FROM COMMISSAR TO….CZAR?
(….accession and start of the reign of Vladimir the First)

Mr. Putin has once again been inaugurated as President of Russia, in a ceremonial having aromas of the long-demised czarist regime, complete with Cossack-like actions by his blue clad riot police enforcers to disperse any protesters inclined to disrupt those proceedings. His non-Armani nondescript business suits notwithstanding, it’s clear from all this he is definitely of an autocratic bent.

His rise to an ultimate power position has much the same pattern as that of any number of such individuals throughout history. That is, while starting early on in relative obscurity and little notice, revolution and the chaos of social upheaval that follows such events, provide the gateway opportunities to break out into full public view.

In Mr. Putin’s case, beginning his career as an obscure KGB aparatnik of the former Soviet regime, he was approaching Commissar level in rank, when its dissolution and subsequent chaotic environment opened the doors of opportunity to reach power in ways he might otherwise never would have had.

Unlike many fellow aparatniks and high level KGB bosses, however, who all engaged in a wild stampede to become Russia’s new class of oligarchs (seizing every former state-owned asset they could get their hands on) he, quietly, and with a coldly calculating focus, engaged in strategic power maneuvers to worm himself upwards instead. And while more discreet about it, may have also managed to get a gratifying share of that looting, in the process. After all, one can’t develop any kind of power position without a firm economic foundation to support it.

And so throughout the last days of the Soviet regime, through the rules of Kruschev and Andropov, the glasnost era of Gorbachev, the high carousing term of Yeltsin, and the new oligarchs’ gang feuds, Putin’s skilled maneuvering throughout all those political minefields has thus left him as the last man standing from all those tumultuous events,
His inaugural speech declaring his intention to bring about the rebirth of a strong and truly “democratic” Russian society should be taken with a definite grain of salt…or two…..or even three. Like any other would-be dynast and autocrat, he’s much more likely to look upon the democratic process not as an end, but as a means, to an end that will be of benefit to himself. His recent slick manipulations of that process to achieve another round of Presidential power thus suggests we have witnessed the accession and the start of the reign of Vladimir the First, a new latter-day Czar….of all the Russians.

CENTURION