Kremlin’s Increasing Repression Reflects Nature of Putin Regime Rather than a Response to Protests, Skobov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 3 – Many commentators suggest that the Kremlin’s increasing repression reflects panic or anger about protests against the Putin regime, Aleksandr Skobov says; but in fact, it has “objective causes” within the regime and won’t be affected by any change in the behavior of the opposition.

            According to the Moscow commentator, “the regime is instinctively seeking to overcome the contradiction between its fundamental essence which is ever more obviously fascist and ever more hardline and its packing which as before completely imitates Western liberal parliamentary democracy” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5D4533676087E).

                As the latter “packaging” ever more often gets in the way of what the regime is really about, Skobov continues, it will dispense with that and use force.  This “tightening of the screws” will not be affected by what the opposition does but only by what the regime sees as its own inherent needs. 

            “Political force by the regime inevitably will grow to the extent that the impact of official propaganda is weakening and the mechanisms of the moral corruption of society with conformism and subservience cease to work,” the commentator says.  The regime has no other choice but to increase repression to maintain itself.

            No one should hope or expect that if the opposition avoids angering the Kremlin that it will be “possible to preserve some comfortable marginal ghetto in which the opposition has been driven for a long time and where it won’t be especially bothered but rather allowed to play in its sandbox.”

            Now, as should be obvious to everyone, “the regime has moved to the complete cleansing of the remaining political reservations, and the opposition as a result as no other path except resistance – precisely resistance and not simply protest.”