Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 23 – The Kremlin has
suggested and some observers believe that the primary elections involving
Russia’s ruling party United Russia represent another step toward the
democratization of Russia. But Yevgeny Ikhlov says that they in fact represent
Vladimir Putin’s preparation for a purge of the elite.
On the Kasparov.ru portal, the
Moscow commentator argues that “the cynically barbaric ‘primaries’ showed the
preparation of the authorities for an open move toward fascism” and even more
to a purge within their own ranks as the first step toward new and broader set
of repressions against the population (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=574286EB60B3E).
Not only to these primaries show what
the upcoming Duma elections will be like, Ikhlov says, but “’the experience of
history shows’” as many like to say “that real mass terror of a tyrannical
regime begins first precisely with violence directed at its radical wing,”
rather than at those opposed to it.
“Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ arose not
out of Chekist violence against the monarchists, the liberals and the SRs, but
out of the suppression of ‘the left opposition.’” And earlier in France, the
Jacobin terror “became completely paranoid right after the guillotining of
leftists from among the Paris Jacobins.”
That is exactly what these primaries
in Russia suggest is ahead because they “showed all the internal readiness of the
party of power to openly fascist methods of rule,” the commentator continues,
first against their own ranks and then against the population of the Russian
Federation as a whole.
Everyone needs to “free themselves
from the ‘émigré’ view on political processes. In the 1920s, monarchists in
Paris and Berlin gloated when they saw the violence Moscow visited on the SRs
and Trotskyites … and in the 1930s, all the emigres together gloated equally
about the Stalin’s extermination of the Bolsheviks and the rest of ‘the
Leninist guard.’”
They failed to see, Ikhlov
continues, that this action by the Soviet dictator opened the way to “an
alliance with Hitler, the fall of Paris, the defeats of 1941-1942 and millions
of additional victims…”
Some fail to see the same pattern
now, and it is necessary that they understand that “the demise of Putin’s ‘decorative
normality’ just like the demise of perestroika a quarter of a century ago”
opens the way to the construction of a broad social front, which,” Ikhlov says,
he “would call ‘anti-adventurist.’”
In support of his argument, the
Moscow commentator points to four aspects of the just-completed primaries:
First, the shoving aside of the popular front Putin had pushed forward five
years ago because some of its members believed too much in what he said then
and therefore could no longer be counted on to follow every twist and turn in
the party line.
Second, the primaries showed that the Kremlin
was prepared to sacrifice the “completely Black Hundred freaks” within its
ranks in order to protect the thieves at the core of United Russia.
Third, Ikhlov notes, “those who joined the
party of power” recently just like those who joined the CPSU after 1956 “suffered
a crushing defeat,” again so that the core of the party could be ready to take reprisals
on them and their obvious but narrow careerism.
And fourth, while the center may have wanted to keep up
appearances for the West, the ranks of United Russia locally, given “the
bureaucratically well controlled situation,” wasn’t concerned about doing so –
and of course, that is exactly what Putin and the Kremlin want and need if they
are going to start purging the elite and then the country.
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