The anecdote is told by Nina Khrushcheva,
the granddaughter of the legendary Nikita Khrushchev
, Stalin's successor.
The Soviet Union had already died and on December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin arrived at the headquarters of the former KGB, in Lubyanka, near Red Square where the holiday in honor of the Russian security services was commemorated.
Recently appointed prime minister at 47 years old and a lieutenant colonel in that dark organization, at the end of the ceremony, looking at the attendees, many of them colleagues from years in the basements of the agency, he made the following announcement in a military tone:
“The “The entrusted mission of infiltrating the highest level of the government has been successfully accomplished.”
There was chuckles,
but the joke was directed at Russia and the Russians.
And it wasn't a joke.
Putin became interim president two weeks later and never relinquished power.
To guarantee this, he transformed the country's bureaucratic structure
by poisoning it with former KGB agents,
renamed FSB by Boris Yeltsin, the president who brought him into politics.
A consummate Westernist and furious critic of communism, he went down in history riding a tank to save Mikhail Gorbachev's opening process
threatened by a coup attempt by a large sector of conservative military men arranged by the KGB itself.
The country, with Putin, was trapped in that
web of security, espionage and internal control orgas,
the only way that the new strongman understood power and its administration.
Nikita's granddaughter summarizes these mutations in that supposedly humorous comment.
What really happened, he says, was
another hit by the services, which this time could not be stopped.
“Russia used to be dominated by security forces, but now an anonymous security bureaucracy became the state itself, with Putin sitting at the top,”
he explains from his chair of International Relations in New York.
This extraordinary description of one of the most serious political leaderships of this era helps to
gauge the meaning and context of the elections that this week and until Sunday, for the first time for three days, are being held in Russia with an undisputed winner,
Putin
.
of course
.
Repression and internal control
First the Covid pandemic and then the war of aggression against Ukraine, have been the tools to suffocate the opposition, eliminate what little remained of the independent press and bill as treason any comment that dissented from official thinking also covered in a
flaming religious fanaticism. medieval.
who even went so far as to declare the LGBTI movement terrorist.
The last of the great critics, Alexei Navalny,
died more than suspiciously in prison on February 16.
Nothing surprising.
In 2014, the charismatic opposition figure Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin.
Before and after, poisonings, falls into the void or opportune cardiac arrests have multiplied among the antagonists of the regime.
The rivals chosen for the election with a guaranteed winner.
AFP Photo
Putin, with these ways, walks in the footprint that Stalin traced to shield his power.
Boarding that ghost train he imitates another implacable leader, Yuri Andropov, who like him came from the KGB and from the highest point of Soviet power
reinvigorated the organization
that Krushchev had previously, for mere survival, polished with the filters of the Communist Party.
Yeltsin, like Nina Khrushcheva's grandfather, at the democratic dawn of the country also sought to curtail the influence of that sinister structure and changed its name as if that were enough to pasteurize it.
Everything ended up being as it always was
and that is why Putin was on the threshold of the country's main seat that day, sharing his very serious joke with the spies.
The conspiratorial machinery
took power and became the new national bourgeoisie,
like an exaggerated and perverse
Multivac
from Isaac Asimov's stories, the mechanical monstrosity that rebels against those who created it.
The elections that will consecrate Putin's fifth consecutive term are a dramatization that will add
predictable successes
in the Crimean peninsula taken from Ukraine in 2014 and in the four provinces that Moscow appropriated with its army in the current war.
Vladimir Putin Boris Yeltsin president of Russia in 2000. AP Photo
Except for the regime, the failure of the polls is secondary.
There is no competition.
The three rivals awaiting the leader
were chosen by the Kremlin
.
Navalny, in his last messages, had called to vote against the Russian leader.
But he warned that the system gave “United Russia (the ruling party) a fantastic, inexplicable advantage.”
All that was left was for many to attend and ruin the ballots and insult Putin on them.
Navalny's widow now raises those desperate slogans.
In the past, when the regime was a slightly less ferocious autocracy than now, there was a certain opposition that
took to the streets
, which allowed the growth of Navalny or before Nemtsov, and the regime campaigned to win voters, with authentic growth among Young.
In 2018 there were eight candidates for the presidency.
In those days, the Kremlin's order was to adhere to the 70/70 formula.
It meant 70% presenteeism and 70% votes for the Russian leader.
But now the goal is more ambitious.
The goal is at least
80% at any cost
, as confirmed by the
Meduza
site with Kremlin officials.
The path of fraud of other dictators
If so, Putin will be closer to the electoral fraud of dictators such as the Romanian Nicolae Ceaucescu who
added 96% in each appointment with the polls,
or the Egyptian Hosni Mubarak, who achieved similar percentages in counts that were done long before the vote.
as happens routinely in the Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro,
an ally and student of Moscow.
Just to specify the extent to which Russian democracy has regressed, Putin
dismantled term limits
.
The Constitution prohibited more than two consecutive six-year terms.
In 2020 he sent a leader of his political alliance to propose overturning that constitutional provision.
A year later he promulgated the law that allows him to remain in office for two more terms of six years
until 2036
and any corruption investigation against the official leadership and his family was prohibited.
A volunteer calls to vote on a street in Donetsk, the capital of the Ukrainian region under Russian control.
AP Photo
This election intersects with the invasion of Ukraine, which has been Putin's greatest effort to
restore tsarism by verticalizing everything Slavic
and to return Moscow to the place it held during the life of the USSR as
the second pole on the planet
.
The Kremlin's strongman needs to turn the electoral victory into a preview of the fate of the war to multiply
the recruitment that the population shuns
and justify an unpopular tax increase already announced to raise US$44 billion for the costly conflict.
The war planned by Moscow for a handful of days has been extended due to pressure from Ukraine's allies due to its enormous geopolitical importance.
A defeat for Kiev
would accelerate the decline of the current international order
, strengthening a hostile bloc that unites Russia, China, Iran and North Korea against a weakened and humiliated West.
With the possible defection of the US, depending on what happens in the November elections.
That crack is what Putin seeks to exploit with the hubbub of the electoral result that amplifies the resignation of Central Europe and its distance from the Eastern neighborhood.
From that perspective, Russia
is not an election, rather a simulation maneuver
like the ones he exercised in the shadows of the KGB to try to twist history...
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