Jonathan Steele (Guardian Utd): Putin's privatisation and welfare cuts

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Fiday March 11

What the west condemns in Putin, it condoned in Yeltsin
Privatisation and welfare cuts are being rammed through by diktat
By Jonathan Steele

Twenty years to the day since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin and launched the programme of modernisation known as perestroika, Russia has not stopped changing. You don't even need to go there to see that.

In a window on the screen where I'm writing this article, I have the online version in Cyrillic of the daily newspaper Izvestia. A coloured panel offers a piece by the ageing popstar Alla Pugacheva complaining about marriage. Another contains a sensational headline asking if the US is about to declare war on Russia. There are links to celebrity gossip web-pages, and a voting site where you can select your candidate for the person most responsible for destroying the Soviet Union.

It is not just Izvestia's content and approach that are new. When Gorbachev took the helm of the Communist party in March 1985, the paper belonged to the Soviet government. Now it is the privately owned plaything of Vladimir Potanin, a Murdoch-like media tycoon, friend of Peter Mandelson, and one of the richest oligarchs in Russia.

Yet while the newspaper-of-record seriousness of the old Izvestia has given way to consumerism and interactive reader-friendliness, is the new paper bolder politically? Not much, to judge by what happened after the massacre of close to 200 children in the Beslan school siege last year. Izvestia accused officials of lying and bungling and suggested the authorities had to share the blame with the hostage-takers. But when the Kremlin complained, Potanin sacked the editor and softened his paper's anti-government tone.

Read more.

[Briar]

1. Kinda like what Blair is doing to the welfare state

just in slower motion.