Russian guy killed due to alleged hate crime

[Guest hitoallusa]

It's so unfortunate. It needs to stop.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/05/russia-gay-hate-crime-alleged-_n_3377085.html?

[boiworship]

Putin is a reactionary. I doubt that Russia will ever be a liberal democracy.

[AdamSmith]

One analysis of how Russia got this way, and what may come next.

After Putin: How Russia’s liberalism might be revived

Autumn 2008

by Boris Kapustin

The Russian liberal intelligentsia fell victim to its own idealism, says Boris Kapustin of the Russian Academy of Sciences. But to challenge Vladimir Putin’s “regime of authoritarian capitalism” he advises taking a leaf from Vaclav Havel’s book of 20 years ago that headed the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia

Russian liberalism is not just in crisis, politically speaking it has ceased to exist. It is not represented in the parliament, it has disappeared as a focus of public debates, even among intellectuals, and its claims to be a credible and politically attractive ideology now seem vain if not preposterous. I use the term “Russian liberalism” as an umbrella concept embracing the political practices and agencies, both of the neoliberal and social liberal types, which identified the Russian “exit from Communism” with the establishment of the rule of law, political and ideological pluralism, the market economy and “openness to the West”, if not its imitation.

Neither the repressive nature of the present regime nor the innate hostility of the Russian “cultural tradition” towards liberalism can explain this calamity. These are pseudo-explanations that serve Russian liberals as pretexts for their own self-exculpation. If liberalism is to be reborn in Russia, one must understand the political causes of its demise. Liberalism failed as an ideology in Russia in the wake of communism’s collapse. Now Russian liberals must free themselves from the burden of the Boris Yeltsin legacy – its unabashed neoliberalism – and confront the type of capitalism expressed by the present Russian regime’s “authoritarian capitalism.”

MATTERS OF OPINION

No free market, please, we’re Russian!

According to a recent Gallup poll, more Russians say that a market economy would be wrong for their country’s future than those who think it to be the right direction. The difference between the two camps has somewhat narrowed in recent years though. In 2007, 41% said that the creation of a market economy largely free from state control would not be right for Russia, down from 44% in 2006. This compared to 35% who said the opposite, up from 32% the previous year.



Fear of voicing political views rises in ex-Soviet republics

Gallup polls in 14 former Soviet states show that, almost across the board, people are increasingly afraid to speak their mind on political issues. In seven of the states, a majority now say that their fellow citizens are afraid to openly express political opinions. The most dramatic increases were in Georgia and the EU member state Lithuania, where at least twice as many people in 2007, compared to 2006, said that “many” or “most” of their fellow citizens were afraid to express their political views. In Tajikistan and Armenia, seven out of 10 of those surveyed in 2007 expressed this view, compared to about half in 2006.



http://www.gallupworldpoll.com/

The mass anti-communist movement at the end of Russia’s perestroika era was liberal in spirit. Liberty and human rights, equality and justice, non-violence and the rejection of economic and political dirigisme made up the “nodal points” of its alternative to the status quo. Unfortunately, self-proclaimed “democrats” opted for sequencing reforms according to a formula of market first, democracy next. Suffice to say that, at least in the specific circumstances of Russia, such sequencing resulted in a distorted and socially harmful free market presided over by a bunch of warring oligarchs. Instead of promoting a transition from Communism to the “blessed plateau” of democratic capitalism, it allowed the undemocratic misdeeds of Yeltsin’s regime and the appalling depravity of the huge portions of the population of Russia. But instead of showing outrage, many liberals considered this as a reasonable price that Russia had to pay for being pulled out from communism. Liberals continued to trumpet their values of human rights and private property, voicing few reservations about “Yeltsin’s policy” in the name of liberty and justice for all, including the millions of downtrodden.

This is what determined the moral and political bankruptcy of post-communist Russian liberalism. Having sided with the new masters of Russia as the only force capable of implementing a Western path to democratic capitalism, Russian liberals forsook their independent popular base and became dependent on the goodwill of those who wielded power. This dependence blinded them to the shocking lawlessness of Yeltsin’s bloody coup d’état in October 1993, to the rigged results of the referendum on the new Constitution, and thence to the massive manipulations of the disgraceful elections of 1996, and to the significance of the financial collapse of 1998.

Up to the end of the 1990s, the regime of authoritarian capitalism had not been consolidated. The future autocrats still needed the Russian liberal intelligentsia as one of their props. So when Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s President he was careful to preserve the semblance of the liberals’ participation in politics, even co-opting certain of them as “advisors”, “experts” and functionaries of the regime. Those who were determined to put their liberal beliefs into practice were later ejected from their positions and the rest were assimilated into the rising and solidifying bureaucracy of authoritarian capitalism. The liberals’ “moment of truth” arrived with the new century, when the regime realised that it could henceforth perpetuate itself without recourse to the liberal intelligentsia. The liberals were found politically redundant and the regime abandoned rather than persecuted them. On their own, the liberals could not survive politically. This is what predetermined the electoral failures in 2003 of parties like Yabloko and the Union of the Rightist Forces.

