Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 8 – The inability of Vladimir Putin and his regime to admit error or
take responsibility “is paralyzing the system and blocking its ability to get
out of difficult situations” like the Skripal case and the government’s plan to
boost retirement ages, Sergey Shelin says.
Acknowledgement
of mistakes if it is sincere, the Rosbalt commentator continues, “is a very strong
political move, which Yeltsin sometimes used with success.” The Skripal case
and the pension plan are two obvious Russian cases which “require something
similar” given the costs of not doing something (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2018/09/07/1730474.html).
Unfortunately,
Shelin continues, “in the coordinates of the Putin system, recognition of
guilty and apologizing for mistakes simply do not exist.” And because the number of mistakes is
growing, this inability to do what is necessary is quickly becoming a major
problem because it reflects “growing systemic weakness,” one Moscow will have
to pay for more and more often.
Had
the Kremlin been able to admit a mistake in the case of Skripal early on,
perhaps shifting the blame to some lower-ranking official, it would have
escaped much of the opprobrium it has brought on itself and the new and harsher
sanctions that Western countries have avoided.
And
had the Putin regime been able to admit a mistake in the case of the pension
reform plan, perhaps by blaming Dmitry Medvedev or someone else and walking
away, it would have won credit with the population rather than sparked protests
that have left it with significantly less popular support and significantly more
public cynicism than before.
Its
failure to do either, Shelin argues, has weakened it; but its unwillingness to
face up to mistakes points to a more serious problem: both an unwillingness and
even an inability to learn from what is going on around it, a pattern that
almost guarantees there will be more and perhaps even larger errors of judgment
in the future.
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