Hail Putin!

Three years ago, when US President George W. Bush was still praising Russian President Vladimir Putin as his democratic soul mate, I was already condemning Putin (in published articles) as a neo-Stalinist munchkin with a dictatorial agenda to reform Russia in his own image.

In fact, I coined the term “Putinization” to describe his neo-Stalinist tactics, which were clearly aimed at neutralizing all political dissent, quashing all civil liberties and making him a latter-day Czar.

Therefore, I was not shocked in 2005 when Putin sent Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to the gulag for daring to fund opposition parties. Nor was I surprised last week when he sent Russia’s most famous political dissident, world chess champion Garry Kasparov, to jail for daring to lead those parties in street protests against his attempt to rig the forthcoming parliamentary elections, which he consummated yesterday.

(Kasparov was released after serving five days – just in time to cast his protest vote as pictured here to the right.)

But even Bush could not have been surprised by the lengths to which Putin went to ensure not only a landslide victory for his party, United Russia, but also a huge turnout – to give his de facto dictatorship the patina of democratic legitimacy.

Although, given all of his open and notorious rigging and intimidation in this respect, I am surprised that early results indicate that Putin’s party will win only about 62 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, this would still guarantee United Russia an unchallengeable majority of over 300 seats in the 450-seat State Duma.

The vote affirmed the main idea: that Vladimir Putin is the national leader, that the people support his course, and this course will continue. [United Russia party leader and parliament speaker Boris Gryzlov]

Never mind that Putin is constitutionally prohibited from continuing as Russia’s “national leader” when his second consecutive presidential term ends in May 2008.

But I’ve already delineated Putin’s master plan to remain Russia’s ruler for life in related articles. Therefore, I shall suffice to simply disabuse all of you of any expectation that accusations of fraud by watchdog groups, or even his “frenemy” Bush, will have any impact on the Putinization of Russia.

After all, revenues from the oil and gas companies he has nationalized – not only to serve his political agenda but also to rebuild Russia’s Cold War military might – have made Putin impervious to criticism. And this is especially the case when it comes to dissidents. In fact, he dismissed them last week as “foreign-fed jackals who, at the behest of the West, would return Russia to the poverty and instability of the 1990s”, when, incidentally, democratic reforms were thriving under former president Boris Yeltsin….

Accordingly, I affirm: Hail Putin!

NOTE: Venezuela’s would-be president for life, Hugo Chavez, found out the hard way yesterday what Putin has known for years; namely, that there’s no such thing as a democratic (or benign) dictatorship. Because even though, like Putin, he has oil revenues to bribe foreign partners, reward domestic supporters and intimidate enemies (foreign and domestic), Venezuelans handed this wannabe dictator a humiliating defeat by rejecting his master plan to reform Venezuela in his own image.

But more on this neo-Castro thug tomorrow….

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