The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Arab Spring, Russian Winter — a bad year for dictators Posted: 16 Dec 2011 10:36 PM PST  Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni works her mobile phone and her laptop computer at a cafe in Tunis: "This (rise of the middle class) is not about bread, this is about cleanliness. It's not political, it's hygienic," explains Moscow author Grigory Chkhartishvili. — Reuters pic The first is that authoritarian regimes don't run on autopilot. To survive, particularly in the age of the Internet, jet travel and global capital flows, dictatorships need to be savvy and effective. We often attribute the success of democratic revolutions to their brave leaders or the spirit of the times, but, as Lucan Way, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, argues, "authoritarian incompetence" can be an equally powerful driver. That is certainly the case in Russia, where one reason United Russia, the party of power led by Vladimir Putin, did so poorly in elections this month is the simple fact that the regime made a lot of political mistakes. "The ineffectiveness and stupid actions of the authorities have accelerated the process," Grigory Chkhartishvili, the best-selling Moscow author who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin, explained in an email. He recalled asking Yegor Gaidar, the late architect of Russian economic changes, "when does he expect society to awaken. Around 2015, he answered, if they, meaning Putin and his entourage, do not make too many mistakes. Well, they have made too many mistakes." Vladimir Gelman, a professor of political science at the European University in St Petersburg, made a similar point this week. Gelman argued that the Kremlin's wobble in December was an own goal, or, as he put it, "a blow delivered with its own hands".  Russian communist party supporters in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk protest against violations at the parliamentary elections. — Reuters pic But the bigger problem was that Russia's authoritarian leaders became so infatuated with their political Potemkin village they neglected some of the coercive basics: focused as they were on the carrot, the authorities didn't pay enough attention to the stick. Gelman contrasts this political season, when the government's attitude before the election was "peaceful", with the 2007-08 political cycle, when the opposition was repressed in advance and the state's political machinery was fully engaged. The standout example of authoritarian competence, by contrast, is China, whose rulers have continued to focus relentlessly on doing whatever it takes to stay in power. That determination was in evidence after the "colour revolutions" in the former Soviet Union, which prompted a thoughtful and concerted effort to tighten government control, as did the uprisings in the Arab world this year. The second lesson of the Russian protests is one that will be particularly worrying for China. It is that economic success does not guarantee political success. This equation is mystifying in Western democracies — where people tend to believe that "it's the economy, stupid", and usually they're right. That's why the International Monetary Fund, which focused on Egypt's healthy gross domestic product numbers, was wrong-footed by the protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo. And it is why the demonstrations in Russia perplexed many foreign observers, who noted that many of their participants were well-heeled members of a middle class that prospered in the Putin era.  Moved by their souls, not just their pocketbooks: A woman with her face painted in the colours of the Kingdom of Libya flag, at a protest against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The word on her forehead reads, "Leave". — Reuters pic Research by Carol Graham and Stefano Pettinato suggests another reason why a prospering society might still be a rebellious one. In work that initially focused on Russia and Peru, the two identified a group they described as "frustrated achievers", people who had become both richer and less happy. "Frustrated achievers are people who are just out of poverty or the lower middle class," Graham, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said. "They are people who have made relatively large gains, but they report being very frustrated." A source of that frustration, Graham said, was when "the gains around them are much bigger than their own, and bigger than they can ever achieve in their lifetime". Post-Soviet Russia, with its oligarchs, crony capitalism and corruption, is a petri dish for frustrated achievers. The third lesson of the Russian Winter is one it has in common with the Arab Spring. One consequence of the rise of social media is the emergence of what Way calls "leaderless protests". "In Russia, as in the Arab world, protests started largely spontaneously without the participation or instigation of the major opposition groupings," Way said in an e-mail. "Instead, they were inspired by actors who came out of nowhere and lacked virtually any kind of organisational backing." But this new world is also hard to manage for the would-be revolutionaries. Twitter and Facebook may make it easy to get those frustrated achievers onto the streets. But the really hard work always starts the day after the revolution, and if you didn't need to build a protest movement in the first place, you may soon lose power to the people who did. — Reuters * Chrystia Freeland is a Reuters columnist. Any opinions expressed are her own. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Picturing the sinking of the Soviet Union Posted: 16 Dec 2011 09:30 PM PST Russian Boris Yeltsin and Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev face the media. — Reuters pic
