The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (4 page)

Until recently, a senior Kremlin official met with
the directors of the three major TV channels every Friday to plan the news coverage for the week to come. Television managers reportedly received a steady stream of phone calls throughout the week, honing how that coverage should be presented, even delving sometimes into how a particular news story should be edited. The Kremlin is not shy about giving TV
executives instructions to follow. For example, after Dmitri Medvedev became president in 2008, the television networks were instructed that news broadcasts each day were to begin with coverage of him, followed by nearly equal time for Prime Minister Putin, whether or not either of them did anything newsworthy. When I was in Moscow, I would watch the evening news just to see how bizarrely balanced the coverage between the two men would be, with each of them getting roughly the same airtime. A senior television executive at one of the networks called this rule “the principle of informational parity.” A journalist from
Russian Newsweek
reported on visiting one of the state-controlled radio stations. While there, he saw notes in front of the radio announcers reminding them to “say only good things about Kazakhstan” and “don’t mention that Dmitri and Svetlana Medvedev arrived to the summit separately.”

The Kremlin wasn’t satisfied with simply taming billionaires, governors, and media heads, though; it also sought to stage-manage politics. From as far back as his Millennium Statement, Putin always stressed the need for political and social unity. He naturally sought to extend this cohesion to the realm of political parties, which had been among the most unpredictable and fractious players in post-Communist Russia. But Putin and his team did not wish to crush all opposition with a single dominant ruling party. Rather,
they engineered space for a small handful of opposition parties to exist and in some instances invented the parties out of whole cloth. These parties—typically referred to as the systemic opposition—ostensibly play the role of regime critics while never pushing their criticism beyond the boundaries set by the Kremlin. In their ideological orientation, these opposition voices are intended to represent social interests—namely, nationalists, the poor, and older voters—who may feel neglected or dissatisfied with the ruling party, United Russia. But they regularly demonstrate their fealty, as in December 2007, when the heads of each so-called opposition party publicly informed Putin that they could think of no one better to lead Russia than his longtime aide Dmitri Medvedev. Putin could then tell the TV public that since the nomination of Medvedev came from different parties that represented “
the most different strata of Russian society,” Medvedev was clearly the choice of the people.

The degree to which Putin concentrated power in the center cannot be overstated.
According to the Russian journal
Ekspert
, which is edited by a confidant of senior Kremlin advisers, the number of officials who had serious influence over national policy and politics from 2002 to 2007 dropped from two hundred to fifty. This pro-government publication admitted that this list of fifty officials reads “almost like a telephone book of the [presidential] administration.” But this centralization of power should not be understood as an attempt to achieve total control of all aspects of Russian life. Rather, it is something more precise.

In talking with members of Solidarity, a liberal political movement that is not part of the systemic opposition, I found out how precise. One of its leaders, Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and legislator, is easily one of the most outspoken critics of Putin and his regime. Nemtsov has a laid-back demeanor that is younger than his fifty-something age. Wearing weathered blue jeans, a gray zippered sweater with no shirt, and pointed black boots, he looked more like an aging rock star than an opposition leader. A Ph.D. in physics and mathematics, Nemtsov has a sharp mind, and he gets right to the point. “
What’s the difference between communism and Putinism?” he says. “This is very important. Putinism looks smarter, because Putinism comes just for your political rights but does not touch your personal freedom. You can travel, you can emigrate if you want, you can read the Internet. What is strictly forbidden is to use TV. Television is under control because TV is the most powerful resource for ideology and the propaganda machine. Communists blocked personal freedom plus political freedom. That’s why communism looks much more stupid than Putinism.”

