Putin is an Andropov at heart

A no-holds-barred excoriation of Russia's President Putin by Gerald Warner in the Scotsman tells it like it is (free registration required).

Warner reflects on the current rehabilitation in Russia of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who ruled the Soviet Union for just 15 months in 1983-84. Earlier this month, to mark the 90th anniversary of his birth, a symposium was held in his honour, a school renamed after him and a 10ft statue of him unveiled.

If any individual had the potential to precipitate a Third World War it was this ruthless disciple of Stalin. His fortuitous death in 1984 purged that date of its ominous Orwellian significance and the West heaved a sigh of relief.

Warner points out the double standard in the West's approach to the Soviet Union, and to its heir and successor, the Russian Federation, in no uncertain terms:

If Chancellor Schroeder were to unveil a 10ft statue of Himmler, it would be ingenuous to assume such a gesture would be viewed with equal complacency.

I remember clearly the period in the early 1980s when Western "peace activists" promoted the image of Andropov as a dovish liberal, fond of jazz and the odd dig at the status quo. As Warner points out,

It was all lies: he was an intransigent Cold Warrior whose military shot down a South Korean airliner, killing all 269 people on board - the Soviet Union’s Lockerbie - and who remorselessly prosecuted the war in Afghanistan.
And he continues:

The question arises: is Putin also imitating his hero in deluding the West about his character and intentions?

In security policy, as a former head of the FSB, successor body to the KGB, he has effectively restored the anti-dissident Fifth Directorate of the KGB, as the ‘Department for the Protection of the Constitution’. When the old KGB fell apart, many Chekists helped themselves to state funds and adopted new careers in ‘business’ - ie organised crime. Some of Russia’s major companies and banks were founded with KGB cash.

That is why Putin is anxious to attract foreign banks and sideline the more suspect home grown institutions. His desire for economic growth is sincere, whatever his eventual purpose. He has introduced some real reforms: a flat rate of taxation and initiatives on pensions and labour law. This has produced some statistics that the regime likes to trumpet: five years of economic growth, a taming of inflation and a stronger rouble.

Much of the hype, for example Putin’s confident forecast last month that the economy could double by 2010, has the resonance of statistics for tractor production in the Urals Soviet area for 1949. All of Russia’s eggs are still in one basket: 30% of GDP derives from sales of crude oil and natural gas, with the petroleum industry boosted by BP’s $8bn purchase of a 50% stake in the Tyumen oil joint venture. Such profitable business is threatened by higher taxes and by the Putin government’s excessive action against the Yukos Oil Company - the largest listed enterprise in Russia - resulting from a political vendetta against Mikhail Khodorkhovsky, its CEO.

The article also points to a consonance of aims and methods that is spreading among tyrannies around the world - led by Russia:

Putin represents a phenomenon now developing much further afield than Russia: the marriage of economic liberalism with oppressive state control. Marxism has become uncoupled from Leninism: the former is dead, the latter rampant. China is another example. In the West it is called ‘political correctness’ (the term was invented by Lenin).

Tyrants no longer have to shoulder the burden of running a command economy: privatisation of enterprise is perfectly acceptable, provided people themselves are nationalised - by regulation, state nannying, identity cards and bans on all activities and opinions deemed ‘incorrect’ by the ruling clique. In this context, the European Union is a streamlined Soviet Union, which will one day converge seamlessly with Putin’s police state, on the road to world government. Liberty has never been more insidiously threatened.

All in all, Warner's article is a salutory read for those who may still have any illusions about precisely who the new masters in the Kremlin really are.