Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, November 05, 2010

A former country heard from

Former Soviet leader Gorbachev isn't happy with the regime Putin seems to be creating or with the party Putin has created. Why not? He thinks Putin is running things just as Gorbachev did in the USSR.

How well could your students identify the parallels between now and then?

Gorbachev Says Putin Obstructs Democracy

Mikhail S. Gorbachev [right], who once supported Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, is voicing growing frustration with Mr. Putin’s leadership, saying that he had undermined Russia’s fledgling democracy by crippling the opposition forces.

“He thinks that democracy stands in his way,” Mr. Gorbachev said.

“I am afraid that they have been saddled with this idea that this unmanageable country needs authoritarianism,” Mr. Gorbachev said, referring to Mr. Putin and his close ally, President Dmitri A. Medvedev. “They think they cannot do without it.”

In an interview, Mr. Gorbachev even described Mr. Putin’s governing party, United Russia, as a “a bad copy of the Soviet Communist Party.” Mr. Gorbachev said party officials were concerned entirely with clinging to power and did not want Russians to take part in civic life.

Mr. Gorbachev was especially disparaging of Mr. Putin’s decision in 2004, when he was president, to eliminate elections for regional governors and the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Those positions are now filled by Kremlin appointees. The impact of this change was illustrated in Mr. Medvedev’s dismissal last month of Moscow’s longtime mayor, who was replaced with a Putin loyalist.

“Democracy begins with elections,” Mr. Gorbachev said. “Elections, accountability and turnover.”...