Standing Up To Putin

Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in the IHT from Riga, Latvia:

In these long winter nights, a headless horseman is roaming Russia's "near abroad," threatening independent countries and raising fears of a renewed cold war.

This specter is Vladimir Putin. Let's hope he finds his head soon.

In traveling around Eastern Europe lately, people keep telling me what a menace Putin is becoming, and they're right. There are plenty of examples of Putin's bullying neighboring countries, from Georgia and Estonia to this lovely little Baltic nation of Latvia, but the most egregious example was Putin's recent plotting to install a new pro-Russian stooge in Ukraine.

And, Kristof goes on:

There's no evidence that Russia was involved in the poisoning, or even that he was poisoned at that dinner. But Russia managed to insert itself into every other aspect of the campaign, so it's a possibility that Ukrainians are murmuring about.

It's clear that Russia doesn't blanch at murder. Two Russian secret agents assassinated a former president of Chechnya (whom Moscow called a terrorist) in the Gulf nation of Qatar in February by blowing up his car as he drove away from a mosque. "The Russian leadership issued an order to assassinate the former Chechen leader," the Qatari judge said after examining all the evidence and convicting the two men.

The bottom line is that the West has been suckered by Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin. Rather, he's a Russified Pinochet or Franco. And he is not guiding Russia toward free-market democracy, but into fascism.

In effect, Putin has steered Russia from a dictatorship of the left to a dictatorship of the right (Chinese leaders have done much the same thing). Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Park Chung Hee and Putin all emerged in societies suffering from economic and political chaos. All consolidated power in part because they established order and made the trains - or planes - run on time.

The whole article, headed "America, Too, Needs to Stand Up to Putin", makes some telling points. The only paragraph where I had some major doubts reads:

Still, a fascist Russia is a much better thing than a Communist Russia. Communism was a failed economic system, while Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile and the others generated solid economic growth, a middle class and international contacts - ultimately laying the groundwork for democracy. Eventually we'll see pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow like those in Kiev.

Some would argue that the distinction between Communism and Fascism the article's author makes is in many ways a spurious one - certainly in the context of Russia's present development, which is more a reversion to familiar patterns from the past than a boldly new and untried direction. After all, a fascist Russia has been with us for a long time - certainly for most of the 20th century. And those Moscow "pro-democracy demonstrations" don't look like materializing any time soon.