Putin's Wars (17 page)

When Yeltsin told Putin in the summer of 1999 that he had chosen him to be his successor
and Putin had to prepare for the presidential elections of 2000, Putin was upset.
“I don’t like election campaigns,” he said. “I really don’t. I don’t know how to run
them, and I don’t like them.”
^[1]
This exclamation would, in fact, become the profession of faith of Putin’s regime,
because the realization of Putin’s imperial project was dependent on two conditions.
The first of these was the unhampered continuation of his regime in order to be able
to realize his long-term projects. The second condition was the necessity of upholding
a formal democratic façade to facilitate the acceptance of his regime in the West,
thus avoiding the West mobilizing against the emergence of a new “Russian danger.”
This meant that he would strictly adhere to the letter (though not the spirit) of
the constitution. He would maintain the external characteristics of a democratic regime,
such as elections and a free press, but at the same time he would do anything to avoid
an alternation of power from taking place, which is the litmus proof of democratic
governance. The repression of opposition forces in Russia, therefore, was considered
a necessary condition for the continuation of his regime. Winning this “internal war”
was for Putin a precondition for winning his first war: the reconstruction of the
empire. How Putin conducted this “internal war” we will analyze in this section.

Each time visitors from the West questioned the reality of Russian political pluralism,
Putin reacted with visible irritation. During the Valdai conference in September 2009,
for instance, a Western participant asked: “To what extent do you think the Western
model for political and economic development would suit Russia? Or do you think Russia
needs to adopt some other model, which would better suit local historical, geographical
and geopolitical realities?” Putin answered—not amused—in a brusque tone: “Russia’s
fundamental political and economic system is fully in line with international standards.
If we are discussing the political system, I am referring to free election(s) and
(an) effective multi-party system.”
^[2]
Apparently, the Russian leadership did not consider reestablishing a one-party system
to be a sensible strategy. The historical precedents—not only in fascist countries,
but also the experience with the communist party in the former Soviet Union—had too
negative an image.

The former communist regime legitimized the existing one-party system by referring
to the emergence of a “classless society” in which the old capitalist class cleavages
would no longer exist. Interestingly, even in the former communist bloc there were
still some countries, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic,
which did not follow the Soviet example, but maintained (quasi-)pluralist systems.
In East Germany, for instance, alongside the SED, the official communist party, there
existed four other political “parties.”
^[3]
However, these parties were not allowed to compete with each other or with the
communist party, nor to participate in elections as independent bodies. Candidates
from all parties appeared on a prefabricated list of the so-called “National Front”
^[4]
under the aegis of the communist party, and in the (obligatory) elections the only
act expected from voters was to throw this list in the ballot box.
^[5]
Putin lived and worked as a KGB agent in Dresden in the German Democratic Republic
between 1985 and 1991. Asked about his activities there, he answered that he “looked
for information about political parties, the tendencies inside these parties, their
leaders. I examined today’s leaders and the possible leaders of tomorrow and the promotion
of people to certain posts in the parties and the government.”
^[6]
Putin might have been impressed by the astuteness of East Germany’s pseudo-pluralism.

Of the four parties that on December 2, 2007, were elected in the State Duma, United
Russia got 64.30 percent of the vote, A Just Russia got 6.80 percent, the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation got 11.57 percent, and the Liberal Democratic Party
of Russia got 8.14 percent. If we take into account that A Just Russia was an artificial
construction, set up by United Russia to attract additional votes, the governing bloc
collected as much as 71.1 percent of the votes (and 78.44 percent of the seats). This
sweeping majority exceeded even the percentage the ANC got in the South African elections
on April 22, 2009 (the ANC got 65.9 percent). The well-oiled and generously financed
United Russia party machine was explicitly set up to support Putin, although Putin
himself was not a party member. This did not prevent Putin accepting, on April 15,
2008, the position of chairman.

