By Mikhail L. Titarenko
They organized all sorts of sociological surveys to support this thoroughly planned campaign and to push their “predictions” on the “crisis” facing Russian leaders and “sharply declining rating” of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev. The anti-Putin campaign became really vociferous when the United Russia congress officially and unanimously approved Putin as its nominee for the presidential election in March 2012.
It is true that the election results showed the correlation of political forces and sentiments in Russia, which is experiencing the difficult strategic consequences of the disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the impact of the global economic crisis.
The Russian authorities should learn the lessons from the protests, which shows the global crisis has had a serious impact on Russia’s economy. For example, it has increased the cost of housing and utilities substantially, and led to proliferation of corruption, lack of discipline among bureaucrats, strong bureaucratic stranglehold, and chaos in army and military reforms. Quite naturally, these factors have influenced people’s attitude toward the United Russia party and the bureaucracy, which has won the “top prize” in terms of public repulsion.
However, the “go ahead” for the nasty campaign came from politicians in the United States, who made it clear that they would not welcome Putin back as president of Russia. The opposition in Russia took the signal immediately and went on the “offensive”.
Voters manifested good understanding of the fact that in the past decade as well as during the current difficult times Putin, the non-partisan leader of United Russia, and Medvedev have made substantial efforts to consolidate the country and solve its political and social problems. As for Putin, he has won wide public recognition as a Russian patriot who cares and works for the consolidation and prosperity of the country and to improve the lives and livelihoods of the working people, especially the less-protected section of society.
The West assumes that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the result of its victory in the Cold War. It hopes that with Western support, separatists and criminals will take the next step to cause the collapse of Russia. In their writings, American politicians such as political scientist and former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright have described scenarios of an expected collapse of Russia and even redrawn its national borders.
Putin, who posed the main geopolitical obstacle to the realization of such goals, outlined the strategy for Russia’s revival and consolidation of its status as an important independent country that would cooperate with other countries, including the US, on the principle of equal rights.
As shown by the Dec 4 election results, the United Russia party, notwithstanding the weakening of some of its authority, retained a very considerable percentage of voters’ confidence and won 50 percent of the popular votes. The results also reflect that the Russian people still have the undoubted confidence in Putin and Medvedev.
The Western media try to fan the liberal opposition’s passions in every which way they can. But the Russian authorities, manifesting maximum tolerance, have allowed such anti-government demonstrations to take place.
Some media outlets are engaged in unbridled propaganda, aimed specifically against Putin. But the Russian people know that it is a preplanned political provocation, designed by anti-Russia elements to destabilize the situation in the run-up to the presidential election.
When the liberal media in Russia and in the West loudly advertise their concern over “democratic development” in Russia, they expose their involvement in efforts to silence true public sentiments, as evident in the protests in the US, Britain, Italy, Germany and France. The demonstrations in the West are aimed against the ruling oligarchs in those countries who have fattened their wallets during the economic crisis and distributed multi-million-dollar bonuses among themselves, thereby aggravating the financial and economic chaos.
The Western media should reflect on their double standard on democracy and protests for justice. As the Holy Bible says, before pointing out a mote in another’s eye, they should remove a beam from their own eyes....
[Putin complains that the new opposition is leaderless, without the ability to formulate one coherent complaint against him and the system. With this description, he could have been talking about the American "Occupy Wall St." movement. The Occupy movement and the anti-Putin movement are twins, fake grass roots movements, generated by the same American sponsors. Occupy and its twin may be nearly identical in composition, but they have diametrically opposed goals--Occupy is intended as an American pressure relief valve, to confuse any real grass roots "praire fire" from sweeping Obama and friends from power; the leaderless Moscow protests are attempting the impossible, to organize around all issues, hoping that one of them will truly light the fuse and destroy Putin in the process....
The CIA has, over the years, perfected its formula for social agitation and behavioral control. Real control of activist populations is a powerful instrument for change, sowing destabilized populations wherever this weaponized political process is deployed. This weaponized form of democratic-revolution is being used in Moscow to destroy the one man who can pull Russia through the time of testing that we have been forced into. Both Eastern and Western movements are also identical to the "Arab Spring" movements, only in the case of the Middle East and North Africa, Washington's "Islamists" are the pawns, the agitators deployed by the State Dept. to stir the boiling broth.
If the world manages to survive the forces that the CIA has unleashed, the end result will be an entire world organized against the perpetrator of all the trouble and chaos. Only God knows what will happen after that.]
Russian protesters seeking to sow chaos: Putin
MOSCOW: Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that mass protests against his 12-year rule were being stoked by a hollow collection of leaderless opposition groups who wanted to sow chaos in Russia.
In his first comments since Saturday’s protest, Russia’s prime minister said it was impossible to annul the December 4 parliamentary election – the opposition’s key demand – but promised the March presidential vote, in which he is running, would be transparent.
Comparing protesters to Russian revolutionaryLeon Trotsky, Putin said they were more interested in sowing chaos than implementing a concrete set of ideas on how the world’s biggest energy producer should develop.
“The problem is that they have no single program,” the 59-year-old leader told top members of his All Russia People’s Front, an umbrella movement of supporters, at his presidential election campaign headquarters in Moscow.
“They have many individual programs, but no unified one and no clear way to reach their goals, which are also not clear, and there are no people who would be able to do anything concrete,” Putin said.
Facing the biggest protests since he rose to power in 1999, Russia’s most powerful politician has looked out of touch in recent weeks, dismissing thousands of protesters as chattering monkeys while offering gradual political reforms.
With supporters, Putin took the protests more seriously, saying his opponents deserved respect despite their hunger for what he termed “Brownian motion,” the apparently random movement of particles observed by Scottish scientist Robert Brown.
Paramount leader
Putin presented himself as a leader able to ensure stability and protesters as spoilers bend on chaos, a potentially appealing strategy in a country which has been racked by crises and political chaos since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.
Putin, who polls show is Russia’s most popular politician, said that he had a solid agenda which included modernization of the $1.9 trillion economy and strengthening of defense.
He said protesters were trying to undermine the legitimacy of the parliamentary vote and called for a transparent presidential election.
“When this kind of situation emerges, there is always an attempt to devalue and undermine the legitimacy of everything that happened in the public sphere, including and, most of all, the electoral process,” he said.
“Therefore, everything must be done in order to ensure that elections are understandable, transparent and objective.”
Putin said his government would spend $500 million to install web cameras at all polling stations, an idea he first aired on December 15, although some of his supporters argued it would do little to boost transparency.
The gulf between Putin and tens of thousands of people who came out onto the streets of Russia’s biggest cities has stoked speculation that Putin may seek to ditch some senior aides.
The Kremlin’s powerful first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, did not attend Putin’s meeting, the first such absence for months at a meeting of such importance. Surkov did not return calls.
Other Putin’s allies, including trade union activists, industry workers and war veterans, complained to their boss about the methods used by the opposition, with some calling for tighter Internet regulation....
The author is president of Russia-China Friendship Association and director of Institute of Far Eastern Studies, affiliated to the Russian Academy of Sciences....
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