Putin’s Progress
by Peter Truscott
Simon & Schuster, £17.99, pp. 370, ISBN 0743240057
Vladimir Putin will be re-elected President of Russia on Sunday with a thumping majority. This is the safest prediction it is possible to make in the New World Order where the word democracy can have many different definitions. In Russia the word means whatever President Putin chooses it to mean, as these two admirable books point out. Putin has spent his first four years in power destroying his opponents, either in the media, which has been cowed into Soviet-era submission, or in the political process itself. The parliamentary elections three months ago were won by the President’s party in a vote which independent OSCE observers described as patently unfair and a ‘democratic regression’.
The current presidential election is no more honest. Viewers of television news are fed a nightly diet of Putin visiting schools, Putin the action man ski-ing, Putin the decisive leader sacking his entire government.
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