Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 5 – Vladimir Putin’s
call for authorities in Russia’s regions – and especially those where
anti-regime protests occurred on March 26 – to organize anti-terrorist meetings
is so transparently political that it has offended many Russians who say they
should be allowed to grieve on their own and thus may backfire on the Kremlin.
The Kremlin leader has called for the
regions to organize such meetings in the wake of the St. Petersburg subway
bombing as a way of promoting national unity (newsland.com/community/politic/content/kreml-dal-ukazaniia-regionam-organizovat-antiterroristicheskie-mitingi-po-vsei-strane/5766093).
But as more than one commentator has
pointed out, Putin’s motivations are transparent and have little or nothing to
do with anything but his own power: he wants meetings in places where the March
26 demos took place in order to show that he can bring out more people than
Aleksey Navalny did (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=58E3E9CAC4A14).
That
intensifies antagonism toward Putin among the opposition, but Putin’s efforts
to exploit grief this time around is offending far more Russians who say that
for them it is important to grieve individually rather than in some formal and
meaningless public exercise (znak.com/2017-04-05/ekaterina_vinokurova_o_popytke_kremlya_organizovat_skorb).
To the extent that such feelings grow, the
Putin regime’s efforts in this regard will backfire leading ever more Russians
to view the regime as concerned only about its own survival rather than the
welfare of the people. That is something the opposition has argued for a long
time: Now, by his clumsy and overreaching action, Putin has unintentionally
encouraged Russians to believe exactly that.
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