Putin Dictatorship Unleashed by July 1 Vote, Commentators Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 10 – In the nine days since the vote on the amendments to the Russian Constitution, the Putin regime has dramatically expanded its attacks on journalists, opposition figures, municipal deputies, and NGO, suggesting that the Kremlin feels it is now free to crack down on any resistance to its increasingly dictatorial rule.

            Many commentators are speaking out when they can, often by necessity most clearly in sites hosted abroad that the dictatorship cannot yet control or suppress. Two examples of this are articles by Aleksandr Podrabinek on the VotTak television which is based in Poland and Ivan Preobrazhensky on Deutsche Welle.

            Podrabinek says that now in the wake of the amendment vote, Europe has two dictators, not just Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus as many have long observed but Vladimir Putin of Russia, as few have wanted to acknowledge in the hopes that he will change course (vot-tak.tv/programmy/diktatura-putina-okonchatelno-ukrepilas/).

            But for now at least, those hopes are for naught. Over the last 20 years, the rights activist says, the Putin regime has step by step moved toward a classical dictatorship. “Being both careful and intelligent, Putin hasn’t forced events but rather slowly but surely built up his one-man rule.”

            He moved first to suppress or geld the independent press. Then, he gave himself new powers over the legislative and judicial branches and over regional and municipal officials. And then he restricted the rights and freedoms of all Russians, thus “concentrating ever greater power in his hands.”

            Now, Podrabinek says, “in terms of the concentration of power, the current [Putin] regime is completely comparable with the dictatorships of the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, the Nazis in the Third Reich, the communists in China, North Korea, and Cuba, and with those of Francisco Franco in Spain, Antonio Salazar in Portugal, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile.” 

            And just like in those dictatorships, the longer the ruler stays in power, the more suspicious and ruthless in striking out against his real and perceived opponents he becomes and more he comes to rely on the development of a cult of personality as the only justification for his continued rule.

            It may be that Putin has acted in the way he has in the last nine days precisely because he was anything but pleased by what the referendum showed. He didn’t get the overwhelming and enthusiastic support he hoped for – the results were falsified and the result of enormous government pressure and Putin knows this.

            But if that is the case, Podrabinenk suggests, it is also true that the Kremlin leader wants to send a signal to all those who may be dissatisfied with him: “From no one, I will speak with you exclusively in the language of force.”  That message won’t be lost on his supporters who like the backers of other dictatorships will be delighted to follow that line.

            In his Deutsche Welle commentary which is entitled “The Putin Era is Just Beginning,” Preobrazhensky makes some of the same points and additional ones as well and sees the vote on the constitutional amendments as a turning point in Russia’s history (dw.com/ru/комментарий-эра-владимира-путина-только-начинается/a-54110986).

            In the wake of that vote, “it has suddenly turned out that until 2020, we still lived in another Yeltsin Russia, not only because we kept formally the old although much abused constitution but because the state machine had brakes.” Now those have been taken off, and the machine is doing what it and its master really want.

            Before the vote, the powers that be acted as if they weren’t completely confident of their positions. They thus acted carefully. They didn’t talk about changing borders and they didn’t arrest and harass people indiscriminately. But now they feel no such reason to hold back.  Indeed, “now everything has changed.” 

            In essence, “all those who don’t like the Putin plan are rapidly being deprived of their civil rights, and this could be only the beginning of the real ‘Putin era.’ How long it will last depends only on the Russian people, Preobrazhensky continues. But the machine has been set in motion and it will continue until it is stopped by the resistance of the population.