Jingle Cells

Starting 2011 as they mean to on, the Tandem have kicked off their (respective?) re-election campaigns with the traditional detention of opposition activists.

While I shed few tears for Khodorkovsky regardnig his sentence and none over the New Year’s eve arrest of Boris Nemtsov (whose self-promoting membership of the Other Russia cannot hide his inability to believe in anything except narcissism), repression is repression no matter how unsavoury the particular characters being repressed. Not to mention the fact that the others arrested alongside Nemtsov included Ilya Yashin (5 days), Kirill Manulin (8 days), Konstantin Kosyakin (10 days), Eduard Limonov (15 days). The fates of these honest left wing activists do not deserve to be ignored out of disdain for Nemtsov and Khoder.

Putin’s déformation professionnelle has become terminal. I have never liked when people fixated on his “KGB past” to tar Putin as illiberal; first of all, few said the same about ex CIA chief George HW Bush, for example. And besides, all sorts of people joined the Soviet secret services for all sorts of reasons. Because those jobs provided one of the only avenues to travel abroad and read foreign literature and press, they attracted a fair share of inquisitive, adventurous and liberal recruits driven by knowledge, or glamour or curiosity more than simple thuggery or authoritarian personalities. One example of just this kind of KGB grad is Primakov.

But while the fact of Putin’s tenure in the KGB does not necessarily reveal his authoritarian nature, the act of being a career agent may have endowed him with a particular prism and skill sets that he is unable to unlearn: an accomplished hammerer, Putin has become unable or unwilling to explore the possibility that not everything in the world is a nail.

From 1999 to, say, 2005, there were an awful lot of nails that needed hammering in Russia, which made Putin a frequently great fit for the country. But he has shown himself ill-equipped, psychologically as well as practically, to handle the country’s present challenges, which, to borrow the metaphor of another political has-been – Obama -demand scalpel work. Even as a one-trick pony, Putin has achieved much for Russia, but he risks overseeing the deterioration of his very work.