Political cars
Most observers expected civil society in Russia to grow out of small businesses and a new class of entrepreneurs. Hardly anyone expected civil society to be based on car ownership. (And, maybe it's not.)Road Rage at the Kremlin
Every society has a breaking point. In Boston it was the tea tax; in France it was Marie Antoinette’s wigs... Russians love their cars...
To this day... it’s a bad idea to get between them and their cars. And the Kremlin apparently knows it. On Nov. 17, after an outcry from motorists, President Dmitri A. Medvedev intervened to block a bill that would have doubled taxes on car owners — a stinging humiliation for Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, which had approved it unanimously the previous Friday. Something almost unheard of had penetrated the membrane of Russian politics: the demands of its citizens...
It may be, as one Russian commentator has suggested, that motorists are playing the role in Russia’s civic development that was expected to fall to entrepreneurs and small businessmen. Yuri Gladysh, writing for the opposition Web site kasparov.ru, said the “army of car owners” has enough muscle and organization to alarm Russian officials...
Not everyone saw the transport-tax reversal as the result of grass-roots democracy. Though motorists’ groups held protests against the proposed tax increase, including a five-minute “horn of wrath,” the actions passed virtually unnoticed in the capital.
Some Kremlin-watchers interpreted the reversal as a purely political move, signaling that Mr. Medvedev seeks to challenge the authority of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, or United Russia...
But it would certainly not be unprecedented if angry motorists rattled the Kremlin. Last December, thousands of motorists and car dealers in the Far East took to the streets to protest tariffs on imported cars...
One reason the motorists may worry Moscow is that they are, mostly, young people... The automobile lobby... defies ideological labels. It is also growing: Russians now own 34.6 million cars, three to four times more than at the end of Communism in 1991, experts estimate...
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Labels: economics, political culture, Russia
posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:53 AM
1 Comments:
You can beat up on people but only to a certain extent. Sounds like in Russia they've reached that extent.
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