By La Russophobe — Global Blogger
Published: August 15, 2010 07:47 ET in Europe
EDITORIAL

Putin’s Russia goes up in Flames

We’ve been saying since April 2006 when we started publishing this blog that Putin’s Russia would go up in flames.

But we never thought it would happen this fast, or this literally.

Putin has been unmasked in a truly spectacular and emphatic manner, before the eyes of a slack-jawed world.

Andrei Seltsovsky, head of Moscow’s health department, puts it bluntly: ”The average death rate in the city during normal times is between 360 and 380 people per day. Now we have about 700.” Moscow’s morgues are, quite literally, overflowing.

The USSR is also burning. Some ignorant Russian simpletons imagine that things were better in the Soviet era, but in fact it was misguided Soviet policy, which Putin has failed to correct, that caused this problem in the first place. Instead of exposing that fact and condemning the Soviet errors, and then fixing them, Putin continues to laud the Soviet past, rehabilitate Stalin, and ignore the horrific mistakes that brought the USSR to its knees. What’s more, of course, Putin has done nothing to reduce the danger of fires or to increase Russia’s ability to respond to them once they start.

Who can be surprised that, ruled by a proud KGB spy, Russia continues to be plagued by Soviet problem?

No thinking person can be. When the global economic crisis appeared, we watched as the Putin economy showed far less resilience than most other countries, and collapsed with amazing speed and totality. The same exact thing is now occurring with a physical disaster. Putin is not qualified, and not prepared, to deal with crises of these kinds. His only forte is cold-war confrontation of the West, he is incapable of building a prosperous society that can compete in the global economy. He squanders Russia’s resources on imperialism and corruption just the same way it has always been done in Russia. Such mistakes destroyed Tsarist Russia, destroyed the USSR, and they will do the same to Putin’s state as well.

Putin and his sycophants smirked at the need to reform Russia’s environmental policy, claiming global warming would be good for frozen Russia. Now, they are singing a much different tune, a song of humiliating failure.

If Putin is entitled to credit for everything that goes right in Russia, including improvements in the economy that result solely from increases in the price of oil he has nothing to do with, then he is required to accept blame for everything that goes wrong. And in fact, Russia’s inability to deal with the wildfires is the direct result of Putin’s failed policies, so that blame is entirely deserved.

If Russians choose not to hold Putin accountable, choose not to replace him with a more qualified and reasonable leader who acts in their best interests, then they deserve the horrific suffering their future holds. It’s just that simple.