Abbas Gallyamov
By ‘no strings attached’, he means that donors shouldn’t monitoring the aid to ensure money is dispersed as intended. That would humiliate Russia. By the ‘rewriting of history’, he’s referring to the West’s version of WWII, where the USA and Britain — not the USSR — are chiefly credited for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Since 1922, Russians have been tyrannised, initially, by The Communist Party of the USSR, which was unrestrained by its constitution incorporating every individual right and some previously unknown collective rights; such as, the right to national self-determination. In effect, the Communist Party ruled like a criminal gang, until it’s dispensation was subsumed by the mafia-style oligarchs and Vladimir Putin. Gallyamov’s proposal would only perpetuate such tyranny.
Corruption has ruled Russia at every level and, after Putin’s dispensation comes to an end, it’s likely to be replaced by something neither better nor worse, since all possible aspirants to power will have been schooled by the dogmas that produced the communists and Putin — they’re like fish from the same pond, utterly oblivious to their water. Ergo, Putin’s successor will be, like him, the most ruthless.
In her book, Putin’s Russia, the murdered Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaja portrays daily life under Putin. It’s as brutish as life in the USSR, without the deportations and mass murders. For her trouble, she was shot at her front door by unknown assassins. The British journalist, Edward Lucas describes the ubiquitous criminality of Putin’s rise and exercise of power in, The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West. There, we see the familiar old Cold War with different actors and modified rhetoric.
Well before the USSR collapsed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn contemplated the damage done to Russia during 70 years of Communist oppression and writing in, From Under the Rubble, he speculated that recovery will require 50 years. That’s a sharp contrast to Abbas Gallyamov’s hopelessly quixotic quick-fix — a massive hand-out from the West with no humiliating ‘strings attached’ or ‘rewritten history’.
Gallyamov may be opposed to Putin, but he can’t promote democracy without an understanding of its essence — limited government, ruling with popular consent. The idea is absurd. Politics in Russia is practiced mafia-style where a gangster, like the mafioso John Gotti, can rise to power by murdering his boss. Putin also rose with criminal tactics. He is suspected of bombing a civilian apartment building, then blaming Chechen extremists and campaigning as a law-and-order candidate. Sergei Yushenko, a Russian politician, was shot to death as he tried to expose Putin’s hand in that bombing. The former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, blamed Putin for both the bombing and also the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. He was subsequently poisoned by polonium-210, a deadly substance hardly available to anyone apart from the military.
Once Putin was in power, nosy journalists like Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova were shot to death. After exposing corruption, Sergei Magnitsky, was clubbed to death in a jail cell. The former politician, Boris Nemtsov, was shot in Moscow; the oligarch, Boris Berezovsky died in London, under puzzling circumstances; the Russian news network executive, Mikhail Lesin, died in a Washington hotel room from blunt force injuries and, just recently, Lukoil executive Ravil Maganov died suspiciously, as an apparent suicide.
All of the above critics of Putin died at the hand of unknown culprits or unexplained circumstances.
Furthermore, this list is only illustrative; not exhaustive.
Andres Gutman
Sept. 2022
