Those Restive Authoritarian Troublemakers
Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, March 1st, 2014
Salaroche


So, over three decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, have there been any real radical changes in Russia? Do we now have there a nation that seeks to redress the bureaucratic arbitrariness and the criminal abuses of its communist past, or do we only have a milder socio-econo-political version of it all? Do we now have a country where the well-known government corruption of its Soviet era has been purged of its rotten practices, or do we just have a more shameless in-your-face version of it? Are Russians any better off today than they were before the fall of the Berlin Wall?

None of the questions presented above has an optimistic answer, except for the last one which, according to the few Russians I had the chance to talk to during my recent visit to St. Petersburg and Moscow, is a resounding “yes”: Russians honestly think they’re much better off now than they were during the Soviet era. In fact, and according to what I witnessed, such new state of affairs seems to comprise a good number of freedoms and no noticeable day-to-day repression, but it certainly doesn’t include much political and financial transparency.

Democracy for Russians remains a Western construct with no direct applicability in their own environment, and bribery persists as the governmental institutions’ day to day transaction of choice. In practical ways, not much has changed in that sense over there, except that now you can openly criticize such practices without fearing your neighbor fingering you with the local party capo and the dire consequences for you and your family that such fingering would entail.

Yes, Russians now have much more freedom of movement, much more freedom of speech, and much more choice of local and foreign goods in their supermarket shelves. But the Mayor of St. Petersburg is still chosen by Vladimir Putin and to get married a girl still has to get a permit from the government, not to mention that to get a Driver License they all have to pay the equivalent of US$1,000 (one thousand US dollars) in bribes.

Happiness is a relative thing, they say, and the same could be said about the idea of being “better off”. Where in Sweden, France, the US, or Germany, we take all sorts of freedoms and citizen rights for granted, in Russia those are precious new concepts for which the existing rules and traditions don’t exactly provide the necessary means to protect or promote. Still, just having a taste of those new rights infuses the Russian population with a certain sense of renewal and hope.

Yes, life is now considerably more bearable for Russians than it was during the Soviet Union, but Russia is still nowhere close to being a democracy. What we have there is a one-party authoritarian political system in a country whose economy has been suitably labeled as “Mafia Capitalism”. And, unfortunately, such label doesn’t apply only to Russia, but to the Ukraine as well, where corruption runs rampant too. And it is along these lines that we can easily detect the crooked legacy that communism has conferred upon those countries that previously embraced it, particularly on the big ones, Russia and China.

No doubt there’s a considerable stretch from Stalin’s and Mao’s bloody dictatorships of the past to Putin’s and Xi’s authoritarian regimes of today, but both the latter still fall very short of respecting the will of their own people and even shorter still from keeping their countries’ wealth from falling largely into the hands of government officials and their sycophants.

Worse still, those well-known communist imperialist ambitions of the past still surface in the foreign policies of those two countries today, most recently in Russia’s opportunistic stance vis a vis Crimean separatist possibilities and in China’s latest moves regarding its maritime security boundaries and its increasingly aggressive moves in the South China Sea.

So, historical claims aside, what’s the problem with these authoritarian guys who never seem to sit themselves comfortably within their own territorial boundaries? Why are these guys always concocting ruses to acquire more territory or to increase their world power? Could it be that most authoritarian and totalitarian leaders need to play the nationalistic card in order to hide their domestic abuses, thereby fooling their own people into believing their leaders are good for their country? The answer to that question is a resounding YES.

The world is as much “awash in change” today as it was 25 years ago when then-Secretary of State G. Schultz coined the phrase, but why should the ones rocking the boat be always those power-hungry authoritarian lunatics? Political madness is a well-known human trait and an essential part of it is the desire for power over our social, political, or economic environments. Extreme madness, then, either under its Fascist or Communist guise, or anything in between, is probably what has kept the world awash in change in recent history.

World terrorism aside, the most dangerous lunatics shaking the world today seem to be the major inheritors of the Communist regimes of the past. Those restive authoritarian troublemakers don’t seem to have learnt much over the years except how to emulate the failed domestic and international policies of their failed previous regimes.

In a nutshell, the Putins and the Xis of the world, alogside the cliques that sorround them, all seem to have a few traits in common, namely blindness to the lessons of history, power-hungry madness, and brutality as the first and last policy of choice. But, above all, they all seem to suffer from a couple of very common human maladies, namely arrogance and stupidity.

May the Universal Forces someday shed some light upon their obtuse ways of thinking, although I wouldn’t hold my breath about it.

Salaroche