Exclusive: America’s neocons are lusting for their ultimate “regime change” — destabilizing Russia and getting rid of President Putin — but they ignore the likelihood that the leader after Putin would be a much more hardline nationalist, a prospect addressed by Gilbert Doctorow.
By Gilbert Doctorow
As in Soviet times, Russian taxi drivers remain among the best informed and eager interlocutors about the ins and outs of the country’s often opaque politics — what we used to call “Kremlinologists” who would decipher who was rising or falling based on who was standing closest to whom at public events.
To show that “Kremlinology” is alive and well, the taxi drivers were speculating this week on the imminent removal of St. Petersburg Governor Georgi Poltavchenko because he was nowhere to be seen at the top shows of the Fourth International Cultural Forum, a major event in the old imperial capital which attracted the big bosses from Moscow who were everywhere.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But more significant to the West is the power line-up behind President Vladimir Putin if he were to leave office for whatever reason. For years now, American hardliners and particularly the neoconservatives have been lusting for “regime change” in Moscow, hoping that some malleable figure like the late President Boris Yeltsin would be put back on top.
However, as my well-informed taxi drivers tell me, the man one heart-beat away from Putin is Sergei Ivanov, who would make Putin look like a pussy-cat in dealing with the West. And if not Ivanov, the next in line is likely Dmitry Rogozin, another fervent patriot and Kremlin favorite.
Despite what Russian dissidents Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Masha Gessen have been telling the readers of The New York Times, “regime change” in Moscow would almost surely not achieve the goal of a second Yeltsin era. Memories are still too fresh of the humiliating 1990s after the Soviet collapse when the West dispatched financial “experts” who prescribed capitalist “shock therapy” for the Russian system — leading to a precipitous decline in living standards and an alarming rise in death rates.
What’s clear is that…