Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 3 – Vladimir Putin
may have no grander purpose in his current exercise in constitutional reform
than to write “a Putin constitution” which can stand alongside “the Leninist,
Stalinist, Brezhnevite, and Yeltsin constitutions” and thus elevate him into
that pantheon of Russian leaders now and forever, Russian sociologist Igor
Eidman suggests.
It clearly appears to be the case,
he continues, that the Kremlin leader will be able to do that. But perhaps his
constitution will be distinctive in ways different than he hopes because the
emerging document is certainly even in that category “the apotheosis of
stupidity and hypocrisy” (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2976879535708339&id=100001589654713).
“Here for example is the latest
pearl offered by the president personally: ‘The Russian Federation, unified by
a thousand-year history, preserving the memory of ancestors who have handed down
to us the ideals and faith in God and also the continuity of the development of
the Russian state recognizes the historically evolved state unity.”
As Eidman points out, “it is
characteristic that this amendment has been offered by a former member of the
CPSU who for many years denounced religion at party meetings and in reports on ‘scientific
communism,’ a KGB officer who was required to actively persecute believers …
and who is proud of his Chekist-Komsomol-Communist past.”
Other people “with similar biographies
will accept these amendments. What history are they talking about? About the many
thousands of the religious of all confessions destroyed by their favorite
state? About the total desecration of religious facilities by crowds of
compatriots filled with anti-religious enthusiasm?”
“What could their ancestors transfer to them?
Memory about how churches were converted into public toilets and cowsheds?
Faith in the holiness of the army boot? Ideals of the knout and the barracks?
The continuity of slavery, rightlessness and terror?”
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