Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 17 – Telephone bomb threats continue to force the evacuation of
buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg (regnum.ru/news/accidents/2574492.html) and have affected their most prominent target, the
Mariinsky Theater in the northern capital, a trend that has forced the central
media to cover a phenomenon it earlier downplayed.
Such
coverage now of an attack on such a prominent place – see, for example, the
article at regnum.ru/news/accidents/2574506.html – will only spark
additional questions about the inability of the Russian intelligence and force
structures to do anything to prevent this new plague (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/02/new-wave-of-bomb-threats-forces-mass.html).
And these are likely to be even more
urgent because this reportage follows a time when such things were not reported
and because of two other negative developments in the capital that also have
been reported – the collapse of the roof of a St. Petersburg university
building (meduza.io/feature/2019/02/16/v-sankt-peterburge-v-universitete-itmo-obrushilas-krysha-zhertv-net-i-eto-pohozhe-na-chudo)
and violent ethnic clashes in Moscow (https://meduza.io/news/2019/02/17/v-moskve-nochyu-proizoshli-dve-massovye-draki-v-odnoy-iz-nih-pogibli-dva-cheloveka).
It is often said that the most dangerous
time for a bad government is when it tries to begin to reform itself. A
corollary of that observation is that a government that begins reporting bad
news in greater amounts after suppressing news about earlier equivalents may unintentionally
lead its citizens to conclude that things are getting far worse far faster than
they actually are.
In the current environment, where
Russians are already angry about their falling standard of living and the
regime’s spending on foreign adventures rather than on their needs, that
pattern may turn out be even more true that earlier, with one or another piece
of bad news becoming the trigger for a new wave of protest.
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