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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Apr-05
Russian President Vladimir Putin bares his teeth as unrest spreads in Russia

Web Log - April, 2005

Russian President Vladimir Putin bares his teeth as unrest spreads in Russia

Putin threatened to crack down heavily on any attempts to instigate a popular revolution in Russia, in Sunday's State of the Nation speech.

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin

The speech comes as social unrest has been spreading throughout Russia.

The social unrest is increasing because of a recent law that removed numerous benefits, and replaced them with cash payments worth much less for many pensioners.

In past years, the public would be demonstrating against their local government leaders, but that no longer makes sense, since Putin abolished direct election of regional leaders last year.

"It is evident now that instead of making its life easier with this proposal, the Kremlin created huge problems for itself," said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center who studies regional politics. "There are now no legal means for the opposition in this or that region to beat the incumbent governor."

Troubled areas in Caucasus region - including North Ossetia and Chechnya

Troubled areas in Caucasus region - including North Ossetia and Chechnya

Ethnic protests have been also occurring in Karacheyevo-Cherkassia, Ingushetia and North Ossetia, Russia's Muslim southern provinces in the Caucasus. A neighboring province, Chechnya, has been the site of a regional war with Russia that's now over ten years old.

The social unrest throughout Russia is being encouraged by the success of protests in three former Soviet Republics: Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. During the last 18 months, widespread protests and demonstrations have resulted in the downfall of Kremlin-supported leaders in each of these three now independent nations.

These three losses have been extremely humiliating to Putin, as he indirectly indicated in his State of the Nation speech, when he referred to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union as "the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century. Specifically for the Russian people it became a real drama. Dozens of millions of our citizens and compatriots found themselves outside of the borders of Russian territory".

Many Muslims considered this statement to be quite ominous, as indicated by an editorial in the Arab News:

One of the more disturbing parts of his speech was his reference to the millions of Russians who found themselves outside the country’s borders when the Soviet Union broke up and thirteen independent republics were created. His audience, not just in the Duma but on nationwide TV, might just have taken the view that the president felt that this was a wrong that in due time needed to be righted. For the independent Ukraine with its new independent-minded government and a large Russian minority, Putin’s comments will not have played well. Indeed for all former Soviet republics with significant ethnic Russian populations, the statement could be taken as downright sinister.

As I've written on several occasions, Putin is a man of steely determination. He made some missteps by overreaching in Ukraine, where he humiliated himself, but he stepped back and covered his tracks very adroitly, all the while accumulating more power for himself in the Kremlin.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, Russia and the Caucasus is one of the the six most dangerous regions of the world, in that a regional war is almost certain to expand quickly into a world war. Generational Dynamics predicts that the violent Russian civil war, ending in 1928 following the Bolshevik Revolution and killing tens of millions of Russians, is going to be refought, with near absolutely certainty.

An eerie sign of this is the revival in veneration for Josef Stalin, one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century, who committed genocidal atrocities against Muslims, Chechens, Ukrainians, and several other ethnic groups in the 1930s and 1940s. These fault lines are all reopening. (26-Apr-05) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Apr-05 Russian President Vladimir Putin bares his teeth as unrest spreads in Russia

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Apr-05
Russian President Vladimir Putin bares his teeth as unrest spreads in Russia