The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (7 page)

But there is little indication that anyone in a position of power is willing to risk much. This fact becomes abundantly clear nearly every time Russians go to the ballot box, because evidence of election rigging quickly follows. As members of the opposition and United Russia explained to me, the problem is bigger than a senior leader ordering that ballot boxes be stuffed; in some ways, the fraud and tampering that go on at election time are now ingrained into Russia’s authoritarian system. Sergei Markov readily admits that the allegations of election tampering are true. But it isn’t because Putin is handing out orders over who should win what percent. “
You should understand the mechanism and how it works. Never does Putin say, ‘Get me such and such percent.’ He even says he doesn’t need this. What’s Putin’s interest if [someone] doesn’t have 50 percent but 70 percent? Fifty percent is also the majority, yeah? He doesn’t care,” explains Markov. “But governors and mayors absolutely think about this because it’s a reflection of how popular they are. And that’s why they use it.”

In other words, lower-level officials engage in election fraud because they don’t want to look bad. Whether they are fearful of not delivering the votes for a superior or they are concerned they won’t appear as popular when compared with other officials across the country, the tactic is the same: steal the election. We think of elections within authoritarian regimes as being uncompetitive charades. But that isn’t precisely right. There is competition. It is just between officials jockeying for favor, rather than between ruling party candidates and their opponents.

Perhaps one of the more suspicious recent elections was the most high-profile one: the 2008 election of President Dmitri Medvedev. In
Putin’s previous presidential election, he captured 71 percent of the vote. When Medvedev, Putin’s handpicked successor, stood for the vote, he walked away with precisely 70.2 percent. To many, it appeared like a textbook example of Russian election engineering. There had been a desire to make sure that Medvedev came into office with a clear mandate, but no one wanted the protégé’s tally to trump the mentor’s numbers. Markov essentially agrees. “Yeah, it’s not totally controlled,” he says, “but nobody [wants] to give Medvedev a [greater] percentage. I call it self-winding hyper-bureaucratic loyalty. It’s a real problem for United Russia and for dominating parties [elsewhere].”

Igor Mintusov knows what it takes to win a Russian election. He is the fifty-two-year-old chairman of the Niccolo M Group, one of the best-known political consulting firms in Moscow. (The name refers, of course, to Niccolò Machiavelli; Mintusov’s business card features a portrait of Machiavelli, peering at you from behind a globe.) Founded in 1992, the firm has run campaigns across Russia. Nor has Mintusov’s work been limited to his native land: he is well traveled, having helped direct political campaigns in Bolivia, Bulgaria, Chile, Estonia, Nicaragua, South Korea, Venezuela, and even the United States. And his services don’t come cheap.
Lunch with Mintusov can reportedly cost a client thousands.

When we met, I asked him which campaigns he had worked on in the United States. One was a failed Democratic gubernatorial campaign in Florida against Jeb Bush. The other, he told me, was Senator Chris Dodd’s 1998 Connecticut reelection campaign. Mintusov was supposed to help with media messaging, so when he arrived, he went to meet with Dodd’s campaign manager. Straightaway, Mintusov asked about the media budget. So the campaign manager showed him what he had to work with. “
He pointed to the budget for research, the budget for staff, the budget for getting out the vote, things like that,” recalls Mintusov. “I saw the salary for the press secretary, the expenses for equipment, office space, shipping costs, Internet, and I’m looking at it and say, ‘Well, it’s okay. But where’s the money for working with the media?’ ”

The campaign manager then repeated himself, reviewing the list of salaries, expenses, and whatnot. So Mintusov asked again. “I said I understand, but where is the budget for working with the media?”
Again, the campaign manager walked down the same line items. And then it dawned on Mintusov. “Suddenly I understood that he didn’t understand my question at all,” says Mintusov, laughing. “Then I understood how spoiled I am in Russia!” Mintusov just assumed media, like everything else, was for sale.

