Putin's hold on Russia
FOR AMERICAN liberals who like to compare the rise of authoritarianism in Vladimir Putin's Russia to the "imperial presidency" of George W. Bush, this month's political events in Russia - the rigged "elections" in a de facto one-party system, and the emergence of Putin's handpicked heir, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, as the next president with Putin himself the likely prime minister - should serve as a reality check. And yet Russia remains a land of paradox; amidst bleak news of democracy's last rites, one sees small signs of hope.
Even the ruling party's landslide victory with 64 percent of the vote seems less than overwhelming, considering how unequal the contest was. United Russia hogged close to 100 percent of the media coverage and the campaign publicity. Most of the opposition parties were kept off the ballot through the manipulation of election laws; the ones permitted to run were barely allowed to campaign.
Imagine a professional basketball team playing against an amateur club and not only bribing the refs but denying its opponents access to training facilities and using trickery to disqualify the rival team's best players,
A vote for United Russia was widely touted as a mandate for Putin to remain a "national leader" after his second term as president expires in 2008 and he is required to leave office under the Russian constitution. Yet, with a 64 percent turnout, this endorsement comes from an unimpressive 44 percent of eligible voters. Andrei Piontkovsky, a columnist for a liberal website, Grani.ru, suggests that it is the weakness of this "mandate" that prompted Putin to make the final decision to step down rather than seek an overhaul of the constitution and a third term.
The Putin cult rampant in today's Russia does not suggest a leader on his way out. The United Russia election campaign was a gigantic Putin public-relations campaign, with ubiquitous posters, billboards, and booklets promoting the mysterious "Putin Plan": "The Putin Plan Is Russia's Victory!," "The Putin Plan Is Working!," and "You Are Part of the Putin Plan." This cult has sinister overtones reminiscent both of Stalin worship in Soviet Russia and of 1930s Germany, with Hitler as the strongman who raised a humiliated country from its knees. In latest news, the Putin-loving youth movement, Nashi ("Our Guys"), now has an auxiliary for the 8-to-15 set, Mishki, "The Little Bears," that designates Putin as its Chief Bear. At a recent rally, the Mishki sported jackets with the slogan, "Chief Bear, please take care of the kids!" and carried signs that said, "We thank Putin for our stable future." For many, this evoked memories of an infamous Stalin-era poster, "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood."
And yet Putin is not Stalin, and not everything is harmonious in Putinland. For instance, the Mishki movement has been widely ridiculed, and even a member of the Moscow City Council, Evgeny Bunimovich, has denounced it as a "horrifying" attempt to drag children into politics. Some independent media outlets remain, and it's likely that the state cannot shut them down without destroying at least the veneer of a civilized society. Thanks to them, solitary protests and brutally dispersed unsanctioned rallies do not happen in a void - and people fed up with the Putin cult can not only speak their minds but, sometimes, make themselves heard by vast numbers of their fellow citizens.
Thus, last September, the pro-government daily Izvestia killed an article by its television columnist scathingly critical of a sycophantic Putin birthday special (directed by renowned Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov). This would have been unremarkable - except that the incident received enough coverage on the Web and the radio to shame the editors into reversing themselves and running the column.
In October, a leading newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, published a letter from Mikhalkov and the heads of three major cultural organizations begging Putin, in the name of Russia's art community, to stay (not run, but stay) for a third term. The public reaction was not an outpouring of support but a vocal backlash. Prominent artists, actors, authors, and entertainers publicly lashed out at the letter-writers, castigating them for presuming to speak in the name of others, for addressing Putin in a slavishly fawning tone, and for encouraging the president to flout the constitution. When Mikhalkov faced writer Viktor Yerofeyev on a popular television debate program, three of the four in-studio judges declared Mikhalkov the winner, but the call-in vote went for Yerofeyev, 90,000 to 52,000.
All things considered, the Putin regime's increasingly brutal pre-election tactics toward the opposition - the intimidation, the arrests, the hysterical rhetoric about foreign-paid "jackals" - may have been a sign of fear more than arrogance.
As Russia heads into 2008, its future remains murky. Will Medvedev prove to be a more liberal president, or a front for the "Chief Bear"? Will Putin remain in power - or fall from grace and become a scapegoat, like some other dear leaders in Russian history? No one knows. Most likely, not even Putin.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. 