Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 3 – Although
intended to project force and dynamism, Gleb Pavlovsky says, Vladimir Putin’s
address to the Federal Assembly in which he talked at length about Russia’s new
arms “in essence was a demonstration of weakness. Russia is not ready for
negotiations, nor for development, nor even for war.”
Putin’s speech, the Moscow
commentator says, was “his personal PR action” but he made “the classic mistake
of amateurs” – each group received “a signal not addressed to it.” Pensioners
were frightened, the military wasn’t reassured, and the West wasn’t
impressed. The latter two know the real
situation is not what Putin described (snob.ru/selected/entry/134865).
Those in the hall
clapped with apparent enthusiasm and approval – but “just try not to jump up
and clap when your neighbor does,” Pavlovsky observes – but the only people who
were perhaps were really impressed and pleased were those looking forward to
spending and taking their cut from the trillions in new spending Putin talked
about.
“But the sarcasm with which the
social networks caught the absurdity of the message is another side of the
general weakness,” Pavlovsky says. “To be strong is simple: one need only to
present an alternative to the regime of national weakening [and] an alternative
means another political agenda.”
However, “where is it?”
Some say that everyone should look
at the domestic part of Putin’s remarks. They are different in some respects,
the commentator continues; but in one respect, they are identical: they are based
on the proposition that everything can be solved by throwing money at it with
no change in the way business is conducted.
That may serve those in his audience
who are part of the way business is carried out under Putin; but it won’t work
on the larger issues that the Russian president talked about without any clear
understanding or ideas about how these things could in fact be dealt with
successfully.
“Why is all this possible?” Pavlovsky
asks rhetorically. The answer is simple: as a result of “the collapse of
strategic administration at the upper reaches of the system. Despite the hopes
of the Kudrin command, modernizing ideas in such a system will not work: they
will be destroyed by the poor way in which things are run from above.”
“You cannot carry out modernization
with such administrators who do not distinguish between Russia’s real potential
and comic films. Stalin, it is said, also judged about the state of the
collective farms by the film ‘The Kuban Cossacks’ but only after having become
quite old,” Pavlovsky argues.
The current regime has “unlimited”
opportunity to do harm, but “the demonstration of military might” on the video
screen behind Putin “will not frighten military circles in the West.” They know
what Russia can and can’t do and can distinguish not only between those two
things but between reality and what Putin talked about.
“This is dangerous,” Pavlovsky says.
The world is changing and “new appetites and new technological platforms are
taking shape.” But for Russia to be part of this, it needs a reason to do so.
Freedom isn’t enough: it needs “space for creativity” rather than the kind of
micromanagement that is no management characteristic of Putin’s siloviki.
But what the speech showed was
something even worse than the weakness of Putin personally and his regime: It
showed “the weakness of the [Russian] nation” itself. It would be well to recall what a younger
Putin once said: “The weak get beaten.”
No one needs to reach agreements with them about anything, let alone “about
a new world order.”
“Today,” the Russian commentator
says, “Russia shows that it is simply not ready for talks, for development or
even for war. And with this situation,
it is entering the next six years” of Putin’s term. “Before us is the prospect of an artificially
weakened country, run by a weak president.”
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