Putin and His Team Ready to Shoot Russians to Remain in Power, Gennady Gudkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 23 – The Putin regime is becoming ever more repressive because it fears that there are Russians who are really ready to conspire against it and is now ready to shoot large numbers of protesters if that is what it takes to keep Putin and his top lieutenants in power, Gennady Gudkov says. 

            “The moral level of the regime has fallen to the floor and will fall even further,” the opposition politician says; and “soon everyone will simply hate it,” creating a situation that could lead to a new 1937 or a new 1917 or a combination of the two (censoru.net/2020/02/23/kreml-gotovitsja-streljat-v-narod-jeks-polkovnik-fsb.html).

            Given the dangers that this represents, the Kremlin’s latest actions have become almost impossible to understand, Gudkov continues.  Indeed, he says, “for the first time in 20 years, I do not understand the Kremlin.” The proposed Constitutional amendments don’t solve Putin’s problems and thus one must ask why they have been proposed and why now. 

            Gudkov says that he believes there are now a handful of people around Putin who together with the president are making the decisions. And he then poses the same question Andrey Illarionov has also asked “Who are these people?” (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/02/putins-own-words-indicate-power.html).

”Undoubtedly,” the commentator says, “the siloviki stand behind them.  Nikolay Patrushev is the most obvious of these. It is said that “Vaino is now close to Putin.”  But what is obvious is that Putin now like Yeltsin and Brezhnev at the end of their terms has no cadres reserve.

Those who suggest the Constitutional amendment affair was “like a special operation of the KGB” designed to distract attention are wrong. Rather, what has begun is “another special operation,” one where the goal is in full view – the extension of Putin’s time in office to the end of his life.

The small group around Putin is made up of “petty, angry, cruel and vengeful people who think only about preserving their power so they can grow ever richer.” They don’t want their power or their property challenged and they are prepared to take radical actions against anything or anyone they view as a threat.

And that leads to the question: “will the authorities shoot at the people?” Gudkov responds that in his opinion, they are quite prepared to do so.  And “sooner or later this will happen.” Once it does, there won’ be “any peaceful transformation of power in Russia” but rather a violent one.

Putin certainly knows what happened with Nicholas II, Gudkov says, and he certainly recognizes that once the authorities use force against the people, the people will respond in unpredictable ways, many of which will prove fatal not only to many of them but to those who ordered the shootings to begin with.