Russian Prez: 'Putin Could Serve 2 More Terms'; Me: 'We Don't Actually Hate Russians'

Linkeydink

MOSCOW – Russia's constitution will be amended by year's end to extend the presidential term to six years, lawmakers promised Thursday — a move that could pave the way for Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin.

It would be the first change to the Russian constitution since its adoption in 1993. A six-year term could mean 12 more years as president for Putin — the current prime minister — who has not ruled out getting his old job back.

President Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin protege, had suggested raising the term from four years to six Wednesday in his first state of the nation address.

Pretty much everything GFK was worrying about in his post a couple months back is coming true. Medvedev basically just gave a speech a few days ago saying, "We're back. We're going to kick some ass. Fuck you if you can stop it." Now Putin may wind up back as president for 12 more years due to his handpicked errand boy changing the rules for him.

Gosh, you know, I LOVE Democracy. And I LOVE Authoritarianism! Both have such great tastes, but where can I get both of them together, like in some kind of fucked-up government version of a Snickers bar??? Oh, the president of Russia. Great! Wait, if democracy is the caramel, and authoritarianism gives you peanuts, what's the nougat? DUH - the secret intelligence services!

Putin will probably get away with it because of them. I can't imagine what it must be like to be an opposition leader right now. It's probably like having bowel control issues and going on a roller coaster called THE ELIMINATOR. You probably can't even stand up without your asshole closing to the size of a pinprick. How can you organize anything that might change the government when you could be infiltrated or subverted or hurt?

This probably all sounds mean. Looking back, it looks like we really hate China and Russia. Look, for anyone Chinese or Russian who might ever read this (HA!), we don't. Seriously. Chinese people, chinese food, chinese basketball players, chinese culture (except the music, sorry, I can't take it) rule. Every Russian I've met socially has been all class and really cool to meet. Russian music rules. Russian literature OWNS. And both your countries are so beautiful it's sick.

But here's the thing, obviously we aren't a gang who loves authoritarianism. It's bad. And frankly, your bosses scare the shit out of me. Probably the same way our boss for the last 8 years scared the shit out of you.

When you think back to you having watching a gang run our country without anyone holding them accountable, watching them rewrite the rules to suit themselves and ignoring all the ones they didn't want to bother with, heading out into the rest of the world and fucking with other people however they pleased to win the WARAWN TEAR, maybe you have an idea what it's like for us looking out now.

We've got nothing against the people in either place, and hope they don't feel like we do. Just bear in mind dealing with your bosses frightens the fuck out of us right now. The last couple years couldn't have been a cakewalk for you either, so please just be patient with us if we start running drills about hiding under desks again.

Russia & Georgia (Will They Ever Hook Up?)

You asked, I felt like I should answer about Russia.

Also I'm going to preemptively head off any complaints about being eggheaded by saying you asked for this.

There are only two problems facing Russia, and they're Putin and indifference.

Let me tell you about the indifference. Right now, Russia is going through one of its biggest economic expansions ever. If not the biggest. (You don't even have to include the boost organized crime contributes to the economy, especially the pirating of western media.) And God help you if you don't report that condition favorably.

Since Putin took power, about 20 journalists have been killed in Russia. While that's not quite Columbia-level numbers, that's astronomical for a western European country. There's just no excuse for it. But a common thread running through the deaths and the spontaneous raids of radio and TV stations is that these people were following the money. The Putin regime has never really seemed to care if you report on their human rights abuses or their lack of transparency or the really boundless executive power. Once you get into the kleptocracy stuff — once you ask, "How many billions does Putin have in Swiss bank accounts due to just seizing energy companies?" — that's when you're going to get disappeared.

Because ultimately I don't think a lot of Russian citizens care too terribly much about a lack of transparency at the top. When America was doing all right economically, you probably couldn't find even 5 people in 10 who really gave much of a damn about unchecked executive power. Iraq or Katrina or tax cuts for the wealthy... sure, they might have cared about that. But the principle of balanced power and oversight of the executive is too abstract to care about.

Putin's a smart guy. It's the economy, stupid. He's kept people better off than they were under communism and under the panics of early democracy, and for that they repay him by not caring enough to ask the hard questions. "Who cares if he's a strongman? We have iPods."

It's also partially what happens, I think, when a people have almost zero experience with democracy and whose moments of freedom almost always couple with economic panics or social dislocation. Russian democracy was a messy business, and it hurt an awful lot of people because there were no built-in safety nets anymore. In the rush to tear down communism, they tore down the stuff that bailed out people in tough times, and the only people who knew how to build those safety nets only knew how to do it with a communist instruction manual.

So because freedom was so scary and uncertain, a lot of people treated it as "the time you steal everything not nailed down because you never knew when the next crisis would come and it would all disappear." But since that kind of cowboy capitalism creates crises and destabilizes the economy and social order, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You want to get out of a crummy system, so you choose freedom; but freedom creates chaos and another kind of crummy system. So at some point you throw up your hands and say, "WE NEED ONE MAN TO SOLVE THIS, BECAUSE DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK!"

