Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 4 – Vladimir Putin’s
newly approved constitutional changes which among other things destroy the
division of powers in Russia and take the country out of the international legal
order will last as long as he is in power and cast a dark shadow on the country
until then, according to Moscow commentator Igor Chubais.
Abroad, these changes in the Russian
system will raise new questions not only about its membership in the Council of
Europe but also its status as one of the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council with the right of veto, he says. How can Russia occupy that
position if it doesn’t recognize international law? (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5F01F251B9891).
That is especially the case, Chubais
says, because Putin’s chief international defender, US President Donald Trump,
appears ever less likely to be re-elected. With him no longer in a position to
back the Kremlin leader regardless of what he does, Putin and his country will
be ever more isolated and weakened internationally.
But there is a second factor that
will be working against Putin: growing popular anger among Russians at what he
is doing. While the Moscow state since 1917 has insisted that the population
must support the government rather than the other way around, in fact, popular
resistance repeatedly forced the government to change – and Putin may not be
able to avoid that.
The Kronstadt and Tambov risings
forced Lenin to shift from War Communism to the New Economic Policy. The German
invasion forced Stalin to drop communist memes in favor of Russian nationalist
ones. And risings in the GULAG after Stalin’s death caused the communist
leadership to move toward a thaw.
And Gorbachev’s perestroika “did not
fall from the sky,” Chubais says. “It was a forced response to the pressure of
society, to the extraordinary resonance of the actions of a small group of
dissidents and to the Revolution of Anecdotes,” when the entire people laughed
at the existing regime.
What will happen now? “As a result
of the changes in the constitutions, the intellectual and economic life is the
country will get worse. That means that protest again will grow and even that
in one way or another the Putin regime will have to take that into account. It
can’t simply act as it would prefer.
But there is a third source of
problems ahead, one that has existed in Russia since 1917 and that is the
conflict between the political system and its leader, even when the leader has
created and seems in total control of the system. Lenin and his system played
to a draw, Stalin defeated it, but the system defeated Khrushchev, Brezhnev,
Gorbachev and even Yeltsin.
Until these constitutional changes,
it might have appeared that Putin was on a trajectory that would leave him the
victor over the system, Chubais says; but now, with these changes, his victory
may prove Pyrrhic and set the stage for his defeat by the system that he put in
place whose members have a different long-term agenda than he does.
The “no” vote in Nenets Autonomous
District about his amalgamation plans shows that Putin’s position is “not as
simple” as many assume as does the new political activism and willingness to
attack the Kremlin leader by name by formerly well-integrated “systemic”
opposition leader Gennady Zyuganov of the KPRF.
In all these sectors, Putin’s
situation is becoming more complicated and difficult because tensions are
rising. Having won approval of his amendments, he has put himself in a position
where future victories may be even harder to come by and future defeats by the international
system, his own system, and the Russian people more likely.
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