It is hard to dispute Nemtsov’s analysis. No one would say that life isn’t freer in present-day Russia than it was under the Soviet Union. That is unmistakable. And it is certainly more affluent, as the oil boom that accompanied Putin’s two terms as president raised the standard of living for Russians to levels never seen. When his presidency began, oil prices were considered high—at $21.50 a barrel. By the end of his second term, oil had climbed to $147.00 a barrel. It was a windfall for the government’s coffers. But, as Putin had observed as a young man in East Germany, there was no need to channel this wealth into recreating
an invasive totalitarian state that tried to pry into the personal beliefs of each citizen. The costs of such control were too high and ultimately unnecessary. Putin’s form of authoritarianism represents an evolution of the model, something far more scaled down but more effective. Ilya Yashin, a young leader of the Solidarity movement who says he was expelled from another party because he refused to “act like a member of the systemic opposition,” put it this way: “
Putin has created a kind of dream of the Soviet past. It’s like the Soviet Union without the lines, deficits, and with open borders.”

Even if the system that Putin has devised represents an improvement on twentieth-century attempts at dictatorship, it does not mean that it doesn’t have its costs. Centralizing power in so few hands raises the likelihood of corruption, complacency, and an abuse of power—all sins that Nemtsov says Putin’s administration is guilty of committing. These failings represent a danger for the regime, but not necessarily because they amount to poor governance. Rather, for Putin and his clique, the constant worry is that the costs of the strategy they have chosen undermine their main objective: manufacturing a stable political system. Expensive oil may help to shield them from many social dangers—it is always easier to purchase rather than coerce support—but their attempt to simulate so many facets of a democratic system significantly shrinks the regime’s margin for error. Having eliminated so many other centers of power—the business community, governors, media, opposition political parties—the Kremlin must chart the correct course if it hopes to maintain control. It’s a difficult balancing act. “
They don’t want to lose control over the changes like Gorbachev. It means they try to keep this control every moment,” says Alexander Verkhovsky, a leading human rights defender. “If they plan, for example, to give us 3 percent freedom, maybe they will give us 4 percent but not 5. I think that is really their plan. To make the situation not so tight as when they had no connection to the society, when they had no signals to the objects of their manipulation. I don’t know if it will be 3 percent or 10, but I am sure that they do not want to permit any real democratization as there was in the late ’80s.”

If you were casting the part of Communist apparatchik, you couldn’t do much better than Sergei Popov. He’s a mountain of a man, and his face betrays almost no emotion, except perhaps those that exist between mild condescension and anger when someone questions the wisdom of the political system he represents. If he looks the part, it may be because a little more than twenty years ago that is precisely who he was. In the twilight of the Soviet Union, he was the Communist Party’s first deputy chairman of Moscow, holding the post from 1983 until the end. When I met him in his corner office at the Russian Duma, the country’s parliament, he was still every bit the party man. The only difference was the lapel pin he wears on his dark blue suits. Right away you know you are meeting with United Russia, the party of Putin.

If the Duma is a rubber-stamp parliament—which most people will rightly tell you it is—it still requires some loyal soldiers to make sure the stamp gets applied. Not long after we sit down, Popov makes clear that “
90 percent of the civil laws are created here at this table.” (Translation: meet the stamp.) As chairman of the Committee of Public Unions and Religious Organizations, he rides herd on the laws governing political parties, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), media companies, commercial organizations, and religious groups. He is, in other words, the most senior member of the Russia Duma with responsibility for that most unpredictable variable: civil society. For any authoritarian regime, managing that variable is a crucial part of its ability to remain in control.

Putin’s choke hold on Russian NGOs was a late but inextricable part of his effort to centralize power. After he had moved against other pillars of the state, and in the wake of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine,
an onerous 2006 law targeted civil society. The law gave the Kremlin broad powers over all NGOs. Any nonprofit organization can be inspected at any time, groups need to comply with rigorous reporting requirements, and the Ministry of Justice has utter discretion to request any documents and determine whether they comply with Russian “interests.” Simple errors, like typos or the improper formatting of documents, can lead to harsh sanctions. Authorities require
only the flimsiest excuse to dissolve an organization. And the more sensitive the subject that a group addresses—for example, human rights or freedom of expression—the more likely it is to be targeted for tax audits, building-code violations, or the use of pirated software. Once passed, the law did not simply exist on the books; it was vigorously enforced against selective targets, especially Kremlin critics and human rights defenders. In the first year,
the Ministry of Justice led 13,381 NGO inspections.
A slew of foreign human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch, were forced to temporarily close their doors. Thousands of NGOs have ceased to exist, although the exact number is unknown. The resources available to those that remain were strangled further when
Putin followed this law with a 2008 decree that cut the number of international organizations allowed to give tax-free grants to Russian groups from 101 to 12. Groups that lost the ability to offer these tax-free contributions included the World Wildlife Fund, the International Red Cross, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria—hardly national security threats to the Russian government. It takes five days to register a business in Russia;
it takes roughly two months to register an NGO. It’s also more expensive. The legal costs for starting an NGO in Russia are 40 percent more than they are for starting a private business.

