Russia Is Next

Front Page Magazine ^ | 4-11-2005 | Dick Morris

[Pendragon_6]

The post-communist empire that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to cobble together is coming apart, decomposed by the centrifugal forces of democracy and freedom that suck peoples from the grasp of the Russian gravitational field.

First Georgia fell away from Russian domination by ousting former Soviet Union Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Then Ukraine bolted by protesting for weeks in the streets to force official recognition of the victory of Viktor Yushchenko, a man Putin considered so dangerous that his KGB henchmen poisoned him. Then tiny Moldova turned aside the Russian mafia and voted for an anti-Russian collection of “communists” desperately trying to survive in an orange tide.

And now, in far away Kyrgyzstan, President Askar Akayev has resigned, clearing the way for the nation’s first free post-Soviet government. This, with the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania safely in NATO, means that half of the former Soviet states have joined the freedom bandwagon.

Thank the Lord. Putin represents a lethal cocktail combining unreconstructed communists, KGB secret police, Russia’s corrupt mafia and the old nomenklatura that ran the USSR. At home, he has stripped local democracy by preventing the independent election of governors and eviscerated national democracy by eliminating single-member districts and hanging the entire election on party slates drawn up by people at the top. In the process, he has made a mockery of free speech and the free press by bullying and buying it, reducing its once-noisy voice of liberty to a frightened whisper. Economically, he has destroyed the independent, privatized oil industry and reinvested the government monolith with full powers.

Continued

[Lion in Winter]

More "wisdom" from the toe sucker... YUK!