Vladimir Putin wasn’t the only one with tears in his eyes as he exulted in his presidential election victory and shouted “Glory to Russia!” The entire American punditocracy, to say nothing of the Brits, responded as one with accusations the election had been fixed, confidently predicting a “crackdown” on “dissent” as the Russian leader resumed the office he had never really left.
Yet there is very little to these claims of fraud. Of course, in every election ever held anywhere there have been “irregularities,” such as are commonplace in our very own Chicago. There is some evidence the Russian parliamentary elections were somewhat less than honest – the 99 percent pro-Putin vote in Chechnya, of all places, was particularly suspect – although no one has gone so far as to say Putin’s United Russia party actually lost.
The reality is that Putin is immensely popular in Russia, a fact the English-speaking media only admits with great reluctance. The “dissidents,” who are fawned over by Western journalists, are viewed by Russia’s vast-albeit-silent majority as a tiny faction of professional discontents with dubious motives. Putin has characterized them as professionals in the pay of Washington and London, a charge given credence by some hilarious video of a British diplomat and Russian “democracy activists” who wound up between a rock and a hard place.
As the US and Britain move against Iran, setting up Tehran for a round of “shock and awe,” the Russians aren’t sitting still for it: they’re sending arms to Iran’s ally, Syria, and calling for mediation with the mullahs. Western leaders are especially nonplussed at Putin’s blunt denunciations of US policy: “They want to control everything,” he told student interlocutors in Tomsk, “sometimes I have the impression the United States doesn’t need allies, it needs vassals.”
Truer words were never spoken. The last thing Western NGOs – and their governmental paymasters – want is a strong, united, and relatively free Russia. They much prefer the corruption and chaos of the Yeltsin years, when a perpetually intoxicated “leader” and his Rasputin-like cronies helped the West and the former communist elite seize the country’s “privatized” assets, and let the nation crumble around them. Putin saved Russia from dissolution, and those who were hoping to pick up the pieces were not at all pleased. This is the reason for years of relentless anti-Russian cold war era propaganda, the charges of “authoritarianism” leveled against a nation emerging from a 70-year-long nightmare, and the revived hype about a Russian “threat.”
