"He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so I asked my friend if there was anything at all about Britain that impressed him. The stability, he said without hesitation. You can feel the stability. That was a different world; the late 1990s."
"It was the decade of degenerate democracy under Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Union had collapsed. It was not obvious where the unravelling would stop. Criminal violence was endemic. The drunk president was propped up by a lawless oligarchy, pillaging state assets and calling it privatisation. No one who witnessed Russia's trauma in that period was surprised that it engendered nostalgia for the pre-democratic era."
"Vladimir Putin is as crooked as everyone else who rose to the top in Yeltsin's entourage. But he restored order and national self-esteem, which mattered more to most Russians than the slow suffocation of political freedom. It is not a familiar dilemma to British voters because democracy and stability have not seemed mutually exclusive. Our multiparty system allows peaceful rivalry between different political and economic interests."
A Russian visitor in London valued Britain's palpable stability above sights. Russia in the late 1990s experienced degenerate democracy under Boris Yeltsin, with endemic criminal violence, a drunk president, and corrupt oligarchs pillaging state assets. That chaos produced nostalgia for the predictable Soviet past. Vladimir Putin, though part of Yeltsin's crooked entourage, restored order and national self-esteem, which mattered more to many Russians than political freedoms. British democracy combines stability and political competition through rules-based multiparty rivalry, peaceful transfers of power, and accommodation of dissent. Putin seeks to exploit Western openness by turning its strengths into vulnerabilities.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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