Not only did United Russia have a comfortable majority at that time, but, additionally,
the two “opposition” parties, Zhirinovsky’s crypto-fascist Liberal Democratic Party
and the Communist Party, had long since abandoned playing a serious opposition role.
These parties, instead, fully supported the government. The resulting system, therefore,
in practice came close to a one-party state. Richard Sakwa had remarked that already
Unity
, United Russia’s predecessor
^[7]
was “neither a modern political party nor a mass movement but was instead a political
association made to order by power elites to advance their interests. [It] . . . could
become the core of a new type of hegemonic party system in which patronage and preference
would be disbursed by a neo-
nomenclatura
class of state officials loyal to Putin. Unity could become the core of a patronage
system of the type that in July 2000 was voted out of office in Mexico after seventy-one
years.”
^[8]
Unity’s successor, United Russia, indeed, succeeded in establishing itself as the
inheritor of the old monolithic CPSU. Former president Gorbachev called it “the worst
version of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
^[9]
This was a rather harsh accusation from the mouth of the last president of the
Soviet Union, who made his career inside the defunct CPSU and knew better than anyone
else how rotten the old system was. But Gorbachev made a mistake: United Russia was
not
a remake of the old CPSU. Because, quite simply, communism in Russia was definitively
dead. The new pluralistic façade might hide the same monolithic political structure,
but it was situated in a rather different environment: not the former environment
of a communist, centrally planned economy, but the new environment of a state capitalist
economy. This made a big difference and was one of the reasons not to look back to
Soviet times for historical analogies.

On October 28, 2006, a new party was introduced into the Russian party landscape.
Its name was
Spravedlivaya Rossiya
, or A Just Russia
^[10]
—at first sight a promising name, because many Russians deplored the loss of the
former socialist model of the defunct Soviet Union and craved a more just and fair
society.
^[11]
What was A Just Russia? A new opposition party? A party that would challenge the
near monopoly of United Russia? One should forget this illusion. According to the
Moscow Times
, “Russia . . . [has] become possibly the first country in history with a two-party
system in which both parties share the same overriding principle, that the executive
is always right.”
^[12]
In a report for the American Congress, Stuart D. Goldman wrote: “The platforms
of United Russia and A Just Russia consisted of little more than the slogan, ‘For
Putin.’”
^[13]
He added that the “second pro-Kremlin party, A Just Russia—[is] widely believed
to have been created by Kremlin ‘political technologists’ . . . to draw leftist votes
away from the Communists.”
^[14]
Goldman was right. The instigator of the new party was Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s
deputy head of the presidential administration and a prominent Kremlin ideologue.
Surkov was the inventor of the new political concepts of the Putin era, such as the
“power vertical” and “sovereign democracy” (which had nothing to do with democracy,
but meant merely that no foreign power had the right to define what democracy is).
Anna Politkovskaya characterized Surkov as follows: “The deputy head of Putin’s office
is a certain Vladislav Surkov, the acknowledged doyen of PR in Russia. He spins webs
consisting of pure deceit, lies in place of reality, words instead of deeds.”
^[15]

Surkov’s “master idea” behind the creation of A Just Russia was to establish a two-party
system as existed in the United States, but with one important difference: neither
party would embody political alternatives, nor would they lead to an alternation of
governing elites. Instead, they would guarantee political continuity by supporting
the Putin regime. The hidden aim was that A Just Russia, as the new “left wing” party,
would draw votes away from the Communist party. However, even circles close to the
Kremlin were not convinced. One of them was former prime minister Primakov, who wrote
“proposals can be heard to create in Russia a two-party system. The center left party
A Just Russia could aspire to the role of lead second party. But the realization of
this project, the idea behind it being attributed to the Kremlin, presents great difficulties.
When United Russia was created, the administrative potential was used to the maximum.
Many regional and local leaders felt obliged to become members of this party. Might
they this time take at least a neutral position, or even support A Just Russia at
the Duma elections? And that while V. V. Putin has become leader of United Russia?”
^[16]
Primakov’s skepticism was justified. In the December 2007 Duma elections the strategy
did not work out as was planned. Although A Just Russia was secured a place in parliament,
the Communist Party resisted better than expected. However, we have to take into account
that the Communist Party, although an “opposition party,” did not play a serious opposition
role. The party “knows its place” in the existing system and does not transgress its
(narrow) limits, as it is dependent on the government for registration, fund-raising,
and access to the state controlled TV channels. The same is true for Zhirinovsky’s
Liberal-Democratic Party, of which it is said that “according to insider accounts
[it] was established by the Soviet KGB to serve as a nationalist pseudo-opposition.”
^[17]

