Caption: Hopes that Putin’s successor would shift course have yet to be fulfilled
Vladimir Putin’s appointment as prime minister of a symbolic “union” of Russia and Belarus highlights the troubling similarities between today’s Russia and Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the 1970s, says Leon Aron. Aside from epidemic levels of alcoholism (male life expectancy men is less than 60.6 years, 15 years less than in Pakistan or Bangladesh) and oligarchical, single-party rule, they also demonstrate the underlying fragility of non-democratic rule.
“The 1970s made clear what the belief in official infallibility and omnipotence, utter disregard for public opinion, ossification, and pandemic corruption could lead to,” Aron notes. “Most of all, the experience of Brezhnev’s Russia confirms that authoritarian “stabilization” is a curious political commodity.”
Hopes that Putin’s successor, Dmitri Medvedev, would shift course have yet to be fulfilled. But, argues Moscow University’s Irina Filatova, while the jury is still out on Medvedev’s democratic credentials at home, his foreign policy is “a direct and straightforward continuation of his predecessor’s line”, most recently demonstrated by the shameful veto of UN sanctions against Mugabe’s illegitimate regime. “This was a very powerful signal to send both to the Russians and to the international community,” she writes, “a litmus test of the attitude of Russia’s leaders both to democracy and to human life.”
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