"It Can't Happen Here" (Russian election)

[djohnson@xxxxxxx (David Johnson)]

The Nation
June 17, 1996
editorial

     It Can't Happen Here

     Imagine that Russia has been governed for the past
five years by a popularly elected Communist president.
During his term, the Kremlin relentlessly pursued harsh economic
policies that plunged nearly a third of the country's ordinary
citizens into poverty and devastated the middle classes while
turning over most of its richest assets to a small segment
of previous Communist officials. When the Russian Parliament,
which had also been popularly elected, opposed his policies,
the Communist president used tanks to disband it and then
rammed through a Constitution enabling him to rule virtually by
decree. A year later, now relying mainly on former K.G.B. and other
security officials, he launched a savage and still unresolved
war against a tiny breakaway region (smaller than Afghanistan,
for the sake of comparison) of his own country, decimating three
cities and countless villages and killing 35,000 to 40,000 Russian
and non-Russian civilians, most of them children, women
and the elderly.

     Would an American President enthusiastically devote himself
to the re-election of this Russian president; support a $10 billion
contribution to his campaign by the International Monetary Fund;
remain all but silent about his transgressions and victims;
travel to Moscow to endorse him with favorable comparisons to
Abraham Lincoln and while there shun another presidential
candidate who had actually dismantled the Soviet Communist
system in the 1980s? And all this with uncritical coverage
by most of the U.S. media? Indeed, would there be any limit
to American support for this Russian president -- even, say,
if he found a way, in the name of ideology or stability, to escape
or falsify the election he now faces?

     Send your answers to President Bill Clinton, The White House,
Washington, D.C., or to the editor of your daily newspaper.

     SOVIETICUS

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