Friday, July 12, 2019

Putinism Must Not be Treated as Russia’s Internal Affair, Yakovenko Says


Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 11 – Just like his communist predecessors, Vladimir Putin is committed to spreading the features of the system he has imposed on Russia to as much of the rest of the world as possible, a drive that requires the world to view what he is about not as a domestic problem for Russia but as an existential problem for the world, Igor Yakovenko says.
           
            Soviet rulers defined themselves and their task as opposing the capitalist system wherever possible so as to bring it down and supplant it with their version of socialism. Putin today represents if anything a broader challenge: he opposes the ideas of liberalism and human rights wherever they exist (detaly.co.il/pochemu-putinizm-ne-yavlyaetsya-vnutrennim-delom-rossii/).

            Having worked with unfortunate success to undermine or eliminate those values within the borders of the Russian Federation, the Kremlin leader seeks to do the same thing abroad via all the means at his disposal, military action where possible, subversion and propaganda everywhere else, Yakovenko continues.

            In doing so, Putin has adopted a clever strategy. Because the only systemic ideological alternative to liberalism is one or another form of fascism, Putin has not offered any model of the future for all to compete with it.” Instead, he has attacked liberalism as such but insisted on “the right of each people to choose its own particular path to the future.”

            That idea is viewed with sympathy, the Russian commentator says, “in various corners of the planet especially where dictatorial and authoritarian regimes exist, regimes which Putin’s Russia as a rule supports.”  And with the rise of Trump in the US, the chief defender of human rights around the world, has retreated from that responsibility.

            Tragically, “the defense of human rights has been reduced to the private affair of human rights defenders,” Yakovenko says.

            Supporters of the notion that each people should have the right to choose its own form of government even if it is authoritarian often point to Singapore where the population has backed an authoritarian regime for decades in exchange for a rising standard of living and where that regime does not aspire to extending its kind of governance to others.

            But Russia is different in two respects. On the one hand, the Russian people “in exchange for freedom have received a mafia state, legal arbitrariness, corruption as the basis of the economy, and poverty. And on the other, the Putin regime has the power and desire to spread its system to other countries.

            Not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries may be inhumane but it is in a certain sense rational, Yakovenko says, because it is “difficult to demand from Swedes, the Dutch or the English that they take up the budgets for the citizens of Turkmenistan or Somalia, especially if neither understands themselves to be like Europeans.”

            But when an authoritarian and dictatorial regime like Russia seeks to spread its system to others, the situation is very different.  Putin wants to see his anti-liberal approach spread across the world, and his government has the resources to promote that notion.  As a result, Putinism represents a “mortal” danger to the world.

            “The only possible strategy in regard to such a regime must be its isolation, delegitimization, and ultimate destruction,” the analyst argues.  And because it is going to be so difficult to separate Putinism from Russia even after his passing, there is an extremely great probability that at that time, “the Russian Federation won’t exist in its current borders.”

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