送交者: mangolasi 于 2006-1-20, 16:07:03:
现在西方其实不把俄国看成是一个民主国家，仍是专制国家，充其量比中国形象好一点点（还不一定，起码中国无明目张胆地卖核武，和无明目张胆地左右外国）。
后面的部分最好。讲明民主并不只是选举show。一个这么大的国家，要改革，一定是要微妙的进行。当然，有进行的欲望是第一步。
Martin Wolf是我喜欢的专栏作家之一。他可不是那些左派人士如一些人看到批评俄国的改革会立刻联想到的。
quotes:
But if they never quite got around to putting in place these deeper foundations of democracy, Yeltsin and his contemporaries found that a seemingly democratic superstructure could be lashed together much more easily, and could appease or fool Russia's new Western friends, as well as many Russian voters. The essential activity, they saw, was to stage elections and election campaigns, making generous use of advertising and broadcasting to give the idea of a Western-style contest. Since Russia had no strong and independent political parties or other political and judicial institutions, elections could be manipulated easily by anybody with the power and the money to do so, usually the Kremlin and its friends. The purpose of the people around Yeltsin was, as Wilson nicely puts it, "to legitimate power, but not to provide any real threat to it." Even for elections like these, however, expertise was useful. A new profession for Russia, the "political technologist," was born, approximating to the job of a political consultant or campaign manager in America, but with much more creative scope.
Yeltsin's presidency, and especially the parliamentary election of 1995 and the presidential election of 1996, was a golden age for these Russian spin doctors. The Kremlin had administrative and financial resources, but little idea how to use them in electoral politics. It relied on the "political technologists," who used techniques imported from the West or revived from the Communist era to develop arguments exaggerating and demonizing the power of the Communist Party; to run television advertisements claiming that Yeltsin was a strong president when, much of the time, he was too sick to speak clearly; to invent dummy parties and dummy candidates to confuse and divide voters; to bribe or bully journalists into filling the press and television with pro-Yeltsin stories."
" He has pu political technologists at the center of his study, he says, "not because they are th only people who count in post-Soviet politics, but out of a desire to change th perspective from more traditional accounts that take the public performance of politic at face value."
"Putin has contrived, in the words of Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, "not only to establish a monopoly of power, but also to monopolize competition for it." Opposition is allowed only where the Kremlin feels it would be useful—for example, to make Putin's own positions look good by comparison, or to float trial balloons. Accidents may happen. "