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Vladimir Putin’s Panicked Panicked Crackdown in Russia Shows He’s on the Way Out


Can the Ukrainians survive the current onslaught by Vladimir Putin’s forces? Amazed at their defiance and courage, the international community responded with sympathy for their cause — and more importantly, imposed a series of sanctions aimed at cutting support within Russia for Putin’s war. But will this stop the Russian dictator?

I lived in Moscow as Newsweek reporters in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, many of my friends expect me to know the answers to those questions.

I certainly don’t know how long Ukrainians able to hold back an army that, although demoralized and poorly commanded, still had the advantage of firepower. But if forced to risk conjecture, I would say that any short-term Russian victory would only delay, not expel, the prospect of a leadership change in the region. Kremlin. This is what Putin fears most and what made him bet in the first place on an invasion of a neighboring country.

He cannot allow Ukraine to continue to develop into a successful country, increasingly linked with its Western neighbors and having given its citizens more freedoms and opportunities than most people. Russia enjoys. It is an example that Putin is determined to eliminate.

After more than two decades in power, Putin also fears his own domestic critics, such as jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who systematically exposed the corruption of his regime. As in the late Soviet era, even relatively small protests signal a challenge to the authorities that reveal much broader discontent – and trigger repression, including many arrests and more crackdowns on the few remaining independent media outlets.

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is escorted out of a police station on January 18, 2021, outside Moscow, following a court ruling ordering him to be jailed for 30 days.

Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images

All of that brings up memories of the first time I posted to Moscow in 1981. Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev had been in power for 17 years at the time, which seemed like a lifetime to him. with most of my Russian friends. He died the following year, but he was initially succeeded by similarly molded movements, which meant that the rigid Soviet system remained largely untouched. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, the country’s most famous dissident, still lives in domestic exile in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), and there seems to be no prospect of real change.

Angered at my reporting of stories about everything from corruption among the elite to popular discontent over widespread food shortages and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the authorities expelled expelled me after fourteen months, accusing me of “unacceptable journalistic practices”.

My last trip before being deported was to Tajikistan, the Central Asian republic bordering Afghanistan. Most of the young men I spoke to were very vocal about their feelings about the conflict across the border. “Many people have died from here in Afghanistan,” one Tajik soldier told me. “Mothers get telegrams that their sons have been killed and their bodies are being returned… Nobody wants war, nobody wants to die.”

The Brezhnev regime has been trying to convince its people that it is fighting “counter-revolutionaries” in Afghanistan, just as the Putin regime is portraying Ukrainians as Nazis – completely ignoring the illiteracy It makes sense to do so in the case of a country with a Jewish president and a political system that Russians can only dream of.

While some Russians certainly believe that the official propaganda about how the military is carrying out a “liberation” mission, the skepticism – and outright dissent – currently exists. much more pronounced today than it was in the 1980s. This is true for many young Russian soldiers who were stunned to find themselves fighting in Ukraine, and for their family members who were are terrified of their fate.

It’s not just civilians and lowly soldiers who are worried about the current situation. Last month, Russian Army General Leonid Ivashov, a staunch critic of the Kremlin, proclaimed the broad support of retired officers for his statements denouncing Putin.criminal policy“Of pushing the country into war.

Both the 1980s and now are marked by the dismay of much of the Russian population. In the earlier era, one consequence was an increasing number of writers, artists, musicians and activists in exile, emigration or defection. Among them was Yuri Lyubimov, the director of the Taganka Theater, who staged daring political and artistic works until he lost his position and was expelled from the Communist Party. In April 1984, I interviewed him in Florence, where he was directing Rigoletto. His reflections could then be easily applied to present-day Russia.

Lyubimov complained about the exodus of so many talented people from Russia, calling it “a national tragedy, the spiritual impoverishment of the nation.” Currently, many Russians are calling for a limited number of planes that can still fly out of the country. The exodus was even bigger – and much more frenetic – this time.

Lyubimov also lamented the growing isolation of his country, the result of the backlash not only by the invasion of Afghanistan but also by the imposition of martial law in Poland to suppress the Solidarity movement. This has led to boycotts and sanctions by Western nations.

However, Lyubimov still hopes that the “return to Stalinism” of the Kremlin rulers can be reversed. “Even within the party and at the top there are people who understand that this is an evil policy and that the country is losing its credibility and power,” he said. “You can’t build everything on tanks, threats and brute force methods. I am not alone in this opinion. “Putin’s critics will say the same thing.

Lyubimov was proven right when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, transforming himself into a new kind of party leader. He made the policy glasnost (openly) with the naive belief that he could save the communist system by reforming it. Instead, it collapsed completely. But for his credit, he largely resorted to brute force to push back the clock and preserve his own power. Amidst these upheavals, Lyubimov and many other famous exiles returned to Moscow.

His war in Ukraine was the beginning of the end for him, no matter how long that beginning was.

Of course, Putin has worked hard to restore the brand of authoritarianism and imperialism that his predecessors before Gorbachev would largely espouse. It was not a long-term victory proposition, however, no more than when Communist hardliners took power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, surrounded by top military officers and officials, visits a military flight test center in Akhtubinsk on May 14, 2019.

Alexey Nikolsky / AFP via Getty Images

Compared with the early 1980s, there are many Russians who want to live in a normal country, who at least for a time feel that they have almost done so and dread the prospect of having to go through a difficult period. long as a pariah state. When I asked Lyubimov if his message was one of optimism, in spite of everything, he replied: “There is an aphorism: a pessimist is a well-rounded optimist. information”.

In that sense, I feel the same way about Russia today. Unless the current war, which is a tragedy for both Ukraine and Russia, prompts an upheaval in the Kremlin for too long, the pessimist in me will prevail, and Ukraine will continue to suffer the consequences. people. But the Russians will also – and have – are feeling the consequences.

That worst-case scenario will flare up again for Putin at some point, a belief that feeds optimism in me even now. His war in Ukraine was the beginning of the end for him, no matter how long that beginning was.



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