俄國普丁的鐵腕政治，近來引發西方的連串批評，包括限制外國民間組織的活動，反對政府的女記者被謀殺（而且不是唯一一宗）等等。多位俄國政治人物公開批評俄國已成為警察國家，回復到中世紀的統治，指控恐怕氣氛迷漫。甚至有人指俄國已快成為法西斯。
俄國的政治不及西方的民主標準，可是很明顯的也無法達到普丁所誓言達到的現代化水準，從俄國的腐化程度來看就可了解。從國際透明化貪污指數來看，普丁執政看，指數一直都維持二點四的超低水準，去年是歐洲最低的國家。和一九九九年葉爾欽執政時一樣。低於烏克蘭和白俄羅斯。
這不一令人驚訝，普丁所謂要強化法律而可犧牲一些自由，根本就是錯誤的想法。法律要能有效執行，貪污要能有效控制，社會的透明化是最重要的，當一國的媒體無法自由報導，沒有透明化，要執行法律就很困難。
如果認為俄國可以在沒有民主、責任信用、自由及法治而達到現代化，這是大大的錯誤。由於缺乏上述特質，俄國政治己經成為獨裁專制者、共產威權、企業獨佔、組織犯罪的天下。
普丁或許想追求現代化，但他用的手段只是讓政治及社會停滯不前，回到舊俄國的時代。
Putin’s Russia fails its own test
Robin Shepherd International Herald Tribune
Published: October 20, 2006
For entirely understandable reasons, recent events in Russia have prompted a tidal wave of criticism against President Vladimir Putin’s style of government.
The horrific murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and three other high-profile contract killings in the last few weeks alone; the Kremlin-inspired chauvinism against Georgians in Russia after a spying row between Tbilisi and Moscow; and growing concerns about the way energy policy is being used to promote a form of neoimperial aggrandizement - all these have combined to produce some startlingly blunt descriptions.
The former world chess champion and possible presidential contender Gary Kasparov now speaks openly about a police state in Russia, a phrase also used by the seasoned Russia analyst Anders Aslund in the current edition of The Weekly Standard.
A former Putin adviser, Andrei Illarionov, talked on Echo Moskvy radio last week of an "atmosphere of terror" and of a move toward a medieval form of government that is "the property of a narrow group of people who use the instruments of state against the rest of society."
The Economist referred to former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar’s comparisons between contemporary Russia and interwar Germany, concluding its analysis with the dire warning that: "It’s not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be heading toward fascism."
It is a measure of how far Russia has sunk that such appraisals can no longer be dismissed as hysterical. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is that Russia is not merely failing to live up to standards set by the West or by its own Western-oriented intelligentsia, it is failing in crucial respects to live up to Putin’s primary aim of modernization.
Consider Putin’s record on his core pledge to put Russia under a "dictatorship of law" and move away from the corrupt free-for-all of the 1990s. With a score of 2.4 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (in which 10 is the best score and 0 the lowest), Russia tied with Albania in 2005 as the most corrupt country in Europe. Russia now ranks lower than Ukraine and Belarus.
Russia’s ranking in 1999, the last year of Boris Yeltsin’s rule, was also 2.4. In other words, despite all the rhetoric from Putin supporters about the need to give up a few freedoms in order to break with the "wild east" practices of the Yeltsin years, Putin has failed to make any progress whatsoever in entrenching the rule of law in Russian society.
This should not surprise us. The supposed trade- off between personal freedoms and enhanced legality was always deeply flawed. Law can only function as the guiding principle of society when there is sufficient transparency to hold government and business accountable for their actions. That transparency disappears when, as in Putin’s Russia, the news media cease to be able to carry out their most important functions.
Admittedly, there is no single blueprint for modernization. It all depends on where you started from and where you can realistically expect to get to in a particular time frame. When North Korea finally frees itself from the awfulness of Stalinism, for example, it will need a different blueprint for progress from Saudi Arabia when the time comes, as it one day will, to ditch the House of Saud.
Russia will never become a Eurasian version of the United States and to try to make it so would be both futile and dangerous. But it is a grave mistake to believe that Russia, with its historical baggage, can accomplish the task of modernization without adopting certain basic norms of democracy, accountability, law and free political discourse.
It is precisely the absence of such qualities, after all, that has always held Russia back and made its society vulnerable to the excesses of arbitrary rule, whether by Czarist autocrats, Communist totalitarians or today’s cocktail of Kremlin demagoguery, business oligarchs and organized-crime syndicates.
Commentators have long recognized that Putin’s so-called managed democracy was a contradiction in terms. The bigger picture, however, is that the entire Putin project offers up a classic example of an irreconcilable contradiction between ends and means. Putin seeks the goal of a modern, dynamic Russia while simultaneously employing the kind of strategy that leads to political and societal stagnation reminiscent of Russia’s past.
It is from within that contradiction that the pain- filled drama of contemporary Russia is now being played out before our eyes.
Robin Shepherd is a senior trans-Atlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, based in Bratislava, Slovakia.
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