Will there be a Soviet Spring?

Tensions are high in Russia as former soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has added his voice to the growing list of individuals calling for Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to scrap the results of Russia's recent parliamentary elections and start the ballot process from scratch.

Despite widespread allegations of vote rigging and ballot-box stuffing, Putin's United Russia party saw their share of the vote in the Duma (the Russian representative assembly) drop below 50% of the total vote for the first time since Putin came to power twelve years ago. Gorbachev, the Nobel laureate who oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union, called the elections 'dishonest' and urged the Kremlin to change its authoritarian stance towards pro-democracy protestors.

The new Russian constitution allows a candidate to stand for two six-year terms, meaning that if Putin is re-elected in next year's presidential election, he could retain the power in Russia until 2024. However, those who are pressing for political and economic reform in Russia will realise that the single biggest obstacle to achieving those goals is Putin himself. Questions are rightly beginning to be asked about increasing corruption, politically-motivated arrests and the murders of Putin's opponents.

Following Boris Yeltsin's disastrous free-market reforms in the early nineties, many Russians adopted a stoically fatalist attitude towards politics. Up to now, most Russians had accepted an informal social contract whereby they allowed the state to restrict their personal freedoms to a degree in return for political stability and rising living standards. Now that those living standards are stagnating in the aftermath of the global political crisis and Russia's younger generation are able to compare their lives to those in the rest of Europe because of easy access to travel and Wi-fi (ironically, a consequence of one of the regime's genuine successes), discontent is spilling out onto the streets of Russia's largest cities.

Quality of life is not the only thing waning in the former superpower. Russia's indomitable figurehead is no longer the immensely powerful man that he once was. A million people have seen YouTube videos of Putin being booed at a judo competition in his constituency heartlands. Imprisoned anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny has poked fun at Putin's hardman image and his posts have made him one of the most popular political commentators in Russia.

The state has transported 5,000 police and interior ministry troops into Moscow in response to a Facebook campaign that has attracted a pledge from over 40,000 people to attend demonstrations this weekend in Triumfalnaya Square and Revolution Square in the shadow of the Kremlin. Amnesty International are monitoring the situation and warning that a bloodbath could result if security services are determined to put down the demonstrations at any cost.

As whispers persist about the potential of a Soviet Spring political uprising, both Putin and the pro-democracy campaigners will be holding their breath in the days to come.

Four Thousand Words (Reprise)

So how many of you enjoy Four Thousand Words? I get a massive kick from writing regardless of whether the things I write ever get read, but it's best of all when someone I don't know emails me or comes up to me at work to say, 'Hey, I read your blog about the EU (or Amy Winehouse, or cheese, or whatever) and found it really interesting.' I'm all set for my best ever month of blog ownership (500+ hits) and I've decided to have a little look back at things I've talked about previously and see how they have progressed.

I Hate Tony Blair: Tony Blair, to the regret of all concerned, still feels that he is a key figure in British politics. His decision to tie Britain to the US following the attack on the USA on 9/11 was a noble one and much appreciated by American citizens, but for him to try and claim that his subsequent actions made the world a safer place is simply ridiculous. Leaked documents have shown that the illegal war in Iraq was fought under false pretences and was against the wishes of the international community. Blair recently described the subsequent and irrelevant death of Osama Bin Laden as "important", suggesting to this day that he is still playing war games in his head, fighting dark forces that his foreign policy helped to create, while citizens from his own nation have tried to arrest him for war crimes.

Each To Their Own: The Arab Spring democratic movement has stalled somewhat, thanks in no small part to the UK, who were selling weapons in the region even as revolution ensued. There have of course been some high profile regime changes, with Hosni Mubarak having been replaced by a military government in Egypt and Muammar Gadaffi having purportedly fled from Libya as his last strongholds begin to fall. It remains to be seen what the future will hold in the area, as Amnesty International have called upon Egyptian authorities to amend legislation to better protect women in Egypt, and ensure that both genders play an active role in the reforms that will follow.

March for the Alternative, 26th March 2011: The coalition government may be rolling with the punches somewhat, but the Liberal Democrats' concerted refusal to stand up for their own principles coupled with the general apathy of the British people towards politics means that Conservative policy is still tending to rule the day. A number of the UK's major unions are calling for a day of action on 30 November 2011, and a high participation rate is expected from members. Meanwhile, with conference season in the air, Clegg and Cable have attempted to rally the troops by warning that they dispute the Conservative position on the 50p tax rate and that urgent economic stimulus is required to kick-start the economy. I wish I didn't feel that this was too little, too late.

Justice for Ian Tomlinson!: In April this year I called for Simon Harwood, policeman and vicious attacker of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, to be charged with actual bodily harm for his actions in the events leading up to Tomlinson's subsequent death. The Crown Prosecution Service acted decisively, and decided instead that there was enough evidence to charge Harwood with manslaughter. His trial has been subsequently delayed until October 2011, but it is to be hoped that Tomlinson's family will finally see the justice that they deserve.

It's Not the End of the World: Of course, the news that the Rapture didn't come as predicted did not stop evangelical preacher Harold Campling from immediately naming a new date. Campling identified the supposed mathematical error in his predictions and definitely didn't put a wet finger into the air when predicting that the Rapture should actually have been on 21 October 2011. Honestly, I feel that numerologists are starting to give genuine accountants a bad name - especially as any accountant can tell you that it's Microsoft Excel, rather than cleanliness, which is actually next to godliness.

Keep Britain Rolling!: In July, UNISON steward Karen Michael was kind enough to allow me to reproduce the excellent article that she penned for the Norfolk Country Branch about the possible closure of Bombardier, the only UK-based manufacturer of rolling stock. The UK Government, having seen the wisdom in Karen's words a little bit after the event, invited Bombardier to bid for a government contract to construct steel carriages for Crosslink trains. It has subsequently transpired that the Derby plant is not suitably fitted for steelwork, and now the debate centres on how much of a proposed contract could be fulfilled in the UK, while conveniently ignoring the fact that under EU procurement rules, the government cannot award a contract on the basis that work would be guaranteed to be carried out in the UK. (This did make me think briefly that it was worth reconsidering my largely pro-European stance.) Regardless of the sense in that position, 3000 workers in the Derby area are still waiting for decisions to be made as to what will happen next.

The Cheese of the Day is... Red Leicester. If the Labour Party were cheese...





So it's been a busy few months at Four Thousand Words! I've read about, written about and learned about a whole host of major events in the world around us, and I look forward to many more in future.

Thanks to all of my readers that have read my blog, commented on it, criticised it furiously and on occasion, sent me amusingly rude emails. You really do make the process of committing my thoughts and insanities onto the internet into an enjoyable process. Feel free to comment here or to follow me and chat to me on Twitter, I would really love to know where you'd like Four Thousand Words to go in future.