It’s impossible that Mintusov could work in Russian election politics for so long, be regarded a success, and still have clean hands. He described Russian campaigns to me as “wars without rules,” and in this lawless environment Niccolo M had profited handsomely. Nevertheless, he claims even he had his limits. “The level of fraud in the last few years has become so extremely high that it discredited elections as elections,” he told me. So, at the end of 2008, Mintusov published a book detailing the rigging that had gone on in the Duma elections in 2007 and the presidential election of 2008. In an homage to his country’s most famous author, he titled it
Crime Without Punishment
.

In the murky world of Russian politics, it is hard to draw a straight line between motivations and actions. It could be true that it was some violation of integrity or lost professionalism that led Mintusov to break ranks. It also may be that the political operative had a falling-out with the ruling party’s kingmakers and then saw no disadvantage to publishing his book. In either case, Mintusov told me that United Russia sent a letter to its members telling them they could no longer retain the services of Niccolo M. With that, his firm was effectively barred from 80 percent of Russia’s political space. Then again, if Mintusov’s description is accurate, the fraud has gotten to the point where being a political consultant is almost a pointless profession. “Because what’s the point of developing a message and delivering the message well, when the result will be calculated the night after the election?” he told me.

As I was leaving, I asked him if he was familiar with the recent election involving Sergei Mitrokhin. He laughed, saying, “Yes, it’s an excellent example.”

Sergei Mitrokhin is the leader of Yabloko, a liberal, pro-Western opposition party. In the fall of 2009, Mitrokhin stood for reelection to the Moscow City Duma. On October 11, the day of the election, the forty-six-year-old politician cast his ballot in his home district, District 192. His family also went to District 192’s ballot office to cast
votes for Yabloko. He had friends who did the same. Mitrokhin did not win the election. That wasn’t entirely surprising. What was surprising was the margin of defeat. “
The electoral district where I voted showed that there were zero votes for Yabloko,” Mitrokhin told me. According to the election rolls, not a single person had voted for Mitrokhin’s party—not even Mitrokhin himself.

I met with the opposition leader at his party headquarters in downtown Moscow. Mitrokhin is a bulldozer of a man, solid, stocky, with eyes set deep beneath a furrowed brow. He was elected Yabloko’s leader three years ago, and judging by even recent photographs, the experience has aged him. We talked about the difficulties of trying to operate in a political system so heavily stacked against the opposition. He agreed with Markov’s explanation, that the election rigging is probably the result of “bureaucratic competition.” And this competition, he noted, gives rise to an even stranger consequence. In Mitrokhin’s opinion, the voting in Putin’s own district is probably the cleanest in Russia. The stakes are just too high for someone to be caught red-handed. “It is very dangerous for them to falsify elections there,” he says. “There is always a chance that someone will detect such fraud.” It would be terribly embarrassing for tampering to occur in Putin’s own district, and after all his popularity is great enough that no one thinks—including Mitrokhin—that Putin needs to stack the deck to win. And in the prime minister’s district, Yabloko won nearly 20 percent of the vote. Given how hostile an environment it is for opposition parties, it’s not a bad showing. “These are the realities of authoritarian regimes,” he says. “If we had a democracy, we would have been in the parliament. We have to fight for survival.”

The absurdity of having all of the opposition’s ballots disappear was another example of Markov’s self-winding hyper-bureaucratic loyalty. Amusingly, for all his defense of the system as it exists, Markov did admit that there was one downside to Russia’s lack of open, unfettered political competition: it was holding him back professionally. “I am personally extremely interested in political competition because I can talk on TV,” says Markov, immodestly. “My personal status is lower than it could be.” Even if he wouldn’t admit to the potential benefits of political competition for Russian society at large, the Kremlin insider sees no contradiction in his own personal desire for it.

