Paul Goble
Staunton, Apr. 16 – A story from a village in Orenburg Oblast highlights a fundamental and widespread problem of the Putin regime: its officials fear and thus oppose and work to suppress any action taken by the population they do not control even if it is directed toward aims the Kremlin at least in principle supports, Andrey Okun says.
In the village of Perovsky, when floods threatened, the population organized to build a dam, collected some three million rubles (30,000 US dollars), and threw in up in a matter of days. But local officials opposed this action and even threatened to punish those behind it for “unauthorized” construction (t.me/okun_andrew/2084).
“These unnamed officials,” Okun says, “understood the essence of the Russian state today better than others,” a regime that is so fearful that the people will unite against it that even steps like building a dam against flooding appears to put things on the road to revolution have to be opposed.
What the Putin regime doesn’t understand is that its efforts in this direction are bringing a revolution closer than it would be if the powers that be were to welcome such popular efforts. But the sclerotic nature of those in charge makes such an attitude almost impossible to imagine, Okun concludes.
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