Posted on February 29, 2008 - by Venik

Western Journalists in Russia: Dazed and Confused

I just finished reading AP’s “Putin is leaving presidency, but Putinism is now Russia’s political orthodoxy” (Associated Press, 2008-Feb-29). It is truly amazing how little Western journalists know about Russia’s politics, economy and history. It is equally surprising how perverted the concept of democracy has become in its American interpretation.

Apparently, when a government leader enjoys overwhelming popular support, this is what they call autocracy these days. It doesn’t seem to matter that more than 80% of Russians strongly believe that Putin played a positive role in the country’s development. Western media is trying to convince us that it doesn’t matter what the vast majority of Russian people thinks about their own political system; it only matters what Associated Press and Washington Post journalists think.

“After Putin was elected in March 2000, it was his job — essentially — to build a replacement for the socialist Utopia.”

What Utopia? How much crack did they have to smoke at AP to call the USSR a Utopia? Or, perhaps, Associated Press has been taken over by the Communists? I’d like these AP assholes and their families to experience what the Russians had to experience during the decade of 1989-1999: a complete collapse of their country’s economic, legal and political systems, when people haven’t been paid salaries for months on end and when employers offered to pay back wages in whatever product the company produced. It would be great to see AP reporters try to feed their families with copies of International Herald Tribune.

“Yeltsin was, in a sense, a demolition expert who brought the remnants of the Soviet Union crashing down around the heads of the Russian people.”

Yeltsin was the drunken head of the Communist Party in Moscow – in the CPSU hierarchy this position was second only to that of the Secretary General. By all Party standards and traditions Yeltsin was the logical choice for the top job at the Kremlin. But the Politburo passed him up for a relatively obscure regional Party boss from the provincial Stavropol – Gorbachev.

Replacing Gorbachev at the helm and destroying the remnants of the old system became a personal crusade for Yeltsin. And when, through undermining the Constitution and ordering a tank assault against the Parliament, Yeltsin finally succeeded, he just let a close-knit group of personal friends and associates buy up USSR’s massive industry and other state-owned properties for pennies on a dollar. In a few short years Yeltsin’s incompetence and contempt for law have done more economic damage to Russia than Wehrmacht did in the 1940s. The West applauded: this was true democracy.

In less than three years under Gorbachev and Yeltsin the country went from a superpower building the space shuttle and planning a mission to Mars to food rationing and semi-feudal economy of natural exchange. Russia, with its vast natural resources, massive industry, powerful army, exceptionally well-educated population (more academic graduates than any other country in the world), cutting-edge science and technology , was reduced to asking Bulgaria and Hungary for food and financial aid.

During the Great Depression, the GDP of the US shrunk an estimated 25%. I am sure you’ve read in your high school history book about the consequences. During the period between 1989 and 1995 Russia’s GDP dropped some 40% (possibly as much as 75%, according to some researchers). So you can imagine the impact this had on the quality of life, which wasn’t too high to begin with. So was Yeltsin a “demolition expert”? He was the mushroom-cloud-laying motherfucker, as far as the economy was concerned.

So what about Putin?

“Gross domestic product has grown by 70 percent from 2000 to 2007, real incomes have doubled and the poverty rate has been cut almost in half. Russia today has more billionaires than any nation except the United States and Germany. Perhaps one-fifth of Russians belong to a fledgling middle class.”

Clearly, if Yeltsin was praised by the West as a pillar of Russian democracy, Putin has to be the evil dictator bent on improving the standard of living in Russia. Since it would be rather difficult to accuse Putin of political or economic incompetence (which doesn’t stop the journalists from constantly reminding their readers of Putin’s KGB past and alluding to his lack of political experience), Western media accuses Putin of starting the war in Chechnya:

“He launched a war that left the capital of Grozny in ruins. Today, major fighting in Chechnya is largely over: but the victory came at a cost, critics say, of massive human rights abuses and thousands of deaths.”

Actually, no, he didn’t. Conditions for this war were created by Gorbachev, whose lack of understanding of national and religious tensions in Chechnya was absolutely astonishing for someone who for many years has been governing a neighboring region. The war itself was launched by Yeltsin long before Putin was even a blip on Kremlin’s political radar. Like everything else Yeltsin did during his alcohol-dazed career, the war in Chechnya was a complete disaster.

