Maхim Trudolyubov, Editorial Page Editor at Vedomosti, Russia’s most influential and independent business daily, has written an interesting analysis of how Putin and his cronies have created the conditions for revolution:
But despite all their efforts, it is the country’s current rulers that have created the conditions for revolution. By rewriting Russia’s electoral legislation (the last few years have seen amendments to 55 laws relating to electoral processes), the Kremlin’s political managers have made elections controllable. Businesses have been intimidated by expropriation, their owners prevented from financing undesirable political activity. The development of a civil society has been strangled by restrictions on the not-for-profit sector. The entire thrust of Putin’s policies has been to eliminate everything natural and unpredictable.
The result has been that all genuine, not imitation, political activity has been excluded from the political arena. The Kremlin’s apparatchiks spent years working out how to restrict the opposition’s legal room to manoeuvre, and they succeeded: they destroyed the conditions necessary for the development of a political mainstream. And by doing so, they created a powder keg.
Read the entire article here
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