Democracy, very nice, very nice, but maybe in the next world

Democracy was what Yeltsin did; while Milton Friedman’s acolytes were destroying the Russian economy in the name of some Hayekian notion of shock therapy leading to a free market, the world called it the coming of democracy to Mother Russia.

  Most of the state was being stolen by the ones we now call oligarchs, the streets were plagued with business disputes that featured liberal helpings of murder and bombing, and nobody was paying the teachers or doctors, physics professors sold flowers by metro stations or drove taxis.

Meanwhile NATO was promising not to expand: oops.

  I only caught the last three years of Yeltsin’s time in power, and he may have been in power but he was not in control. Russians looked at the drunken old man stumbling around on the world stage and felt shamed.

Putin brought stability.

No really, he did. It all calmed down and the oil price meant that the financial hell-scape brightened too.

Ah yes but he brought it at the price of freedom you say?

  Well, there’s no shortage of folks in the west who figure it’s all going to hell in a handcart and only bigger prisons and birch thrashings will pull it round. And these are people with comfortable lifestyles and nice cars. What would they accept if it really was going to hell, if Kalashnikov shootouts were going down outside and small business men got shot if they didn’t hand their enterprises over to the bigger guys, if their life savings turned to dust? Would they figure it was worth it in the name of democracy? (Read the Daily Mail before you answer that one)

 So when one gets the urge to preach to these folks about these matters it is well to remember that democracy doesn’t mean the same thing to them. They took our advice once and got badly fucked: they are wary now.