The Duma that was elected in 2007 exhibited another important defect: this was the
absence of liberal parties, such as Yabloko and the Union of the Right Forces. The
Kremlin wanted this anomaly to be “repaired” in the run-up to the Duma elections of
December 2011. By the beginning of 2010 rumors were already emerging about a new initiative.
In February 2010 Owen Matthews, the Moscow correspondent of
Newsweek
, wrote about “a new liberal pseudo-opposition party the Kremlin is rumored to be
cooking up.”
^[18]
However, in the regional elections of March 13, 2011, suddenly another party popped
up. It was the
Patrioty Rossii
(Patriots of Russia). Founded in 2005 by Gennady Semigin, a former member of the Communist
Party, it had until then led a mainly dormant existence. The party, using the slogan
“Patriotism is superior to Politics,” managed to win nearly 8 percent of the vote
in Dagestan. Its program was left-wing, nationalist, and anti-Western.
^[19]
In a comment
The Economist
wrote: “Analysts say the party is another Kremlin product, tested now with a view
to being deployed in the parliamentary election in December [2011]. . . . Its real
purpose, it seems, is to act as a spoiler for the Communist Party and another party,
Just Russia, which itself was originally created as a double for United Russia but
has since become a genuine challenger. Engineering clone and fake opposition parties
is one of the Kremlin’s favourite political ‘technologies.’”
^[20]
All this confirmed what Anna Politkovskaya had written in 2004: “There is a great
fashion at the present for bogus political movements created by a directive of the
Kremlin. We don’t want the West suspecting that we have a one-party system, that we
lack pluralism and are relapsing into authoritarianism.”
^[21]

A fake pluralist system cannot be maintained without massive election fraud. This
fraud, however, must not transgress certain limits if it is to keep the pluralist
system “credible.” On October 11, 2009, when local elections were held in seventy-five
regions for seven thousand eligible posts, something unexpected happened. The strategy
of the Kremlin’s “political technologists” of creating a fake two-party system seemed
to be surpassed by a new reality: the total hegemony of United Russia, which obtained
almost 80 percent of the votes. The other parties were completely marginalized in
the local councils. The background to this new political fact was the greatest election
fraud ever committed in post-Communist Russia. In the Moscow City Duma, for instance,
United Russia got thirty-two out of thirty-five seats. However, exit polls by VTsIOM,
the state-owned pollster, had predicted that support for United Russia in Moscow was
only 45.5 percent. Strangely enough, the party got 66 percent of the vote.
^[22]
According to observers “the campaign was called one of the dirtiest ever in Russia.
. . . Almost everywhere parties complained of the abuse of absentee ballots and the
rather old fashioned abuse of ‘carousel’ voting, in which buses ferry volunteers from
one polling station to the next to vote several times.”
^[23]
However, according to
Novoe Vremya
(New Times)—a weekly magazine critical of the Kremlin—the use of absentee ballots
and the carousel system were only
detskiye metody
(children’s methods) of election fraud. They could change the results by only 5 to
7 percent. However, United Russia’s results were in many cases “improved” by up to
40 percent. The method used for this, wrote the weekly, was quite simple: it consisted
in removing “troublesome observers” at the moment that the ballot boxes were opened
and in presenting the “end results” directly.
^[24]
Ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev on this occasion abandoned his usually prudent and
discrete attitude vis-à-vis the leadership in the Kremlin. In an interview in
Novaya Gazeta
, of which he is one of the owners, he said that “in the eyes of everybody, the elections
have turned into a mockery of the people.”
^[25]