The 1996 Khasavyurt accord put the war on hold just long enough for Yeltsin to get re-elected. That year Yeltsin’s election campaign needed massive financial injections from the oligarchs and various Western “interest groups”, as well as around-the-clock media coverage just to scratch out a slim lead over the Communists. In 1996 Russia was sitting on the needle of Western financial aid and not too many in the West were complaining about Yeltsin’s election campaign (seriously, what was the alternative for the West – the Commies?)

But no amount of financial aid from the West was enough to both enrich the likes of Berezovsky and to feed the country. The preference was given to the oligarchs and, when few believed it could get any worse, the economy finally collapsed (even more) in 1998. For Yeltsin there was a choice: try to fix the economy or find a way to distract public attention. Yeltsin promptly launched the second campaign in Chechnya and, after a rapid succession of Prime Ministers, finally settled on the young and seemingly easy-to-control Putin to lead the charge. Grozny was in ruins long before Putin ever set foot in Kremlin. Today the situation in Chechnya remains tense, but the fighting is largely over and the province is being rebuilt. This is a direct result of Putin’s personal involvement, his support for the military and the consistent policies of his government.

“But his drive for economic modernization stalled in the midst of his battles with the so-called “oligarchs,” financiers who made billions in questionable privatization deals under Yeltsin in the 1990s. Putin made a pact: the oligarchs could keep their money if they didn’t challenge him politically.

Those who refused were imprisoned — like the former Yukos Oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky in October 2003 — or fled, like the business magnate Boris Berezovsky. Assets of these pariah tycoons, meanwhile, were acquired by state corporations or cooperative tycoons, often at bargain prices.”

Sometimes it’s really hard to see any point behind the Western criticism of Putin’s administration. More often than not, this negativity just seems to be criticism for the sake of criticism. What is this AP editor trying to say? That Putin should have put the rest of the oligarchs in jail, as opposed to singling out a few dozen of them? Or, perhaps, that his government should have paid top dollar for the re-nationalized Yukos assets that were privatized in “questionable deals under Yeltsin”?

Putin’s approach to dealing with oligarchs was very well balanced. He did not go overboard, as many feared he might, with his re-nationalization program. He concentrated on key resources of strategic importance to the country’s economy. Unlike Yeltsin, Putin chose to act not through the power of presidential decree and armored divisions but through the country’s slow and convoluted legal system. And in the end there are few in Russia who have any doubts of Khodorkovsky’s guilt or feel any sympathy for the thief.

At the same time Putin found a way for the State to establish a working relationship with the more business-oriented Russian oligarchs by creating the tax amnesty program and bringing back the flat tax. As the result, Russian business boomed during the eight years of Putin’s administration. There is no other way to put it: the results speak for themselves.

“Under electoral laws adopted in 2006, more than half of political parties were disbanded and liberal democratic opposition figures lost their seats in parliament. Political movements that challenge the Kremlin have been harassed, their activists arrested, their rallies dispersed by club-wielding riot police.”

Political parties disbanded themselves as the result of their ineffectiveness and lack of popular support. Most of these “parties” were not parties at all under the Russian legislation. These people never took the time to follow the law and to legally register their ragtag movements. Liberal democratic opposition leaders lost their credibility through their affiliations with right-wing political extremists and foreign interest groups. Protesters were dispersed by riot police when they challenged the law – not the Kremlin – just like political protesters are dispersed by riot police in Washington and everywhere else around the world. And, yes, some “political” parties were outlawed by the Supreme Court for consistently breaking the law – like the National-Bolshevik Party with their Nazi-like insignia and ideology.

The problem of most Western journalists writing about Russia is that they know next to nothing about life in Russia. A Western journalist in Russia, to rephrase Walther Sobchak, is a like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know what happened. These guys need to grow up and realize that democracy is what the people want and not what the White House press secretary says it should be this week.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Related posts:

1. Western press on Russian elections
2. Russia opens gas pipeline that runs direct to western Europe
3. The Makings of a Successful Foreign Policy
4. Russia lashes out at western critics of Khodorkovsky trial
5. Georgia’s Attack on South Ossetia: Washington’s Role