Yeah, absolutely. Revolutions have worked out so well before, especially in Russia. What Russia needs right now is some serious destruction and civil war, followed by a few decades of rule by hard men who know that their Cause comes before anything. Oh yeah.
I think they'd be best off with a "revolution" in thinking by the government and public security services. If they put rule of law as a high priority, and are able to extract enough.
Everyone would be better off with Putin and the FSB crowd having their own licit and overt wealth, power, and perks, but then using their power to enforce fair laws on everyone else in exchange, vs. the system where they officially don't get as much benefit from their jobs, but extract personal benefit through corruption, and where others in society can use the state as a tool against other people.
(which is why it makes sense to pay police, judges, etc. quite well, and to give them high social standing, in exchange for competence, professionalism, and lack of corruption)
You could probably get that from the top echelon (I don't think Putin is at all corrupt, in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that, and would be surprised if his direct reports did), but it's hard to get that down to the lowest level of law enforcement.
Don't know where to start. First, you are seriously naive or uninformed if you think that Putin is not corrupt on a gigantic, unheard-of scale. Take a look at the so-called Putin's palace on the Black Sea, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac4bzpRhtVQ (there have been really feeble attempts to deny that it was built for Putin, but the funds have been traced to companies owned by his associates - funds that they in turn got from government contracts). This thing cost a billion dollars. There is another one of these in one of the most remote regions of Russia - the Altai mountains - where the road to the place alone cost hundreds of millions of dollars (this time, simply taken from the federal budget), and a whole small town needed to be built to house the construction workers. (The story is hilarious, if you read Russian or if the G-translate can get you close enough: http://chistoprudov.livejournal.com/91316.html). The tiny village which appears in some of the photos is the official excuse for building the gigantic road through some of Russia's most difficult terrain; officially, the road is called a "junction". It cost more than the annual budget of the Altai Republic. Something like a dozen of Putin's classmates and friends have become multi-billionaires, in businesses related to government contracts or state-owned oil companies. In general, Putin's corruption makes the Shah of Iran look modest and tasteful. And that's just the financial corruption; there have also been several brazenly stolen elections, railroading of political enemies in the courts, and God knows what else.
With all that, I still don't think that a "revolution", which is to say a violent seizure of power, followed by the displacement of the current elite, is called for. It would result in years of bloody war. (Do you think the men who own these billion-dollar enterprises built on nothing other than government connections will just settle down and start raising turnips?) And the elite which it brings to the top might be no better. You are unlikely to end up with true rule of law.
The fact is that Russians are not without non-violent means of achieving change. The presidential elections were less corrupt than the preceding parliamentary elections, largely because far more citizens organized and became observers. Putin has had to allow popular elections of governors of Russia's regions, after years of personally appointing them, because of pressure brought about by the outrage over the elections. The idea of destroying everything and building a better version is tempting, but it has produced disaster again and again.
Yeah, you're probably right. I guess I don't consider Putin's direct actions to be corruption so much as bad governance (in some cases; in other cases he's superior to Yeltsin, but maybe that's a really low bar). The US President can spend $5b on a few helicopters to fly himself around without it being "corruption", so I assume the Russian president could build a secure "vacation home" somewhere. None of it is acceptable, but corruption vs. not is just semantics.
The sad thing is Russia has so much hydrocarbon fuel that they can probably go on like this for a long time. US and Europe having open immigration for talented Russians seems like the best we can do.
Not only is it not 3 million at one time, there's also no definition provided of what it means for them to have been locked up. It could presumably be a whole load of one week sentences, or maybe even a night or two in jail?
Communism as we know it? Yes. Communism as Marx envisioned it? No.
It's all just semantics really:
1) In the US, 'socialism' is a dirty word, but don't you dare mess with Social Security or Medicaid.
2) China's 'communist' regime is called the "People's Republic of China."
3) Burma is now called "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" after a military coup.
4) China and the former USSR are both referred to as "Communist," but the governmental structures seem vastly different.
5) The Khmer Rouge were known as the 'Communist Party of Kampuchea,' but referred to their country as 'Democratic Kampuchea' even though they implemented forced relocation and confiscation of private property.
I think all these semantic contradictions reveal a much more important truth: what -ism your government operates under or claims to operate under is about 1/1000th as significant as whether it aims to serve the people and respect the law. A corrupt communist state has much more in common with a corrupt capitalist state than with a respectable and well-run communist system, and vice versa. We should really focus a lot less on ideology in our politics and a lot more on basic ethics and accountability. Once we start getting those figured out, we can worry about the -isms.
