New at Reason

David Weigel | October 17, 2006

Cathy Young pores over the case of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya and sees another victim of Russia's declining democracy.

Comments

|10.17.06 @ 4:21AM|#

Who seriously expects Russian rulers to stop behaving the way that Russian rulers have behaved for a thousand years?

|10.17.06 @ 7:16AM|#

A British colleage of mine who worked in Russia up until about 18 months ago has just been back for a week. He says that things are creeping back to the old Soviet days bit by bit. His words were along the lines of "I'm worried about the future of that country, particularly while Putin is in power". What is it with Russians and brutal authoritarian government? Their history is littered with it...

|10.17.06 @ 9:07AM|#

WHAT? Are you saying that the democracies in Georgia and Ukraine aren't creating a domino effect that has the Russians rise up and demand democracy? But it worked so well when the democratic Iraq revolutionized the autocratic Middle East.

Dan T.|10.17.06 @ 9:18AM|#

Hmm...and I thought the free market cured all. I guess not.

|10.17.06 @ 9:34AM|#

Cudos to Cathy, excellent article and right on the money. The only thing I can really fault her article for is failure to explain what "brigades" are in more detail: those are groups of individuals on internet forums, widely believed to be paid by the government with the goal to derail the discussion of the government's crimes and to proclaim superiority of Russia under the current regime (very much in line with old Soviet propaganda). As a semi-regular anonymous contributor to grani.ru forums, I can vouch that this phenomenon is real.

|10.17.06 @ 10:40AM|#

@Dan T.
Would you mind considering this?
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/country.cfm?id=Russia

And would you mind considering that most classical liberals stress the need for transparency, rule of law, free speech, judicial system, etc. for establishing a stable free market economy.

Thank you.

|10.17.06 @ 10:42AM|#

As a semi-regular anonymous contributor to grani.ru forums, I can vouch that this phenomenon is real.

There ya go Dan T. Finally, a place where your posting talents can be truly appreciated.

|10.17.06 @ 10:49AM|#

Russians have had a deep fear of 'weak' leadership that dates back to the Mongol conquest/occupation of the 12th-14th centuries.

Before then, Kievan Rus was pretty much like every other medieval shithole, but there were some interesting exceptions, like the free city of Novgorod, which had a primitive form of representative democracy long before the notion took hold in the West. I say 'primitive', because the main way the representatives of Novgorod decided major issues was to go to the town bridge and start throwing each other off. The last man standing won the debate. I kinda wish Congress would march out to the 14th Street Bridge and do the same thing, but I doubt most of our sedentary leaders could handle the strain.

The Mongol conquest scarred the Russian psyche, however, and they've long veered between brutal strongmen and halting interludes of relative freedom, which often were quite chaotic. The Yeltsin years often made me think of Russia's "Time of Troubles" in the late 16th Century, during the interlude between Rurikovich and Romanoff dynasties.

This is probably a terrible way to put it, but I liken Russia's political culture to a national form of Battered Wife Syndrome.

|10.17.06 @ 1:13PM|#

The Russians have a deep belief in "The Good Tsar" - the notion that, if the man at the top knew about their particular problem, he would set it right.

This isn't unique to Russians - look how many people write to your Congressmen and our Members of Parliament to obtain redress for real or percieved injustices. The authoritarian history of Russia has made this tendency stronger. Tsarist and Soviet era propaganda often exploited this with showy displays of compassion for someone whose injuries were set right by the Tsar/Stalin/etc. Putin's attacks on the 'Oligarchs' fall directly into this model.

Just like us, Russians are also prone to "shoot the messenger" - blaming evils on those who bring them to light instead of the true perpetrators.

|10.17.06 @ 2:26PM|#

Putin also said that "she had minimal influence on political life in Russia" and added, "This murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications." Thus, in one breath, the Russian president not only dismissed Politkovskaya's work as insignificant but also branded it as harmful to her country.

Wow, what a prick.

Still, you've got to wonder about the prospects for freedom in Russia in a country where people accepted Stalin and he is still relatively (say compared to Hitler in Germany) popular more than half a century later. And now they accept this from their government while the rest of the West is moving towards representative democracy.

Maybe Putin is the best Russia can hope for.

|10.17.06 @ 2:39PM|#

How is this news?
If you know Russians you know they have NO value for the following:
"need for transparency, rule of law, free speech, judicial system"

Bring them to the US/West in general and they will see all this and embrace it but left in Russia they will NEVER be a normal country.

Everyone shrugs their shoulders and worries about the fuedal lord. Same as it ever was.

|10.17.06 @ 3:03PM|#

Er...maybe Russia IS normal. Most nations are ruled by their elites, more or less explicitly. Free elections enable you to choose which of the elites you want governing you, with small differences in policy, but the foundations of the system cannot really be changed. A free press might expose some of the excesses of the system (for example, the embarrassing crop insurance program cited on this forum) but rarely challenges its premises (in that we have to help those poor, poor farmers SOMEHOW).

I'm sorry for the violence in Russia, but pretty much every government is run by the elites, for the elites. The elites in Russia have never had an especially light touch, but they are better than the elites in, say, Colombia. For that matter, the only real changes in the Ukraine and Georgia have been in foreign policy. Now they want to join NATO, but the average citizen wouldn't really know the difference between the old regime and the new.

|10.17.06 @ 10:36PM|#

The one good thing about today's Russia is that lots of hot women live there, and they all want to meet ME, according to my in-box.