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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