The terrorist threats at the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics are paler than the snow-flakes falling on the Sochi slopes when compared to the terror President Vladimir Putin inflicts on his Russian citizens and former Soviet Union republics, the recent horrors in Ukraine and ongoing terror tactics against Russians questioning and challenging his politics or legitimacy.
The release in December 2013 of Michail Khodorkovsky, former head of the Russian oil company Yukos, who has been in prison since 2003 for daring to support independent parties in Russia, is a New Year reminder of Putin’s resolution to remain in power at all cost and ensure minimal political protests at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and damage that his and Russia’s negative image is doing to the country’s international standing.
“In my youth, the leaders of the USSR had no desire whatsoever to leave power. But history obliged them to do so just the same. Today’s Russian theoreticians and practitioners of ‘vertically corrupt management’ have no intention of going anywhere. But they will have to. I know. I’ve seen it before,” Khodorkovsky wrote in 2010 as he was tried on new charges of corruption and tax evasion.
Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev is also critical of Putin, whom he blames for taking the country back to the times of a one-party state, and describes Russia as an “imitation” of democracy, where parliament and courts lack independence from the government and the main pro-Kremlin party is a “bad copy” of the Soviet-era Communist Party. He said his own attempt to found a political party failed when a Kremlin aide bluntly told him that authorities would not register it.
Russian youth, like their peers in America, China, Hong Kong, the Middle East, Africa and Europe, who are fueled and powered by the Internet, agree with Gorbachev. That is why they have also taken to the streets by the thousands demanding revolutionary changes be made by Putin and his brutal kleptocracy. Russians terror concern is not limited to the Sochi Winter Olympics.