It could charitably be said that the Russian liberal intelligentsia suffered from its own excessive idealism, and that its somewhat naïve dedication to ideals lacked practical executioners. This faith made too many of them misread the rise of authoritarian capitalism as no more than the zigzags and temporary setbacks of Russia’s transition to democracy. More soberly, however, the liberal intelligentsia, or at least its upper layers, should be viewed as one of the main benefactors of the Yeltsin epoch. They capitalised lucratively on this role, emerging as the main recipients of countless Western grants and honoraria; they were the “patricians of democracy” whose credentials were certified by their positions in respectable and often affluent Western NGOs and charitable foundations. They seemed the spiritual mediators of newly booming trade between Russia and the West.

The same liberals today castigate the regime, and with good reason. The absence of an independent judiciary, severe limitations of the freedom of the mass media, rampant corruption in all branches of bureaucracy and the systematic harassment of nearly all opposition are genuine ills. It is one thing, though, to articulate all these grievances and quite another to set out an attractive and politically mobilising ideology. Russia’s liberals have to send forth a message that resonates with the broader public. The resonance can’t just be some sort of rehearsal of the “superstitions” of the people; it means coming up with a compelling alternative.

The opposition’s platform is by and large not to recognise the legitimacy of the present regime. True, the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2007 and 2008 were unfair, but can their unfairness be realistically equated to a usurpation of power? A historically unprecedented number of Russians, well over 50%, now express themselves as satisfied with the status quo, and that’s something that can’t be ignored. A majority of Russian people feel no anger at the loss of what we might term Yeltsin’s democracy which they perceive as having been a plaything in the hands of unscrupulous elites that had no actual value for the people. The burial of Yeltsin’s democracy may have passed generally unnoticed, but the benefits the people have received from the Putin epoch are clearly visible. They can’t be measured exclusively in terms of material advantage, but no less important is the fact that social life in Russia has ceased to be chaotic, and political life is no longer insultingly grotesque, even though it has become boring. Order has appeared as a buzzword of the day – with all its conservative overtones. Order is by no means an ultimate political good, but it is an indispensable pre-requisite of all political progress and is appreciated as such. But it is doubtful that in the eyes of many Russians Putin’s regime – or, to update things, Putin’s and Medvedev’s regime – has any intrinsic value. For them, it is nevertheless better than the terror of unpredictability, buffoonery and free-riding that was so typical of the Yeltsin epoch. This rational preference can’t be ignored or misinterpreted, but it condemns Russian liberals to a state of political non-existence. Russians will only stand up in support of a different kind of democracy providing it offers a tangible social content and has a bearing on their everyday lives.

It would also be unfair to the Putin epoch to turn a blind eye to the continuity it brought with what preceded it. This continuity saw a maturing of the type of capitalism introduced back in 1992. During the Putin epoch it has rid itself of the extravagances and irregularities of its early years, when it was the people who were the most painfully affected, but it has for all that retained its oppressive, corporatist, oligarchic and profoundly unjust characteristics. The gap between Russia’s rich and the poor has increased during the Putin years and is now indecently wide. So although there is continuity, it is a continuity that has preserved the symbiosis of property and power even though its institutional format has changed. Under Yeltsin, it saw the privatisation of political power by several oligopolies, which in its purest form manifested itself in the “regime of seven banks” (semibankirtschina in Russian) that ensured the president’s re-election in 1996 on condition that he should forfeit his “sovereign” power. Under Putin, this bargain was reversed: the several clans that man the upper echelons of the state acquired control over the main economic resources. The political-economic nature of the symbiosis as a private phenomenon has not been changed by this, but its institutional-legal construction, the ideological modus operandi and the undisputed winners have all altered.

For the mass of Russians, these changes have proved to be important. State-based authority tends to be more sensitive to their sufferings than do the private sector’s capitalist oligarchs. Russia’s skyrocketing oil and gas revenues since the turn of the century have made policies for sharing out the country’s newly-acquired wealth financially possible. The regime has thus been able to reinforce its power.

If the opposition liberals want to escape from their confinement to the political salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg, they must come to grips with Russia’s new political and economic realities. They must reveal to public opinion the present system’s inherent tensions, and they must address actual grievances by proposing feasible and popular political courses of action. It is not enough to recycle the mantra of human rights violations because it is grass roots actions that are required. Russia’s liberals might find it worthwhile to begin with what Vaclav Havel, when discussing how communism in the Soviet bloc could be resisted, dubbed small-scale work. It was a strategy of very concrete small deeds which although seemingly unambitious politically enhanced an alternative public morality, promoted independent networks of cooperation and steeped the reform movement’s would-be leaders in a realistic and non-elitist democratic culture.

In today’s Russia, the likelihood of such a development would seem meager unless a severe economic crisis were to undercut the stability of Putin’s authoritarian capitalism. But do not human dedication, fortitude and tenacity occasionally change the flow of history? After all, before 1989 very few people took Vaclav Havel for a clairvoyant.

http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/articleview/ArticleID/21238/language/en-US/Default.aspx

[RA1]

How do you find the time to find this stuff? Not that I am ungrateful for I am. I suppose you could just while away your time finding pictures of naked guys but what good what that be?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

That there Google thing is the secret. Also that most of my work is sitting at the computer researching and writing, so I can slack off only too easily whenever the muse starts playing hard to get.

[RA1]

I think you misspelled "thar". Of course, I recognize that Google is the genesis but you still have to exercise your fingers.

Still, I recognize the time and effort.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Google is the genesis

I think of Google more as Revelations.