[Marxism] Perry Anderson on Putin

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 2 dated 25 January 2007 | Perry Anderson
Russia?s Managed Democracy
Perry Anderson

Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside 
the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them 
waiting until assorted dignitaries ? Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an 
impotent ombudsman ? had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in 
to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white 
ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by 
the flower-encrusted bier. Around the edges of the mortuary chamber, 
garlands from the media that attacked her while she was alive stood thick 
alongside wreaths from her children and friends, the satisfied leaf to leaf 
with the bereaved. Filing past them and out into the cemetery beyond, 
virtually no one spoke. Some were in tears. People dispersed in the drizzle 
as quietly as they came.

The authorities had gone to some lengths to divert Anna Politkovskaya?s 
funeral from the obvious venue of the Vagankovskoe, where Sakharov is 
buried, to a dreary precinct on the outskirts that few Muscovites can 
locate on a map. But how necessary was the precaution? The number of 
mourners who got to the Troekurovskoe was not large, perhaps a thousand or 
so, and the mood of the occasion was more sadness than anger. A middle-aged 
woman, bringing groceries home from the supermarket, shot at point-blank 
range in an elevator, Politkovskaya was killed for her courage in reporting 
the continuing butchery in Chechnya. An attempt to poison her had narrowly 
failed two years earlier. She had another article in press on the 
atrocities of the Kadyrov clan that now runs the country for the Kremlin, 
as she was eliminated. She lived and died a fighter. But of any powerful 
protest at her death, it is difficult to speak. She was buried with 
resignation, not fury or revolt.

In Ukraine, the discovery of the decapitated body of a journalist who had 
investigated official corruption, Georgi Gongadze, was sufficient outrage 
to shake the regime, which was brought down soon afterwards. Politkovskaya 
was a figure of another magnitude. A better historical comparison might be 
with the murder of Matteotti by Mussolini in 1924. In Russian 
circumstances, her moral stature as an opponent of arbitrary power was 
scarcely less than that of the Socialist deputy. But there the resemblance 
ends. The Matteotti Affair caused an outcry that nearly toppled Mussolini. 
Politkovskaya was killed with scarcely a ripple in public opinion. Her 
death, the official media explained, was either an unfathomable mystery, or 
the work of enemies of the government vainly attempting to discredit it. 
The president remarked she was a nobody whose death was the only news value 
in her life.

It is tempting, but would be a mistake, to see in that casual dismissal no 
more than the ordinary arrogance of power. All governments deny their 
crimes, and most are understanding of each other?s lies about them. Bush 
and Blair, with still more blood on their hands ? in all probability, that 
of over half a million Iraqis ? observe these precepts as automatically as 
Putin. But there is a difference that sets Putin apart from his fellow 
rulers in the G8, indeed from virtually any government in the world. On the 
evidence of comparative opinion polls, he is the most popular national 
leader alive today. Since he came to power six years ago, he has enjoyed 
the continuous support of over 70 per cent of his people, a record no other 
contemporary politician begins to approach. For comparison, Chirac now has 
an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent.

full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n02/ande01_.html

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