Respect

Sometimes I'll want to post about a momentous event but won't feel I have anything more to add than the MSM websites; sometimes something will happen in Moscow (or wherever I am) that I wish I had a good picture of to share. An example of each of these situations happened recently, and luckily in each case I found that others had done a better job of posting than I could have. Hence the title of this post.

The momentous event in question was the day of protests and counterprotests last Saturday, of which I saw nothing in St. Petersburg (mainly because I slept much of the day and was in a banya for a substantial portion of my waking hours). Laurence Jarvik has an interesting eyewitness account of the pro-Putin counterprotest which went right past our apartment on Tverskaya although I wasn't there to see it. The one passage I would take issue with is the following:

The danger, unfortunately, is that the Communists--old, unreconstructed, and openly anti-semitic as well as anti-America--are the only opposition force well-organized enough to take advantage of the situation.

What Russia needs is a "loyal opposition" like those in Western democracies, as a safety valve, a feedback mechanism, and an alternative to yet another bloody revolt in Russia. Reform, not revolution, will be the key to progress here, and to a peaceful country with a growing economy.

The Communist Party (KPRF) may be "old" in several senses - the name's been around for awhile, the stone-faced Gennady Zyuganov sometimes looks like Lenin's mummification specialists have been using him for practice, and their support does come from the elderly - but I don't think the Party is "unreconstructed" (wiser commenters may correct me, but I believe the conventional wisdom on them now is that they are not far to the left of West European Social-Democratic parties), and I think the Rodina Party is much more of a nest of nationalists and far more dangerous in that respect than the KPRF.

As for a Russian political party being anti-American, I don't think that's relevant to Russian voters any more than the GOP's or Democrats' stance on Russia is relevant to most US voters. And these protests, and the current political debate in Russia, are not about America anymore, if they ever really were. If an American wants to consider what's in America's interests, I would say that if we can agree that it's in America's interests for the political debate in Russia to continue (rather than the situation which seems to be getting closer every day, where the Presidential Administration's point of view is the only one in mass circulation), then the KPRF's ability to rally those opposed to the recent changes in social benefits is a positive thing.

As for the "loyal opposition" concept, the KPRF was long considered to be just such a loyal opposition - unfortunately, the current administration (perhaps because it is not "like those in Western democracies) does not seem willing to accept feedback or questioning of the chosen course from anyone with the slightest bit of opposition, "loyal" or otherwise.

I spoke with several people over the weekend who would have identified in the past ten years with the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and its political predecessors, and all of them agreed that it was amazing and frightening that the current situation could make Zyuganov sound reasonable (I heard him on Friday sounding remarkably reasonable at times on Echo of Moscow Radio). However, there was also general agreement that it was a good thing at least someone was able to rally people to make legitimate grievances about the recent reforms known. Unfortunately, SPS, whether due to its leadership's own bumbling or to a government effort to keep them out of the public eye, no longer seems like much of a force. I also spoke with a St. Petersburg cabbie who forecast massive student protests in the spring, when the consequences of students' new lack of exemption from the draft - university students being rounded up for military service - will start to take place, but that's a different story.

Anyway, I digress. What I really wanted to do was thank Mr. Jarvik for posting an eyewitness account of the pro-Putin demonstration that I was not able to see, or, alas, photograph.

As for the second example I mentioned above, there was a brief but mighty blizzard here today - maybe 6 hours of heavy snowfall, and the forecast was for 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) of accumulationn - half the monthly average - which I think was reached. I'll post some of my pictures from today in a bit (unless I fall asleep at the keyboard first), but Veronica at Neeka's Backlog has a picture that evokes the white-out conditions better than any of mine. They even closed at least one of Moscow's airports, a rare event given the lack of risk-averse behavior (or is it the vastly superior pilots?) in civil aviation here.