Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 6 – Various recent
polls show that Russians now trust Vladimir Putin and his entourage far less
than they did only a few years ago, but a more important loss of trust in that
country has passed largely unnoticed, Sergey Shelin argues. That is the
Kremlin’s loss of trust in the Russian people.
In a post on the Rosbalt news portal
yesterday, the Russian commentator suggests that the Putin regime “no longer
counts on its subjects” to love it or feels compelled to show any love for them,
a shift that presents certain problems given that the country stands before
presidential elections in March 2018 (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2017/05/05/1613449.html).
But those problems, he suggests,
only highlight the existence of the rulers’ distrust of the ruled. And the
regime’s efforts to suggest it does care about the people by talking about the
May 2012 decrees and pension indexing only call to mind the joke that “if the
people loses the trust of the authorities, then democratic principles require that
the people should resign” or be replaced.
This loss of trust in the people by the
authorities is perhaps most clearly seen by the decision of Vladimir Putin to
jointly with Patriarch Kirill to erect a memorial in the Kremlin to Grand Duke
Sergey who was killed in 1905, an action the Kremlin leadership said promotes
the strengthening of civic unity by condemning the use of force against any
target.
That contrasts with the Putin regime’s
silence about the murder four weeks earlier in 1905 of several hundred peaceful
Russian subjects in what has long been known as Bloody Sunday. Each of those who was killed at that time “had
exactly the same right to life as did the uncle of the emperor.”
But “our top people are so combined
in their thinking with the top people of the past that the very idea of
displaying even ritual respect to the simple people who suffered at the hands
of the authorities even in the past is absolutely alien to them,” the Rosbalt
commentator continues. Thus, there are no new monuments to the ordinary victims
of stardom: they “don’t count.”
“Today’s bosses are interested only
in the problems of bosses. Today those are their own; in the past, these were
the problems of previous generations of leading people.” And “this isolation
from the subjects, in combination with an absolute lack of trust in them is
constantly giving rise to incidents,” sometimes funny but sometimes tragic.
Such attitudes on the part of today’s
rulers reflect their origins in “the corporate culture” of the security
services in which “trust in ‘one’s own’ is partial, but to ‘outsiders’
completely non-existent.” Such a system may exist for a long time, but
it won’t be a happy one for either rulers or ruled.
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