Did the USSR Really Collapse in 1991?
Vladimir Putin menacing the poor Russians
Russian President Vladimir Putin now looks fully poised to hand over his autocratic power to one of his henchmen in the presidential elections scheduled for March 2, 2008.
The early returns from the December 2 parliamentary elections have already indicated that the former KGB spy, who is responsible for the deaths of Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya and many other courageous dissidents, is now on a roll in terms of paving the way to installing his puppet as the next president of the Russian Federation.
The Russians at large have, time and again, proved courageous and proud people that dared to challenge authority to change their life for the better, if reform has sometimes been attempted in the wrong direction as it was 90 years ago. To that end they have even attempted to kill Czars. But primarily because of the iron-fist rule by Joseph Stalin and his successors, now they have been reduced to a bunch of docile and self-deprecating folks.
That's too bad, but we don't care too much about the way things are unfolding in the today's Russia, because it's their headache, not ours. After all it's them who are destined to suffer the consequence of all this, in a decade or two from now.
If there is someone who is learning a heartening lesson from Putin, it's Chinese leader Hu Jintao and his people. They have already learned WHAT NOT TO DO from Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. But now the communist leadership in China is learning WHAT TO DO. Without doubt Hu is increasingly becoming sure that the introduction of a representative democracy won't necessarily be the end of the world. Monopoly of power by the Chinese Communist Party will withstand a transformation of the system if it only means that Hu has to change his headwear from the red hat to a differently colored one. Indeed, Deng Xiaoping was right when he said, "Whether a cat is black or white makes no difference. As long as it catches mice, it is a good cat." · read more (210 words)