One-party democracy?
If you're teaching about Russia or about to, there's a good article for your students in Sunday's New York Times. It's part of a series of articles that "will examine the crackdown in Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin."I think good questions to ask would be about the prospects for legitimacy of the regime under Putin's leadership.
Putin’s Iron Grip on Russia Suffocates His Opponents
"Over the past eight years, in the name of reviving Russia after the tumult of the 1990s, Mr. Putin has waged an unforgiving campaign to clamp down on democracy and extend control over the government and large swaths of the economy. He has suppressed the independent news media, nationalized important industries, smothered the political opposition and readily deployed the security services to carry out the Kremlin’s wishes.
"While those tactics have been widely recognized, they have been especially heavy-handed at the local level...
"Mr. Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. For most Russians, life is freer now than it was in the old days. Criticism of the Kremlin is tolerated, as long as it is not done in any broadly organized way, and access to the Internet is unfettered. The economy, with its abundance of consumer goods and heady rate of growth, bears little resemblance to the one under Communism.
"Still, as was made plain in dozens of interviews with political leaders, officials and residents of Nizhny Novgorod over several weeks, a new autocracy now governs Russia. Behind a facade of democracy lies a centralized authority that has deployed a nationwide cadre of loyalists that is not reluctant to swat down those who challenge the ruling party. Fearing such retribution, many of the people interviewed for this article asked not to be identified..."
Labels: legitimacy, political culture, politics, Russia
posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:08 AM
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