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March 6, 2012
Article by AUREL BRAUN from Tuesday’s Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Mar. 06, 2012
As sure as the winter snow in Moscow, Vladimir Putin is back as president. But in the wake of mass protests after the widely discredited December parliamentary election instead of the coronation march expected in September of 2011 when he and his hand-picked President, Dmitry Medvedev, reached a private deal to swap positions, Mr. Putin is returning to the Kremlin. The seminal question is: What will he do now?
In just a few months, Russia has become a very different place, where a clash of cultures and contrasting visions for the future have created seemingly irreconcilable divisions. The hundreds of thousands of people – a true grassroots movement – who have poured into the streets, in the coldest weather, demanding democracy and dignity, gainsay the cynical cliché that, in Russia, past is prologue. Consequently, as inevitable as Mr. Putin’s victory may have seemed, it is equally deeply flawed.