I think that's sort of what's happened in Russia. Historically they've always kind of see-sawed between flirting with more liberalism and then trusting in an iron-fisted figure to solve the problems facing them. To a certain extent, I think they looked at Putin and said, "You. Fix this." He did, and in response they turn a blind eye to many things.

One of those things is the sudden aggression toward neighbors. Georgia today. Ukraine and Belarus recently. To a certain extent, there are probably a lot of Russian citizens who enjoy this. After being down and out for the late 1980s and 1990s, it feels good to kick ass and be the big kid on the block again. (You know America loved Gulf War I for the same reasons: Vietnam was such a bummer. But now — we rule again!) But for the most part, this seems like Putin's thing.

You can take the KGB away from a man, but put him in charge of the country, and he'll just recreate it with a new name. Which he has. Putin's an unregenerate Chekist, and he's rebuilt the same spooky secret state apparatus he used to be a part of. And with that comes the aggression, because otherwise what's the point?

As to what that aggression means, I don't think it's part of a plan for global domination. As my namesake George Kennan pointed out in his famous Long Telegram, Soviet expansion post-WWII was really just a realization of all the 19th century land grabs the Russian Tsars pursued. It was this paranoid reach for security in the guise of a century-long national dream.

I don't think this aggression is as grand, but I think it indicates Putin and his band of Chekists are going back to the recent past. They want those satellite states that the USSR had. They want their old Socialist Republics back — Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus. They want to have the glory of the old Soviet dream back. Just without the communism and with the billions and billions of nakedly stolen petrochemical dollars and hijacking of private industries.

It's funny that we picked the name that we did for this place, because at the time, it couldn't have been more of a winking joke. The world wasn't really like that anymore. Now it seems prescient. The movement toward opacity, mendacity, ornate deceptions, arms increases, elective wars and wars-by-proxy — the sort of stuff we lived through in the Cold War — were all sort of coming back after 2001. But to take it seriously enough to call looking at it "Kremlinology" would have sounded like pretentious self-indulgence. Yet in just the last year, all those tendencies have ramped up to an absurd degree. It's not funny anymore. It's not even remotely funny.

And, at least in Russia's case, it looks like Putin and his joke of a picked successor will get away with it. In part because most of the people are too indifferent to really ask what's going on and challenge the responses they get. And in part because when people do do that, more of their bodies are dropping on St. Petersburg streets than Marlo Stanfield dropped on West Baltimore.

how do you explain the crisis in georgia? chatlogs, oh yeah i love chatlogs

e.c: is there a particular reason russia wants all these little states so badly? is it just because they dont want nato setting up bases in them?
GFK: That's a possibility. It could also just be their 19th century territorial ambitions all over again. there's a patter in Russian history where land = security, and maybe it's not even NATO but just a perceptual thing. I don't know. I don't think Putin really has a check on his desires right now either.
GFK: Honestly, I've just given up. That's it. That's the explanation.
e.c: i feel like culturally the east loves to be bossed around ... they really dont like changing leaders
e.c: every former eastern block resident i know who is over 30 talks about how awesome soviet radio was and they start singing these crazy folk songs about farming. i mean not everyone, but enough that it seemed weird. didnt these guys murder and oppress you? why miss that?
GFK: It could be rose-colored glasses. It also could be just not knowing what the struggles of political/economic freedom are. Russia's kind of gone back and forth throughout history. If you look at the course of Russian history, there's this constant see-saw between evil strongmen and slightly more democratizing and benevolent strongmen. You'd have good Tsars and oppressive Tsars, then democracy, then communist dictatorship, then democracy, then Putin's iron fist in a velvet glove.
e.c: its weird theres not more outrage about him inside russia right now, and the only explanation i can come up with is the same reason there arent demonstrations in the streets right now here. as pissed as people are about the government getting more powerful and more secret, theyre comfy for right now and still buying stereos
GFK: Yeah.
e.c: but thats got to be risky too. arent they a little too intertwined with the western economy to do this kind of thing? do they really have any leverage beside something stupid like nukes?
GFK: We've bankrupted ourselves of all moral capital in the world that basically this is just their way of saying, "Fuck it, try something." What the fuck are we supposed to say back to them anyway? "Don't invade other countries on flimsy pretexts"? Pfffffffffffffff!
e.c: i dont understand why they didnt just let them take the 2 breakaway regions.... arent they almost entirely populated with russian nationalists anyway?
GFK: Me neither, but nationalism's emotional. Even if there are more Russian nationalists than Georgian nationalists, it doesn't mean the Georgians are going to stop feeling they have rights. Look at all the Hungarians in Romania. They haven't lived in Hungary since 1919, but it USED to be Hungary, so screw the fact that they're outnumbered.

e.c.: i think itd be cool if one small town went to war against another small town over rezoning, but that wont happen. i guess its because it doesnt matter as much if the place you live is pretty much just as good as the place your neighbor lives. you cant imagine ft. lauderdale going to war with miami, but i think thats because no one could tell them apart in the first place