Two days after declaring the elimination of corruption one of his government’s highest priorities, Russian president Vladimir Putin fired ten high-ranking officials. He said the dismissals were not timed to coincide with his state-of-the-nation address, although he said he knew they were in the works as he prepared his speech. He said there may be more to come.
The actions left some unimpressed. As the Moscow Times reports:
Georgy Satarov, head of Indem, a think tank that deals with corruption-related issues, was skeptical of what the shake-up would bring. “It’s battling corrupt individuals, not corruption,” Satarov told Interfax. “The system needs to be changed.”
Today’s Slate has an piece by Peter Sadovnik that asks: “Can a Westerner understand the Russian people’s love of strong leaders?” He writes:
For 15 years, at least, a cultural-cognitive gap has been growing between the people and the state. That space is a manifestation of the public’s alienation from its government. Attempts to paper over that alienation, to foist a new solidarity on an old people, are absurd. The people, especially the young people who are impervious to the old dogma, know this.
So, too, does the president, who’s not a Soviet premier so much as a tsar, dispensing with ideology and reappropriating the powers of 19th-century imperialism. Whether it’s single-handedly rerouting massive oil pipelines or reorganizing the federal bureaucracy, Putin has not so much resurrected a dead superstate as responded to Russians’ long-festering desire for a “strong hand.”
And so the day after Victory Day, the president gave his State of the Nation address and told Russians that they need to have more babies. Noting that the population has been declining—from roughly 150 million in the early 1990s to 140 million today—he mapped out a series of financial incentives for women to have more children.
Whether more Russians women will become mothers for the sake of the motherland is unknown. There is, of course, something odd about a president telling his people to make more babies—procreation tends to be a personal matter. But this is not how tsars think. And the Russian people—most of them, at least—love their tsar.
I don’t understand this love. I don’t know why so many Russians I’ve met think their leaders are extensions of themselves, like arms or toes or earlobes. After all, they have less power to choose their leaders than we do in the United States.
An interlude before Sadovnik’s final paragraph: his article begins with a description of the Stalin-era building he moved into, built 64 years ago by German prisoners of war. His agent had informed him that in Moscow real-estate circles, “Stalin” and “German” add value, seting the building apart from the crappy apartments built hastily after the war—the so-called khrushchoby (хрущебы—a play on трущобы [slum]).
To return: Sadovnik doesn’t understand this love of Russians for their new “tsar”:
This is what I thought when my real-estate broker told me that German prisoners of war had built my apartment building, when a dictator who killed tens of millions of his own people was vozhd [вождь]—the great leader—and that this makes my apartment more valuable. She smiled at me when I asked if anyone thought it a bit eerie living in a place that smelled of a violent past. Did this make the building tainted perhaps? “You can’t do better for this price,” she said—a bit smugly, I should add.
I will leave it to the reader to note the apparent archetypicality of the Real Estate Agent and to decide what it augurs for the new Russia and for good old America.
