Today Russia is a one party state with a one man rule. Russian revanchism was perhaps always destined after the fall of the the Soviet Union and especially after the basket case economy of the 1990's. There was a chance, if Boris Yeltsin had had the benefits of the land's oil revenue, to bring the new Russiskaya Federatsya out of squalor. But such opportunities were vetoed by corporate America through the charming gauche face of President Clinton. In the 90's the exact number of oil assets the Russian government controlled was 0. Private America controlled them and gave the Russian government a pittance which barely paid the grain.
And so, Vladimir Putin. In office in the year 2000, had, by what is only natural, all the oil assets nationalised soon after. In 1951 Mohammad Mosaddegh began to nationalise the oil assests of Iran only to be deposed two years later by MI6/CIA. Putin would not suffer Mosaddegh's fate, as Russia was too big, being former pole of a once bi-polar world. Yet Putin felt white heat all the same. If Clinton wanted Russia to be an ally why was he complicit in pushing it to beggary?
If our premise in this article is the force of your history condemns you then, it must seem the dictator was never going to join the comity of western, democratic, progressive joys. Instead, inheriting the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and before that the "serfdom of the Tsar". Can it be that Russia cannot understand democracy? Are we to expect democracy in communist China, which has been autocratic since primitive man?
America's independence in 1776 or Britain's parliamentary sovereignty in 1649 or France's provisional committees in the 1790's were all the sharp relief of the people. Russia's moment came in 1917. But the Russian uprising took Marx, deciding to lump the privations of capitalism in with the Occidental concepts of rights, representation, law, free press and enquiry. Forgetting the contradictory term of 'the people's dictatorship', why wasn't Lenin impressed by Jefferson? Why did workers consider the democratic model contemptible? If it's because the Tsar represented the same European order, then the Bolsheviks lacked key detail. There was presented the perennial dilemma, was it the system that needed fixing or the system that needed replacing. Today's question is, is it Globalisation that needs repairing, or replacing? Is it the Establishment that needs remaking or revolting against? These surely are questions of the surface. Isn't it populism precisely that's the problem? Of course we should be able to elect Pericles, but we do so knowing he was born and bred for the task. A populist candidate championing populist commotion will never solve a jigsaw puzzle, let alone a countries problems. How can everyone rule? This is facetious. A Few may rule, not all. That is Law. The real struggle is the ancient one, rich and poor.
Thus, Putin overturning the American rape of oil and inheriting a failing state without any form of democracy in its history and a people used to the directive from the 'boss', was it perhaps always an optimists daydream that Russia become the newborn nephew of democracy?
Putin can last until 2024 or he could be out by 2018. In a kind of thinking his position is anathema. He's been at it too long already. The real question is when he goes, will Russia finally see the benisons of true democracy, or will history condemn the Russian once more tethered to the Tsar?
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