Thursday, February 5, 2015

Unlike Mussolini, Putin Can’t Make the Trains Run on Time – and Russians are Taking Notice


Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, February 5 – Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, it was said, might have failed at everything else, but at least he kept the trains running on time. Now, it appears that Vladimir Putin isn’t capable of doing that and his all-too-public wrestling with the problem is generating concerns among Russians about his ability to govern the country.

 

            When Vladimir Putin finally focused on the fact that Russian Railways was ending service on most of the local electric trains in the country, he exclaimed “have they gone out of their minds” and ordered the government to come up with the 15 billion rubles (250 million US dollars) to restore service.

 

            But it quickly became apparent that Putin not only was simply reacting to a problem the media was calling attention to rather than adopting a positive policy to deal with it and that even if his order is carried out, it will affect only those routes that have been shut down this year and not the larger number cut eliminated over the last two years (slon.ru/fast/economics/rzhd-vosstanovit-tolko-tret-iz-otmenennykh-za-dva-goda-elektrichek-1212105.xhtml, polit.ru/article/2015/02/05/trains_putin/,kommersant.ru/doc/2660776 and newizv.ru/lenta/2015-02-05/214393-vozvrashenie-elektrichek-budet-stoit-gosbjudzhetu-15-mlrd-rublej.html).

 

            That has sparked skepticism among Russians about Putin’s much-ballyhooed “hands on” approach to governance.  In the words of one blogger, after Putin’s outburst, the electric trains are supposed to run. But what this shows is that “the consequences of his ‘hands on” approach is not the prevention of problems but [only] a reaction to them” (7x7-journal.ru/post/53813).

 

            That of course suggests that Russians are beginning to understand that as long as Putin is in power, their country will lurch from problem to problem and crisis to crisis, with none really ever being resolved, and that they if not he will be the first victims of the Kremlin leader’s unfortunate approach.

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