You Had Me At ‘KGB’: Putin Has A Putin Problem

By John Surico

The past few weeks have been especially cold in the Motherland. On the domestic front, massive protests are proliferating around Russia — the last one on Saturday in Moscow estimated an audience of “tens of thousands.” Internationally, in regards to the latest stall on action in Syria, the U.N. is starting to ask wonder whose idea it was to give Russia a veto power.

Vladimir Putin & Dmitri Medvedev — the world’s most adorable master-puppet duo since Bush & Cheney — have never looked more befuddled about a Presidential election in March (which could mean possibly 12 more years for Putin) that they are poised to win by a large margin, And they should be — the external and internal systematic cracks are forming and, as Thomas Friedman pointed out on Saturday in a Times op-ed, “Russia is at a crossroads” and on the verge of collapse from a bottom-up glasnost.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came to Damascus, just as the scared-shitless American Embassy was leaving on a jet plane, in an attempt to convince President Assad to enact reforms and establish peace already. Welcomed by thousands of bloodshed-approving supporters, Levrov had Assad listening to his demands while the tyrant’s soldiers bombarded Homs with Russian weapons just north of where the two men were sitting.

In other words, this was a seller-buyer relationship that was getting bad press and needed a little lunch date to talk about business. Soon after, Levrov told reporters that he was one-hundred-percent positive that the U.S. was behind the Moscow protests. “I don’t think it. I believe it,” he said. You don’t have to be Kasparov to see that something is wrong here.

Russia, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has always found itself in a modern existential predicament. The gloomy past of brutality and an unpredictable future seems to create a landscape that is always out of line with a constantly accelerating world and never actually exists in the present. Just ask Dostoevsky.

The older populace, Putin’s largest supporting constituency, has been on a search for a strong, nationalist fighter like Drago in Rocky IV since 1991, when Boris Yeltsin went behind Mikhail Gorbachev’s back and threw him and his weird socialist-communist hybrid of a system out of the country. Putin, former KGB agent and Bond villain, is the closest fit for this larger-than-life job description.

While solidifying a bureaucracy of powerful and extremely wealthy economic elites, Putin’s United Russia party has created a government that spurs growth at the top while leaving just enough for the rest of the country to stay afloat. Think of a Russian version of Wall Street during the 2000s. His supporters tolerate this semi-statist version of trickle-down economics, scared that any disruption will lead to reform, which is a dirty word in Russian nostalgia.

On the other hand, the youth of the nation, born after the neo-Stalinist days of Brezhnev and into the age of WikiLeaks-esque transparency, do not have this fear of change like their parents — for them, all signs point to it. So when the Putinocracy was reportedly caught cheating last December in the Parliamentary elections, which doesn’t sound so bizarre considering their power hierarchy is like a suspenseful game of Jenga, they took to the streets and have refused to leave since then. They are demanding a 21st century form of “socialism with a face,” a term Gorbachev used to justify his perestroika reforms less than twenty years ago — one that guarantees them a future that pays and a government that serves the people, not the Siberian One Percenters.

Hence the clear division at these protests. On Saturday, just out of earshot from the blaring voices of the youth was a much smaller group of Putin supporters, supposedly sent there by an apparently anxious government in order to make it seem as if the protesters were out of touch with the mainstream and, if you look at Putin’s high (yet rapidly plunging) approval ratings, they technically are. But that plunge is happening and the Russian policymakers are starting to show the world why.

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