Libertys light is dwindling

http://www.siberianlight.net/2006/12/18/demonstrations-in-moscow/

For a few years back in the early 21st century, it looked like Russia might join up with the civilised world, leave behind some of its old pathologies and strike out in the direction of good governance, western-style institutions and a respect for law.

All of those whisps of hope have now disappeared. Political dissent in Russia is being suppressed. Putin is putting a stranglehold on the gas and oil assets that were privatised and is gradually re-nationalising them. Russia has coerced more than half of all the countries it supplies with gas into signing new unfavourable contracts, or risk being cut off. The FSB is pretty much a criminal enterprise whose nationalistic urges are often combined with their aquisitive ones, to the great detriment of many people in the old soviet republics. The bombings in European Russia that led to the second Chechen war were very likely the work of the FSB. Many hundreds of ordinary Russians died in those explosions so the Putin could launch his dirty little war. Via Belarus, Russia is supplying Iran with very late model anti-aircraft missiles which will almost certainly come into play when the US or Israel destroy Irans nuclear capability.

Putin seems to think he can re-create the Soviet Union, but with no sustaining ideology and an economy that relies on arms and raw materials and virtually nothing else. As I have pointed out to numerous people on lots of occasions, becoming a super-power requires more than 2,500 nuclear weapons and a dedicated coterie of criminals. Lets not forget why the Soviet Union died- people stopped believing in the sustaining communist claptrap, and the Russian economy virtually stopped producing things other than tanks, aircraft and missiles. What has Putin done to resolve either of those two issues?

Russia seems from here to be a large mafia-type operation looking for opportunities to cause trouble and get rich quick. Is there any sign that ordinary Russians would or could do anything about the desparate state of their polity? None that I can detect.