Of course, Popov doesn’t see the government’s relationship with Russian civil society as repressive. Like almost every pro-Kremlin politician, he began by praising the stability that United Russia (in truth, Putin) had brought to Russian politics. I suggested that this stability can come at a cost for a regime; for example, strong governments with a weak civil society often fall prey to a lack of quality information, feedback from citizens about society’s needs and demands. Popov shook his head. In theory, yes, it could be a problem, but the Russian government had come up with solutions. When I ask for an example, he points to the creation of public reception offices across the country. Their role is, in essence, to provide a direct line of communication for citizens to air their problems, grievances, and complaints to the central government. “In practice, here is how it looks,” explains Popov. “You come into the office, and you are given a special form to fill out that includes your personal data and a brief description of
your problem. This information goes in the computer right away, and immediately the machine gives you the name of who’s going to be responsible for this, who’s going to look at it, when the answer is supposed to come back, and how it’s going to be delivered to you. And immediately this request or demand is sent to the center … We can judge immediately which problems are the main concern for people; we can also see how many men applied, how many women, pensioners, young people, all these categories.”

Ultimately,
the authorities intend to have two thousand of these offices scattered across all eighty-three regions, not just in major cities, but also down to the level of individual voting districts. In 2009, more than a million people visited these offices to file complaints, he tells me. He pauses for a couple of beats and, as if to underline the point, looks at me across the table and says, “This is to avoid stagnation.”

It is a step a government might take after it has eliminated most democratic mechanisms for people to express their frustrations. With its governors (and increasingly its mayors) appointed, the vast majority of representatives from a single party, and the media controlled by the state or its cronies, the Kremlin recognizes it does need one thing in particular—accurate information on the national mood. In fact, gaining this type of information becomes an acute need as independent democratic institutions are reduced to supplicants. It’s a blind spot that has led to ruin for authoritarian regimes everywhere. Centralizing power may mean one has complete control, but it also means eliminating many of the filters that help sort good ideas from bad. The Kremlin is intelligent enough to recognize that monitoring public opinion is a job worth doing, if only to keep a better gauge on discontent. In most democracies, such feedback would come from elections, legislators, and civil society; in Russia, they are using a computer.

The regime has come up with other innovations besides the digital connection Popov was touting. One is the Public Chamber. From the inside, with its white marble floors, large glass chandeliers, and red velvet sofas on either end of a spacious lobby, it almost has the majesty of a miniature national assembly or legislature. But it isn’t;
this body is a consultative forum made up of representatives from various parts of Russian civil society selected by the Kremlin itself. Members may be experts in media, the law, public health, or human rights; some are
members of genuine NGOs. These handpicked representatives act as a sort of advisory panel, offering Russian authorities their opinions on legislation and pending policy decisions. Although most members of the Public Chamber are considered dutiful supporters of the regime, there are critics among them, and they have issued statements and reports that are critical of the government and its policies. In fact, this is precisely their job: to provide the advice, counsel, and criticism that a toothless Duma cannot. Having hollowed out one branch of government, Putin created the Public Chamber to provide a semblance of the independent ideas, expertise, and connection to wider society that a legislature typically brings—just without the power to do anything other than offer an opinion. “
The Public Chamber is
allowed
to be critical,” says Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch and a veteran of the struggles that NGOs face in Russia. “But what [the authorities] do not want to tolerate are those critics of the government getting to talk to people, getting support in society, getting their messages out—this is something that they’re not ready to tolerate at all. That’s why television is so rigidly state controlled. They want independent information, but they want to use it for their own purposes.”