EDITORIAL

The Moscow Times reports more shockingly bad news for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

In the most recent Global Peace Survey, Russia ranked a jaw-dropping #131 out of 140 countries under survey. Russia has the fifth-highest murder rate on the planet and is involved in turbulent military conflicts all across its southern border. It’s keeping company with Nigeria, North Korea, Columbia and Lebanon, not the other members of the G-8 democracy club.

Russia is shown above in the map colored blood red, with a “very low” score for peace.

Russophile propagandists will point out that the United States didn’t do so well either, coming in at #97 on the list and ending up in the “low” category. But that’s far better than Russia, and the United States is one of the freest countries in the world. So it’s natural that it would have less peace and order than a nation that is ruled as a dictatorship – and yet, where Russia is concerned at least, it doesn’t.

In other words, Russia offers its citizens the worst of all possible worlds. It deprives its people of all the benefits of a free society, yet it doesn’t compensate them by giving them the “peace and order” benefits of an authoritarian society.

And the Russian government’s response was entirely predictable. Think they might be concerned that Russia is in crisis and want to take action? Think again. The Moscow Times quoted Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a think tank that tracks security challenges and Russia's arms trade: “There exists a huge number of misconceptions about Russia and other countries, and they are reflected here. There is no doubt that this ranking reflects an Anglo-Saxon outlook on things.”

In other words, it’s not Russia that has the problem, it’s the “Anglo-Saxons.” Never mind that the United States didn’t make the top 75 countries on the list, Russians are instantly sure that the only possible explanation for such results is a massive anti-Russian conspiracy.

This is exactly the way the old USSR used to react to bad news. Kill the messenger. That attitude prevented the USSR from reforming, and led to its collapse. It’s quite comical, in fact, to watch the Russophile propagandists try to decide whether they should attack America for coming in low on the list (but, uh-oh, that means the list is reliable, and Russia’s score is even lower!) or attack the list itself (thus exculpating America’s poor result). Or, it would be funny if it weren’t so very tragic. This too smacks of the bad old days of the USSR.

Can we expect anything different than the USSR’s fate from Vladimir Putin’s Russia if it acts the same way?