Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 26 – Last week,
Kazan’s “Business-Gazeta” published the prediction by Artem Dragunov that
Vladimir Putin plans to do away with the office of Russian president and create
instead a State Council he would head. (For a discussion, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/09/will-russia-soon-cease-to-have-president.html).
Now, because of the enormous
attention that article attracted, the Tatarstan newspaper has published a
continuation of Dragunov’s argument, one that suggests Putin has far larger
plans for the reformation of the Russian political system and also one that the
paper again notes cannot be independently confirmed (business-gazeta.ru/article/323924).
According to Dragunov, who claims to
have insider knowledge, “the situation has developed even better than the
Kremlin had thought possible” both domestically and internationally and in each
case less by the Russian government’s actions than by the failures of its
foreign “’partners’” and shortcomings of the Russian opposition.
As a result and because United
Russia now has a constitutional majority, something that allows Putin to ignore
the other parties and even arrange for the replacement of their leaders and also
to push through changes in the country’s basic law, this is an appropriate
time, Dragunov says, to launch what he calls “Putin’s new program.”
The population is “ready for this”
and will vote for any changes Putin calls for in a referendum. People may complain about this or that, but
they will fall in line, as a result of the successes of the government’s
propaganda machine and their own interest in stability above all else.
The new Putin plan, Dragunov
continues, involves first of all, “the return of the USSR but without bright
ideological packaging on the basis of private property, reliance on history
including the Russian Empire with a corporate administration at the head of
which will stand an organization which one can call the KGB” or simplified, “”the
Office.’”
In addition, and this is the
unspoken part, Putin’s plan involves “the construction of a Russian China. The
successes of the Chinese,” but just now, no one in Moscow knows how to achieve this
end given the cadres “hunger” that has arisen from the emigration of many and the
collapse of the Russian educational system.
Among the first steps that the New
Putin Plan will involve will be the formation of an analogue to the KGB, major
personnel changes in the regional heads, and attacks on independent business in
the name of fighting corruption. The population will be only too pleased to
welcome all of this, Dragunov says. And it will support the formation of a
State Council as well.
According to the commentator, the
new State Council will consist of the head of the council and his deputies, the
security council, an experts’ council, the accounting chamber, the Russian
national guard, the federal protection service, and the heads of the houses of
parliament. The parliament may soon have three chambers rather than two.
There will be “many women” in the new
Russian government, the commentator continues, although the government will
lose its budgetary powers to the State Council and focus only on administration.
Even more radically, he says, Putin
is planning to move the capital east of the Urals, “not for political reasons
but for military ones.” He hopes to build a new capital on the model of Astana
or Brazilia, although many state functions will remain in Moscow or move among
the cities of Russia, again out of security considerations.
The new Putin plan, Dragunov says,
will involve the nationalization or re-nationalization of strategic parts of
the economy. It will seek to attract back to Russia many of those who have fled
abroad since 1991, and it will make places like Kaliningrad attractive centers
in order to win such people over.
Regarding Russia’s neighbors, the
analyst continues, “the most important role in the plans of the Kremlin”
includes Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, places that are a military buffer
against challenges from abroad and that Moscow will seek to control by
installing its own agents of influence in key positions.
As far as geopolitics is concerned, “everything
here is simple: Europe and the rest are occupied with their own problems, and
the more problems they have, the less time there is for them to put sticks in
the wheels of a New Russian Empire. Russia is forced to build its own Empire
because” others from China to the US to the Muslims are doing the same.
According to
Dragunov, all this will be announced by the New Year, and a referendum and
early presidential elections may follow in 2017.
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