Fear Zone

This sticky feeling is fear. However, psychologists claim that in moderate doses it can even contribute to the successful functioning of an individual - it makes him more cautious, attentive, and protects him from reckless actions. But once fear completely takes over a person, he immediately ceases to be adequate, his immunity to various kinds of external influences drops sharply, and his behavior becomes unpredictable.

The nature of fear is a subtle thing. Sometimes it is on the surface, but often it is quite difficult to figure out what exactly causes horror in a person. But identifying those places where the concentration of this feeling is especially high is not a problem. It is clear that these are places of detention. A person behind a prison wall is afraid of a lot of things, and the list of his fears is disproportionately wider than that of those who are free. It is also obvious that in democratic countries a person is less susceptible to this feeling than someone who lives under a totalitarian regime. But there are not only prison walls, and not only iron curtains.

It is known that the higher a person climbs the career ladder, the more often stressful situations occur in his life, frightening in their intractability. A distinctive feature of an effective politician or official is the ability to cope with such situations. Lately it seems that our powers that be have completely lost this ability. However, perhaps the current inhabitants of the Kremlin never possessed it. At the very least, there is a feeling that today the feeling of fear in the Russian leadership has already reached some completely prohibitive concentration. However, it is not difficult to determine what the Kremlin is afraid of. The Kremlin is afraid of the future.

This fear manifests itself in different ways. For example, last Thursday President Putin went to the opening of the new Supreme Court building, which was erected on Povarskaya Street.

Capital drivers know very well that it is better not to go into the center at noon. Around this time, Vladimir Vladimirovich travels daily from his place of residence to his place of service, which entails blocking traffic along the entire route. But we have already somehow adapted to this habit of the head of state - going to the Kremlin every day. A complete disaster occurs when Putin decides to visit some facility in Moscow outside the Kremlin territory. Do you know what happened on Povarskaya the night before the president’s arrival? All the cars parked there were simply removed from the street. About a hundred cars were loaded onto tow trucks and transported to neighboring streets. Needless to say, no one was notified of anything in advance. Can you imagine what the owners experienced this morning? And a few hours before the solemn event, the police blocked all traffic on Novy Arbat and the adjacent streets. Do I need to tell you what kind of traffic jams formed at the entrances and how long it took for them to clear up?

This is how they protect Vladimir Putin. It is clear that only experts can discuss the adequacy of these measures, but the question arises: how, time after time, do NBP activists manage to come within arm’s length of Putin? This has already happened in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where an anti-presidential leaflet was literally thrust into the president’s hand. So, maybe they are deliberately scaring Putin? Maybe it’s beneficial for someone up there to whip up all this hysteria?

But in Izhevsk, where the head of the Russian state flew in on Wednesday, they found a non-trivial way to combat manifestations of opposition sentiments. There, the police simply blocked the offices of the United Front and the Union of Right Forces for the duration of the visit. People were not allowed in or out. What is this if not a manifestation of fear?

And with shaking hands, Vladimir Putin signed a decree appointing Vladimir Ustinov to the post of Minister of Justice. Well, how else can we explain such a ridiculous “castling”, demonstrating to the whole world that the highest ranks in Putin’s entourage are nothing more than interchangeable screws, whose threads and dimensions are completely the same. Maybe this appointment is a sophisticated revenge of Igor Sechin, who frightened the president so much that he forced him to take such a humiliating step.

But when the supreme ruler himself is in a state of constant terror, what can one expect from his servants? Last week, the most feared member of Putin's inner circle was the deputy head of his administration, Vladislav Surkov. It’s more or less clear why. After a massive attack on the security forces, which resulted in the dismissal of the Prosecutor General, Vladislav Yuryevich is now waiting for a response, of which he himself may fall victim. In panic, people sometimes do unpredictable things. Surkov wrote a letter. About extremism. And he forced as many as thirteen governors to sign it. According to Surkov, it turns out that the main extremists in Russia are the disgraced oligarchs: Gusinsky, Berezovsky and Nevzlin. It turns out that they are the ones who slaughter people in Moscow synagogues, organize nationalist marches and beat up Azerbaijanis in markets.

It is clear that they will now fight the opposition by introducing changes to the Law on Extremism, but is it worthwhile, while solving such an important political task, to become a universal laughing stock by initiating the writing of delusional letters? Or has fear already clouded your eyes so much?