Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 15 – The arrest
of Aleksey Ulyukayev, the incumbent minister of economic development, for bribes
“sharply changes the rules of the game … among the power elites” by suggesting
that if a minister can be taken down in this way, so too can anyone else,
according to the Russkaya liniya portal (rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=76442).
Dozens of senior officials have been
removed from office for bribery and other crimes, “but not one of them was
publically accused of a crime, and all of them, with the rare exceptions … went
quietly on pension. Now, however, everything has changed, the old system of
checks and balances has been shaken and this cannot fail to put one on one’s
guard, the portal says.
Similar levels of shock have been
expressed by Moscow commentators across the political spectrum. Many predict that
more such “tectonic shifts” in the Russian capital are ahead (regnum.ru/news/economy/2205425.html).
And Vladimir Zhirinovsky suggests that now “everyone must be afraid (regnum.ru/news/economy/2205403.html).
More cautious writers have sought to
limit its meaning to being an attack only against liberals and reformers (echo.msk.ru/blog/gudkov/1874472-echo/)
or as a move toward bringing down the Medvedev government (ura.ru/news/1052267683). And some have linked it to the US elections (versia.ru/yekspert-zaderzhanie-ulyukaeva-svyazano-s-pobedoj-trampa-na-vyborax-v-ssha) or wondered about Putin’s precise
role in it (ej.ru/?a=note&id=30406)
(versia.ru/yekspert-zaderzhanie-ulyukaeva-svyazano-s-pobedoj-trampa-na-vyborax-v-ssha).
But
given Russian history, some are suggesting that Ulyukayev’s arrest represents a
return to Stalinism or to the period of Ivan the Terrible when the ruler
launched attacks on those around him in order to win favor with the population
and destroy any in the elite who might challenge him (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2016/11/15/pora_rubit_grebuwie_ruki/).
Perhaps the most intriguing of
commentaries of this kind albeit an indirect one comes in the course of an
interview Modest Kolerov on the Regnum news portal did with Russian historian
Oleg Ayrepetov about the ways in which the events of 1916 led ineluctably to
the revolutions of 1917 (regnum.ru/news/polit/2204855.html).
That is because, the two appear to
agree, those things that the opposition did to try to save the situation had
the effect of undermining the state still further. Those who killed Rasputin,
for example, although this is not one of the cases they discussed, believed
they were removing a cancer from the throne, but they only accelerated the
collapse of tsarist authority.
Arresting Ulyukayev could be another
such case, something done to defend the powers that be that in fact undermines
them, a confirmation of the old observation that the most dangerous time for a
bad state is when it concludes that it has no choice but to do something to try
to rectify the situation.
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