We had all seen the bare shelves in the shops. We knew that many constituent republics had declared their independence. But this was still my almighty Soviet Union, the only country this 20-year-old photojournalist from Kazakhstan had ever known. So why had 10 national leaders rushed to my capital city, Alma-Ata, on December 21, 1991? Who were these hordes of journalists and photographers jostling for position and shouting questions? It was one of my first assignments for the Kazakh Telegraph Agency. The night before, I sat in the agency's darkroom splicing 300-metre rolls of film and inserting it with great care into cartridges, 36 shots at a time. We didn't work with factory-made rolls of film; this was the Soviet Union. Painstaking preparation was part of the job, especially before any major event. And this was certainly major. Even my seasoned colleagues had had few opportunities to photograph national leaders. Party congresses, military parades, even New Year celebrations: these happened in Moscow, events we watched on television. Less than two weeks earlier, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus — the Slavic core of the Soviet Union — had signed the agreement that dissolved the country and created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).  Spotlight on Yeltsin at Alma-Ata. — Reuters pic WHAT IF? Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of newly independent Kazakhstan, mobilised quickly to ensure our country and a host of other newly independent republics were brought into the fold. He met one leader after another at the snowbound airport as they arrived to sign the declaration that would bring the number of countries into the grouping to 11. It seemed everyone who arrived was in a rush. Even now, when I edit my pictures, I can see the worry etched on the faces of the Kazakh statesmen of the time. What if someone were suddenly to change their mind, snatching away the security Moscow had always provided?  Signs of insecurity: One of two lone protesters outside the hall where the signing would take place. — Reuters pic Our shared Soviet heritage was all that bound us together. Even the name of the new alliance sounded strange. We could appreciate the idea of "independent states". But a "commonwealth"? Between a set of ethnically divergent countries, two of which — Armenia and Azerbaijan — were already engaged in a brutal conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh? Inside, the grandiose ceremony had begun. Never before had I seen so many KGB officers gathered in one place. Its 9th Department, which was responsible for guarding dignitaries, had a lot of people to look out for. And so many journalists! Some photographers had brought ladders to climb above the crowds — a device I would use countless times over the next years, but something I'd never seen before that day. Russian President Boris Yeltsin was the most charismatic of all the leaders present. His words — and he spoke a lot — were accompanied by animated hand gestures. People shouted questions at him on the move. For a photographer, he was a great subject. Yeltsin's individual style contrasted sharply with that of the ranked officials around him. Even the Trilby he wore was at odds with the thick fur hats of other leaders.  Leaders of the post-Soviet republics face the media in Alma-Ata. — Reuters pic He grinned and gave the thumbs-up. With a single click of my mechanical Nikon F2, I realised that a new time was upon us. I was recording history. STRANGE FILM Before writing this article, I was scanning my old black-and-white negatives in a photo store in Almaty, as Alma-Ata is now called. The other customers were printing out pictures taken on their mobile phones. "What a strange film! I can't even see any picture numbers along the perforations," said the curious sales assistant, too young to recall the 300-metre rolls with which I once worked. At 40, I have now spent half of my life in the Soviet Union and half in independent Kazakhstan. The second two decades have brought changes unimaginable during the first. The Soviet Union gave me much for which to be thankful: an education that could not be bettered today, and the well-built apartment blocks that my parents still call home. But gone are the fear and uncertainty — my own and Kazakhstan's — I remember from that day in December 1991. They have been replaced by a maturity and an independence that comes from facing and overcoming your challenges. We have both grown up. — Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
ALMATY, Dec 17 — The Soviet Union, we had always thought, was surely too big to fail.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Features To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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