Putin government now behaves like ‘any other occupation regime,’ Moscow commentator says

With its plans to reintroduce the Soviet tax on "parasites" and to restrict travel abroad, the Putin regime is “conducting itself like an ordinary occupying power which has seized a country, established its garrisons and now has decided how to extract as much money from the aborigines it controls, Aleksey Roshchin says. “But the aborigines are evil” in the eyes of the occupiers, the Moscow commentator continues; and for some reason, “they don’t want to share with the Reich” what little the occupiers have hitherto left to them. Moscow has foolishly taken up the idea of imposing a tax on "parasites" from Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s Belarus without stopping to think what this measure meant in the past or how it worked against the survival of the USSR, a place that turned out to be “a fake state, bankrupted itself and fell apart.” In the ruble left behind, Roshchin continues, there were attempts to create something new but then a crisis came and “the semi-fake countries of the post-USSR could come up with nothing better than to try ‘to become just like the main failure,’” that is like the Soviet Union which is no more. In many ways, he writes, this is exactly like the case of “the son of an alcoholic who ends his days in a psychiatric hospital, clutching ever more tightly his bottle and in drunken form ever more frequently recalling and reproducing someone ‘just like dad’” whose sad end his drunkenness has kept him from remembering. But even more, this latest Moscow action recalls the works of Orwell and Kafka. In most countries of the world, the government seeks to help those who have no jobs with unemployment compensation or other assistance. But in Russia, the government has decided that this is precisely the category of people from whom it can extract money, without anyone complaining. Roshchin says he would call the logic of the Putin regime “classical occupation” logic in which those in power try to extract all they can from those least able to defend themselves. But the fact that Putin et al are doing this should not really come as any surprise because after all “the occupation model of administration is the Soviet model.” Some people thought they could escape this model but now, Roshchin laments, “we are returning to it” in what can only be described as “an eternal return.”

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