Russia and Democracy
I really like the idea of cross checking mainstream opinions as you realized from my last entry. These days I came across an interesting perspective on the Russian elections in which President Putin's party won more than 60% of the votes and the perception of Russian democracy. Mostly the elections were described as unfair not giving the opposition parties the means to represent themselves. Other voices even said results were manipulated. In general the reputation of Russia as democracy is very bad in the west and Putin is accused to destroy any elements of it.
Nicholas N. Petro is a teacher of international politics at the University of Rhode Island. He served as the U.S. State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under President George H. W. Bush and is bringing different facts to the table that seem to get overlooked by most observers. In his article “Russia through the looking-glass” from February 2006 he lists a few of these to give a true understanding of developments in Russia to challenge the distorted perceptions of western governments, media, and human-rights organizations, as he puts it.
His article in the Herald Tribune “Why Russian liberals lose” that made me discover Petro and his view on Russia simply states that it is not that the opposition cannot get its message to the public but it is about the people representing the opposition who are not credible to their main audience Russia's growing middle class. In this context he mentions that 13% of Russia's population use the internet as their main resource of information which remains completely unfiltered. In the big cities St. Petersburg and Moscow the rate is double. Maybe the lower percentages voting for “Unified Russia” in these areas (only around 50%) are a result of their internet literate populations.
And there are very concrete and evident elements contributing to Putin's popularity: the economy is booming, average salaries have increased from $81 to $550/month, social spending has increased and the poverty level fell from 27 to 15 percent.
Nevertheless there are very critical voices for example in the blog Russophobe which subtitles “Recording the rise and hopefully fall of the Neo- Soviet Union”. Also Kasparov, the former chess champion being one of the disputable figures of the opposition mentioned by Petro, is raising his voice regularly like in this IHT article.
Posted at
05:27PM Dec 07, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Europe & Beyond |
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