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Vladimir Putin: Janus Look

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 4/17/2005

Even the most careful and informed perusal of Western policy papers and official announcements leaves one baffled. What is it the West prefers? Does it plump for an affable though ineffectual and constantly inebriated Yeltsin-style leader or would it rather have a thinly disguised authoritarian like Putin? The dilemma seems to be between anarchic democracy and authoritarian rule of law and order. The former agrees with get rich quick tycoons and bleeding heart liberals - the latter with foreign investors and weapons dealers (often one and the same). In Russia, what is good for business often goes against the grain of old fashioned liberalism.

Or so the common wisdom goes. The eternally raging debate is reminiscent of the bogus "Asian values" intellectual construct. Asians, it was claimed, are "not built" for Western type democracy which is incompatible with their values and way of life. They are more amenable to avuncular authoritarian guidance coupled with sustained economic growth. It took a bursting bubble of gargantuan proportions to debunk that myth. The same has been conveniently said about Africans (by the most rapacious African dictators, needless to add) - and about the Russians.

Russians need a "Strong Man" such as Stalin - the man of iron, recently reappraised and praised by Putin in a speech in St. Petersburg. They are an unruly lot, prone to Vodka and petty crime. They fall easy prey to felony organized from the top or to the grassroots home-made variety of cosa nostra. They are disorganized and emotionally labile. They are in dire need of micro-management and cruel deterrent leadership.

This pet theory of kremlinologists and Kremlin dwellers is enthusiastically endorsed by businessmen subjected to the vagaries of the Wild East that Russia has become. The restoration of property rights and a semblance of law and order at whatever bloody cost is likely to be welcomed by the long suffering populace itself. Stalin-nostalgia is rife.

Western governments, publicly committed as they are to human rights and civil society, make polite noises whenever the "Strong Man" thesis is advanced. The Russian people - goes the feeble opposition - is perfectly capable of maintaining a functioning, law-abiding democracy. That this is not the current case is the result of "transition" - that fabled, all-explaining beast. It is a tad more difficult to reason why lawful democracy has never been the case in Russia in the preceding millennium - but this is conveniently ignored. The history of Russia seems to have started in 1991.

The truth is more prosaic and rather sad. Democracy and law is to no Russian's liking. They contravene the vested interests of one and all. Venal politicians, gold chained mobsters, sunglassed, square jawed FSB agents, Georgian and Chechen pimps and smugglers, money laundering banks, import export enterprises (importing illicit goods and exporting hard currency and stolen art) - all share a common vision of an increasingly savage territory. The urban parasites: the money changers, the small time traders, the club operators, the hookers - all thrive on lawlessness. The law enforcement officers - policemen, judges, lawyers - fattened by bribes and confiscated property have vested capital in the disintegration of the social fabric.

The government - a crime organization with its armed forces - competes with other criminals on turf and traffic. The media is owned by the former or the latter and is an instrument in furthering crime or covering up for it. Thus, journalists are propagators of the very plague they are supposed to cure.

The West will do well to realize that the interests of individuals and those of society are incompatible in Russia. The more dysfunctional the hospitals - the more bribes collected by nurses and doctors to provide decent care. The more clogged up the courts - the richer judges get by juggling schedules. The more burdened and dilapidated the universities - the more do cash and sex substitute for learning. The more bloodied the streets - the higher the price of private protection afforded by policemen and criminals alike.

Even the humblest citizen engages in daily misdemeanours, in petty theft, in forgery and tax evasion, in egregious deceit and double accounting. He cheats his employer, she cheats her husband, they cheat their neighbour. Malfeasance and corruption are all pervasive, they permeated the membranes of every social cell, they cannot be rid of unless the body is. They are a way of life, a state of mind, a reflex, an instinct, an intuition, a language, the grammar and the syntax of a mass pathology, a life deformed.

A Strong Man in government will only monopolize crime, as Stalin did. He will extinguish all private competition in the pursuit of subornation and illegality. He will both legalize and legitimize reality and accept that which is inevitable in Russia, this vast, perverted continent. Crime is order of a kind, it is a law unto itself and it is often the most democratic of institutions. To everything there is a price and place, to everyone according to his needs, justice is swift and often irrevocable. The tariffs of subornation are well-known, the territories demarcated, the equilibrium maintained. It is a precarious social order - but order all the same. It is the law of lawlessness - but althesame a law. It is a co-optition (co-operation and competition) inside an oligopoly. The people are both consumers and producers of the perversity that is Russia in the 21st century - and Putin can only go along with it as have all his predecessors in the last one thousand years.