Few people dared to expect much from Dmitri Medvedev. He was the dutiful aide who had been plucked from obscurity and made a president. Like Putin, he had never held elected office before becoming president. His name was rarely mentioned as one of those most likely to succeed Putin. It was suspected by many that whoever would follow Putin would be little more than a placeholder. The Russian constitution forbade Putin to serve three consecutive terms as president, so rather than revise the constitution, Putin simply required a reliable surrogate. If he wanted to return to the presidency, he could always do so. In this way, whoever the next president would likely be, he was just another plank in Putin’s democratic facade. It took less than twenty-four hours for that impression to gain credence. On December 11, 2007, the day after Russians learned that he was Putin’s choice for president,
Medvedev went before television cameras and appealed to Putin to serve as his prime minister. “
What is Putin’s main dream? To be in power up until the end, like everyone,” says Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader. “According to our constitution, we have just two terms. That is why he suggested Medvedev as his successor. It was selection, not election.”

Less than three months later, on March 2, 2008, Medvedev won in an apparent landslide. That night, wearing a leather jacket and blue jeans, he celebrated his victory alongside Putin at an outdoor rock concert in Red Square. At only forty-two, he was a young, handsome, if somewhat bland protégé. The former lawyer from St. Petersburg had done very little to distinguish himself to Russian voters, making vague pronouncements about his desire to fight corruption and promote the rule of law. As one of his current advisers told me, with so little time between his debut and his election, it wasn’t as if he had any vision or program for how to lead Russia. But from Putin’s perspective, that may have actually been one of his greatest qualities as a temporary successor. As Medvedev told the people in Red Square that night, his victory meant “
we will be able to maintain the course suggested by President Putin.”

But the mere fact that the country was being led, at least formally, by a new face gave some people a reason for hope. Medvedev did not
share Putin’s KGB background, and he had come of age during the reforms of the 1980s. Some noted that Medvedev had likely had a hand in some of Putin’s early reforms, before he turned more autocratic. If nothing else, his legal training suggested that he might value the role of institutions and legal protections, not just power. Arseny Roginsky, a former Soviet dissident and the co-founder of Memorial, one of Russia’s most respected NGOs, told me as much when we met in Moscow. “
As a rule, the skeptics are always right in Russia,” he said. “And believe me, I am not a Medvedev man. But we need hope, and we need to hope for something.”

Medvedev’s own words fueled those hopes. A year into his presidency, his speeches and remarks were frequently
peppered with criticism for the political system he led. He described the country’s democracy as “weak.” He said the economy was “primitive.” He called the country’s social systems at best “semi-Soviet.” In a speech to the Duma, Medvedev declared, “
Our state is the biggest employer, the most active publisher, the best producer, its own judge, its own party, and, in the end, its own public. Such a system is absolutely inefficient and creates only one thing—corruption.” If nothing else, Medvedev sounded like a president who understood the system and its flaws.

And that was the trouble. There was nothing else; Medvedev was long on rhetoric and short on results. From the beginning, he had talked about the dangers of corruption, and it remained unchecked. He had promised that the people behind the murders of journalists would be brought to justice, but cases remained unsolved. He unveiled proposals to reform the police and the Interior Ministry. Russians barely noticed, and according to the Levada polling center 66
percent did not believe his reforms would accomplish anything. It did not help that in early 2010 Medvedev was publicly complaining that by his count, 38
percent of his presidential orders were ignored by governors and ministers.

Medvedev could be as hapless as he sometimes appeared. After all, he might have been the president of the Russian Federation, but
it wasn’t as if he had many centers of support inside his government. Putin loyalists—the ministries, the Duma, United Russia, the security services—essentially flanked him on all sides. Given how much these politicians and bureaucrats had personally benefited from the system
as Putin had constructed it, what interest did they have in reform? Indeed, despite his vocal criticisms, some viewed Medvedev’s role as both president and chief critic as an innovation in its own right. The tandem leadership of Medvedev and Putin took on the appearance of good cop, bad cop, with a twist. “
You can see the whole tactics of Medvedev-Putin as a very interesting communication approach where Medvedev is addressing minorities and Putin is addressing majorities,” says Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Russian online journal
Caucasian Knot
. “Medvedev is talking specifically about the problems. It’s a very wise division. They are talking to different sides of society—those who are rich and those who are poor, those who are supporting the political rule and those who are protesting them.”