St. Petersburg said Russia could see massive political protests of the kind that overthrew the Ukrainian government last month. Putin’s only means of forestalling that kind of unrest is to crack down hard and early. So on Feb. 28, Russia’s most prominent opposition activist Alexei Navalny was put under house arrest less than six months after he won 30% of the vote in the Moscow mayoral race. Expect more of the same if the opposition to Putin’s intervention starts to find its voice.

2. The economic impact on Russia is already staggering. When markets opened on Monday morning, investors got their first chance to react to the Russian intervention in Ukraine over the weekend, and as a result, the key Russian stock indexes tanked by more than 10%. That amounts to almost $60 billion in stock value wiped out in the course of a day, more than Russia spent preparing for last month’s Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. The state-controlled natural-gas monopoly Gazprom, which accounts for roughly a quarter of Russian tax revenue, lost $15 billion in market value in one day.

The value of the Russian currency meanwhile dropped against the dollar to its lowest point on record, and the Russian central bank spent $10 billion on the foreign-exchange markets trying to prop it up. “This has to fundamentally change the way investors and ratings agencies view Russia,” said Timothy Ash, head of emerging-market research at Standard Bank. At a time when Russia’s economic growth was already stagnating, “this latest military adventure will increase capital flight, weaken Russian asset prices, slow investment and economic activity and growth. Western financial sanctions on Russia will hurt further,” Ash told the Wall Street Journal.

3. Even Russia’s closest allies want no part of this. The oil-rich state of Kazakhstan, the most important member of every regional alliance Russia has going in the former Soviet space, put out a damning statement on Monday, marking the first time its leaders have ever turned against Russia on such a major strategic issue: “Kazakhstan expresses deep concern over the developments in Ukraine,” the Foreign Ministry said. “Kazakhstan calls on all sides to stop the use of force in the resolution of this situation.”

Every single state in the former Soviet Union, from Central Asia to the Baltics, has a large Russian-speaking population, and this statement means that Russia reserves the right to invade when it feels that population is threatened. The natural reaction of any Russian ally in the region would be to seek security guarantees against becoming the next Ukraine.

[I]n the course of one weekend, Putin has spooked all the countries he wanted to include in his grand Eurasian Union, the bloc of nations he hoped would make Russia a regional power again.

4. Russia’s isolation from the West will deepen dramatically. In June, Putin was planning to welcome the leaders of the G-8, a club of Western powers (plus Japan), in the Russian resort city of Sochi. But on Sunday, all of them announced they had halted their preparations for attending the summit in protest at Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. So much for Putin’s hard-fought seat at the table with the leaders of the Western world.

In recent years, one of Russia’s greatest points of contention with the West has been over NATO’s plans to build a missile shield in Europe. Russia has seen this as a major threat to its security, as the shield could wipe out Russia’s ability to launch nuclear missiles at the West.

[A]fter Russia decided to unilaterally invade its neighbor to the west this weekend, any remaining resistance to the missile-shield project would be pushed aside by the renewed security concerns of various NATO members, primarily those in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Whatever hopes Russia had of forestalling the construction of the missile shield through diplomacy are now most likely lost.

No less worrying for Putin would be the economic sanctions the West is preparing in answer to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Depending on their intensity, those could cut off the ability of Russian companies and businessmen in getting Western loans and trading with most of the world’s largest economies. Putin’s allies could also find it a lot more difficult to send their children to study in the West or to keep their assets in Western banks, as they now almost universally do. All of that raises the risk for Putin of a split in his inner circle and, potentially, even of a palace coup. There is hardly anything more important to Russia’s political elite than the security of their foreign assets, certainly not their loyalty to a leader who seems willing to put all of that at risk.

The Russian people deserve better than Vladimir Putin and I for one hope his days in power are numbered.  It would be a sweet irony if Ukraine does become his Waterloo.