Paul
Goble
Staunton,
September 7 – Vladimir Putin may or may not succeed in absorbing Belarus into
Russia, but over the last two months, Moscow historian Sergey Medvedev says,
the Kremlin leader has succeeded in transforming Russia into Belarus, eliminating
most of the democratic arrangements that had set Russia off against its western
neighbor.
In a blog post that Novyye izvestiya
has now republished (newizv.ru/news/politics/07-09-2019/sergey-medvedev-za-dva-mesyatsa-rossiya-okonchatelno-prevratilas-v-belorussiyu),
Medvedev lists seven of Putin’s “achievements” in this direction. As the historian
puts it, Putin has “deprived” Russians of the following:
·
The
right to choose candidates, that is, even the conditional, imitation and
fraudulent democracy which had existed up to now.
·
The
right to play even according to their draconian and intentionally unfillable
rules.
·
The
right to protest, even peacefully and in a restricted way.
·
The
right to be on the streets of a city near where protests are occurring.
·
The
right to self-defense against unjustified and disproportional force by officers
of the law enforcement agencies.
·
The
right to public expression of views the regime doesn’t want to hear.
·
The
right to a just court was taken away long ago, but now has been taken away even
the right to expect that procedural norms will be followed.
Over the last two months, Medvedev
concludes, Putin hasn’t managed to transform Russia into Turkmenistan but he
has at least achieved what Alyaksandr Lukashenka has done in Belarus. Russia is
now ready to take in Belarus because Russia now isn’t so different from what
Belarus has long been.
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