Like the Soviets, Putin Regime Plays Up Clashes in US but Primarily to Justify Its Own Fears and Repressive Inclinations, Shelin Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 2 – Just like their Soviet predecessors, the current  rulers of Russia play up the clashes in the West to suggest that such things can’t happen in Russia; but unlike the Soviets, Sergey Shelin says, the current Kremlin does so for another reason as well: to offer “new evidence for their obsessive fears and repressive inclinations.”

“The average Soviet man did not think about comparing American police actions with those at home,” the Rosbalt commentator says. The differences were too great. “’They’ and ‘we’ existed in two absolutely different worlds which in Soviet minds did not intersect” (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2020/06/02/1846808.html).

Now, however, in the minds of Russians, the two have intersected, with the population comparing what is done in the US with what is done in the Russian Federation and the powers that be seeing what is happening in the US as justification for the fears they have if they ever loosen up and for the repressive actions they are inclined to take.

“The Soviet bosses had absolute no need to find a justification for their repressive actions by making reference to Western experience,” Shelin argues; but today that is exactly what the current Russian leaders need and look for, in France a few months ago with “the yellow vests” and in the United States now.

At the same time, the powers that be don’t want what they are doing to be so obvious and so they say things like Putin’s press secretary has about the case of George Floyd when he suggests that it is too soon and too hard to judge (ria.ru/20200602/1572341879.html) that would cost any American politician his position.

That is because the powers that be today fear what will happen if Russians begin to judge not just what happens to protesters in the two countries but how differently American society and Russian society reacts to police brutality. The Kremlin would like to use the current protest wave in the US to present itself in a better light, but it can’t because of this risk, Shelin suggests.