--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> I should also say I like Boris Kagarlitsky and a lot
> of his work. But
> he's sometimes very excitable - quick to believe in
> crisis and
> disbelieve in a boom. So I'm curious what a critic
> might say about
> him.
>
Kagarlitsky has a piece in today's Moscow Times on the educational system, which, it turns out, is in crisis. Not only that, the crisis has supposedly been deliberately engineered by the government to make people stupid. He does all this without mentioning that there are twice as many people enrolled in institutions as in the Soviet era.
This book also has a nice few pages on the Western media and Beslan. It seems Zhores was feeding him articles from London. I might translate that too.
Here's what Medvedev says:
Roy Medvedev Vladimir Putin: vtoroi srok (Vladimir Putin: The Second Term) Pp. 35-36
The presidential elections in 2004 were a triumph for Vladimir Putin in many respects: he received almost 20% more votes than in the 2000 elections, and 14% more than Yeltsin had in 1991. In what did the reason for such an obvious success for Putin consist?
All Russian analysts posed this question to themselves. It was impossible for Vladimir Putin’s opponents to account for it as the result of the good work of Putin’s political technologists (CD – “polittekhnology”) as they had in 2000. Putin’s opponents from the democratic camp explained that his success was because he and his circle had allegedly been able to crush the opposition and remove his opponents from the political stage. They attempted to present their own ineffectiveness and lack of appeal as a defeat of democratic values in Russia.
Novaya Gazeta’s Boris Kagarlitsky, who is usually opposed to every political trend and group in Russia, easily coming up with any grounds whatsoever for any accusation whatsoever, maintained that Putin only won the election because – he hadn’t done anything, allowing events to go on their own course. “In the course of his first term,” Kagarlitsky asserted, “Putin was not a politician, but a rating. A symbol, an official, anything at all, except for a state leader laying out his own course. It was precisely this that made his position so strong, as everyone could think up his own Putin and put into this empty form one’s own pleasant content. ‘Putin has no faults!’ – thus answered the majority of Russian citizens to the questions of sociologists, and in fact, how could faults appear in a president who has taken absolutely no steps that would affect the lives of the majority of the population?”* Boris Kagarlitsky, it appears, is a left-wing publicist who is a master of rhetorical denunciation -- but it is empty and demagogic rhetoric with nothing behind it. Examples of such irresponsible raving could also be seen in the comments of the newspaper Zavtra. (CD: the anti-Semitic anti-government newspaper.)
* Novaya Gazeta, March 15-17 2004
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com