But it's hard to miss the pattern - we have yet to see well run communist (not socialist) state. Every country that tried communism failed, and either are poor backwater countries (Kuba, North Korea), reverted to capitalism (Central and Eastern Europe), or kept communism on banners only, changing most of economy to capitalism under the hood (China).
We even have a few case studies, where one country is divided into 2 parts, and one half is made communist. Both in East/West Germany, and North/South Korea the differences are quite obvious.
Maybe it has sth to do with the system itself, after all?
The most well run communist state was probably Yugoslavia. I can see a few things which made it more successful than other communist states: it did not cut itself off from the world as a whole or associate itself with a much bigger and more powerful communist state and it allowed its citizens more personal freedoms than any other communist state. Of course it eventually collapsed due to internal and external pressure, but communism was not ousted due to a mass civil uprising (the wars were largely due to the policy of forcing a pan-Yugoslavian identity independent of pre-existing ethnic differences). In Slovenia, which only participated in the wars for a few days, the transition between communism and capitalism happened gradually and to my knowledge non-violently over 10 or so years.
Background: a group of farmers in a small Chinese village secretly agreed to start keeping their surplus crops for themselves.
=============
Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.
"We all secretly competed," says Yen Jingchang. "Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person."
It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.
At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.
It could, but the correlation doesn't automatically imply causation. Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption are more likely to give rise to communist regimes. If a society with stronger civil traditions or more capital attempted to implement a communist system, the result might be radically different than what we've seen so far.
I also think that in modern-day practice, the lines between what we term communist, capitalist, socialist, etc. are much blurrier than we tend to admit. The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric. If you could somehow find an absolute measure for the success level of each country in the world and plot it according to the political system they supposedly espouse, I don't think you'd find nearly as much cohesion compared to if you plotted them according to measures like the strength of judicial and education traditions, beneficial geography, balanced ethnic makeup, and so on. These labels get applied after the fact, they aren't the structural drivers that make various governments and societies function the way they do.
> It could, but the correlation doesn't automatically imply causation. Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption are more likely to give rise to communist regimes.
Communism was introduced by force in many countries, in few cases it was introduced to half a country, and the half that stayed capitalist, benefited. You'd need to assume countries with high probability of dictatorship and corruption are more probable to be forced to become communist states by others, and that the difference between West and East Germany, North and South Korea regarding authoritarianism and corruption tendencies are bigger, than the same differences between for example East Germany and Russia, or West Germany and Spain.
I think from the data we have it's more probable, that communism just don't work.
> The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric.
Communism is "from everybody according to their needs, to everybody according to their needs". So salary and employement doesn't depend on productivity, free market doesn't dictate prices and volumes of produced goods and services.
Public road system, army, health care system and free education are implementation details, compared to centrally planned economy.
> Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-
> existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption
> are more likely to give rise to communist regimes
Seems more likely that whenever someone wants to rise to power as a despot, it's a lot easier when you are claiming to be communist/a workers' paradise/a government for the people, even if that description is in name only. E.g.:
Why do you want to over-throw $despot? You must be
an enemy of 'the people.'
You can find corruption all around the world, in places that were never under a communist regime.
Corruption is a consequence of our human condition, not our economic system.
Or maybe low level stats are falsified in each prison/police station to show better "effectiveness" of cops. Only when it's aggregated it's stuppidly big number.
The same happened with recent elections to Duma (over 100% people voted in many regions of Russia).
>Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country.
So you're saying there's a violent class struggle between the populist system and the oppressed business class - and that the only way the downtrodden business owners can rise up and free themselves from their chains is through full scale revolution?
This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that.
The corruption, like corruption in other countries (including the US), hurts the poor and wage-earning directly and indirectly as well. It's not like it's the populace vs. business owners, it's the powerful and capricious vs. everyone (including other powerful people), using the state and security apparatus as a tool.
Aside from a few people who made a lot of money a couple decades ago from rapid deregulation, I don't think business owners in Russia are worried about taxes, reasonable regulation, etc. hurting their businesses -- they're worried about totally random extortion.
Very few businesses would rather operate in Equatorial Guinea or Somalia instead of (heavily regulated country of choice: depending on context, could be Germany, the US, Denmark, ...).
Stealing businesses is a much smarter idea than stealing money. Russian government thugs have figured it out.
I do see why it may seem funny and Monty-Python-like, but it's extremely sad. It's a huge country ruled by thugs and talking heads, and they want more and more for themselves, while talking about helping the population.
You're right however, the 3 million figure seems very high.
Russia is a lost cause. Police/government can (and regularly do) take over any business, especially any small business.
Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country.