POLITICO Column: …[Vladimir] Putin’s Russia has finally “come out” as a traditional autocracy. Since his return to the presidency in 2011, the Russian leader has made clear that he will tolerate no form of opposition. Putin embarked on a crusade to cleanse Russia of what it believed to be treacherous Western-backed NGOs, forcing human rights organizations to register as “foreign agents.” The Kremlin also continued its clamp down on the media – journalism is a dying profession in Russia as only a handful of media outlets that have not been turned into zombifying instruments of Kremlin propaganda remain…
Putin’s Ukraine adventure has only intensified his hunt for dissenters. With Russia in a de facto state of war, public opposition to the Crimean annexation only brings harassment from the authorities. The man who once drew thousands to the streets and even ran for mayor of Moscow – Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most famous blogger – is now under house arrest. The tech nerd who created social media giant Vkontakte, Pavel Durov, has been forced to leave Russia amidst long-going threats from the FSB. And, as Russian propaganda enters the realm of the absurd, so does its crackdown on dissent. Putin called the Internet a “CIA project” before the Kremlin announced that all major servers will be held in “closed cities” (a left-over from the Soviet era). Most recently, Putin’s aggressive deputy Prime Minister Rogozin threatened to ban the use of GPS on Russian territory – allegedly to protect Russians from Washington’s incessant spying…
But in reality dictatorship is the logical culmination of Putinism. The Ukrainian revolution only accelerated Russia’s nosedive into autocracy, but such a step was probably inevitable for the regime to survive. Putin’s fear of revolution, hatred of the West, personal greed and somewhat addled Slavophile vision of the future could not endure the kind of public scrutiny and debate that democracy requires… (more)
