The Politics of Dancing

PUTIN ALCOHOLISM AND DISSENT IN MODERN RUSSIA As the crisis in Ukraine has enfolded, fuelled as it has been by Putin’s ongoing campaign to destabilise the country, it has obscured another development taking place in the region, and that is the acceleration of the crackdown on opposition to president Putin in Russia itself. Ever since his re-election in 2012, and in particular the widespread protests against the electoral fraud that characterised that election, Putin has been steadily eliminating all possible sources of opposition. [1] The remaining few vehicles for dissent are being closed down or taken over, the law now so restrictive as to make any challenge to Putin’s authority impossible. Still there is another Russia. 1. There was always another Russia. As Nicholas 1 st sought to crush all internal opposition and strangle the nascent intelligentsia, as nihilist fanatics laid down the foundations of red terror and as Stalin exterminated two generations of the brighte...

Pat Buchanan  Pat Buchanan, Nigel Farage and the  new love affair of the Right with Vladimir Putin During the 1930’s there was a slogan employed by the French right, ‘better Hitler than Leon Blum!’ It was a symptom of the degraded state of right wing politics in France, a symptom of the rot that was to lead directly to Vichy. I do not know if anyone on the American right has yet coined the slogan better Putin than Obama, but we surely cannot be far off that point. For here too the rot has set in and it appears to be just as deep.  Thus Pat Buchanan, former presidential candidate and right wing pundit has now come out as an admirer of Vladimir Putin. 1 For Pat Buchanan any leader as vehemently opposed to liberal values, to equality for Gay and lesbians and who is as wedded to conservative ideology  as Putin, the attraction is very great indeed.  2   Buchanan however goes further, placing himself firmly in the better Putin than Obama c...

‘ MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Friday that gay people have nothing to fear in Russia as long as they leave children alone.’ Washington Post 17/01/2014 Putin’s remarks seem to have perplexed some commentators, why they ask make such inflammatory remarks in the run up to the Sochi Olympics? Now I don’t know whether Vladimir Putin believes that anyone who is gay automatically harbours paedophile instincts and thus present an immediate threat to all children and young people. [1]  I've seen no evidence that he does not believe it. What I do know is that Putin hates liberalism and liberal values. Putin shares with the Nazi’s, and indeed with Islamists, a belief that liberalism and liberal values are some sort of disease that can infect any society, bringing corruption and decadence in their wake. It is a view shared by the Russian Orthodox Church which believes that in Putin they have found their lord and saviour. It is in this context that h...

Afghantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 Rodric Braithwaite: Profile Books 2011 “Many of the women here conceal their faces under the chador- a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium too, and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador* and the parachute. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute.”   Soviet youth advisor and journalist Vladimir Snegirev speaking in Afghanistan March 1982 During the Christmas period in 1979 I was a student in Worcester and one of my friends was an Afghan student studying agriculture. He was a passionate socialist and may even have been a member of the Afghan Communist Party, his name was Asker Olfat, and he hailed from Herat . He spent some of that Christmas holiday with me and my parents in Shropshire . It was Asker who explained to me the internecine struggles within the Communist party in Afghanistan and that the majority of the other ...

Obscured by all the recent acclaim for Vladimir Putin, - leader of his people, statesman, peacemaker, - Putin has, yet again, been putting the squeeze on his neighbours. He has been making his immediate neighbours, in particular Armenia and Ukraine , offers that are difficult to refuse. The catalyst of this activity has been the possibility that either country might sign bilateral trade and economic co-operation agreements with the EU. Since the collapse of the USSR , with the brief exception of the early Yeltsin years, Russia has sought to bully and intimidate all the former soviet states that now constitute Russia ’s immediate neighbours. Russia ’s track record against tiny Estonia alone makes for particularly grizzly reading. However the real affront to Russian hegemony is the existence of an independent Ukraine . Russia ’s continued blatant interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine is so naked precisely because, for a considerable number of Russians in general ...

Bluff: to mislead by a display of strength, self confidence, e.g. in poker to deceive by a show of confidence in the strength of one’s own cards. I The Russian state has long been a master of bluff, bluster and deception. From the painted façades of Potemkin villages to the model factories and kindergartens shown to visitors of Stalin’s workers paradise. T hese days the Russian façade is less sophisticated and elaborate, it consists merely in the pretence that Russia is now a normal democratic state, albeit with a Slavic twist; a society with free elections and healthy civil society. Putin calls this cardboard model, ‘sovereign democracy.’  This façade may be unsophisticated but it is not cheap, in 2011 the Russian government spent £1.4 billion on international propaganda. [1] For this money Putin has purchased, amongst much else, a slick TV operation in the form of RT (Russia Today) and The Voice of Russia radio station. Both affect a highly professional air, thou...