Winter is Coming (12 page)

So when we happily mobbed the polls in 1991 to vote for Yeltsin the first time it was as if many Russians expected the ballot boxes to operate like ATMs: put your ballot in and money will come out! This conceptual misunderstanding later made it easier for an authoritarian like Putin to roll back civil rights by claiming that democracy had failed, that it had all been a Western scam to exploit Russia, and so on. The economic situation didn’t help much either. If there is anything worse than empty store shelves it is shelves full of expensive new products you cannot afford to buy.

We had sobered up quite a bit by the time special parliamentary elections were called in 1993 after the constitutional crisis that nearly toppled the entire government. Yeltsin attempted to dissolve the Supreme Soviet in September, something he did not have the authority to do according to the constitution. In retaliation, the parliament impeached Yeltsin, who of course refused to recognize their act of defiance. After weeks of dueling protests and street violence, Yeltsin called in the special police and the parliament building was sealed off. It was quite uncertain what would happen. Pitched battles were taking place in the streets outside the government building and nearly two hundred people would be killed and hundreds more wounded.

Along with the rest of the world, I was watching all of this unfold on CNN from afar. My 1993 world championship title defense against Nigel Short began in London on September 7 and lasted, as matches did in those days, for six weeks. As it had been in 1990, it was difficult to focus on chess when my country was again facing revolution. Fortunately, I jumped out to a big lead in the match and could play with less psychological pressure. I felt comfortable enough to give a few interviews on the situation in Moscow, where I said Yeltsin was fighting for the free future of Russia.

After days of violence and frantic negotiations on all sides, the allegiance of the Russian army to Yeltsin was the decisive factor. In an unbelievable scene, on October 4 a row of tanks fired on the White House (as we call the parliament building) and the top floors of it caught fire. Special forces stormed the building and clamped down on the street protesters. Back in control, Yeltsin wasted no time in pushing through constitutional reform, demoting the parliament and creating the very strong presidency that haunts us today. The Supreme Soviet was obsolete, of course, but in a country with such a fragile civil society it is important to have power spread as thinly as possible.

In 1996, Yeltsin had little popular support but he could count on many of the oligarchs whose fortunes he had enabled and the financial backing of the West. Despite a campaign spending limit of $3 million, still out of reach of most parties, the Yeltsin campaign spent somewhere in the range of one to two
billion
dollars according to later investigations. Even more important was a huge loan from the International Monetary Fund in February. The $10.2 billion allowed the Yeltsin government to pay long overdue wages and pensions.

If that had been all, dubious financing and pork-barrel politics on steroids, it might not have done damage lasting beyond Yeltsin’s term in office. But there was also the media influence and outright electoral fraud, weapons that are very hard to put back in the closet after being used. It was all enough to earn Yeltsin a narrow lead over Zyuganov in the first round, 35 percent to 32 percent. Yeltsin had a serious heart attack between the June 16 election and the July 3 run-off against Zyuganov, a potentially dangerous situation that was successfully hidden from the public thanks to government and media complicity. Yeltsin won the runoff 54 percent to 40 percent, with even more evidence of widespread voter fraud later coming to light.

At the time, had I known everything that was going on, it still would have been very hard for me to wish for anything other than a Yeltsin return. In 1996, Gennady Zyuganov wasn’t the performing pet Communist he is for Putin today. He was a Communist revanchist who had fought against liberal reforms every step of the way and he would have been a dangerous man with the power of the presidency. There was a real possibility that an election that brought him to power would be the last election we would have for a long time. And yet the lesson of 1996 is that institutions must matter more than the man. The Yeltsin campaign undermined nearly every aspect of a democratic society and it never recovered. His successor would quickly take up Yeltsin’s campaign tools of repression and corruption and apply them to everyday governance. Putin was no Communist, but he was a Soviet revanchist through and through.

I feel I must also apply to myself the standards I regularly urge on the leaders of the free world who so often put expediency and personal affinity over nurturing institutions. The fear of the unknown, of losing a reliable ally, often drives democratic leaders to the utmost hypocrisy. It leads them to support “friendly” dictators against their people, as was seen recently by the tepid reception the Arab Spring movement received in the Obama administration and in much of Europe. I have long railed against this in regards to how Putin was embraced by the G7 despite his crackdowns on civil liberties, but this is far from a uniquely Russian problem.

My thoughts on this have been further shaped by my work as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and at the Oslo Freedom Forum organized by the HRF and its founder, Thor Halvorssen. We invite dissidents from all over the world to speak about their movements and their fights for liberty. One common denominator is how dangerous and demoralizing it can be for the so-called leaders of the free world to downplay or to ignore their plights, or, as often happens, to openly support the authors of their repression. Often, European and American visitors were surprised to find out that their governments were actively supporting some of the world’s most repressive regimes.

I may be idealistic, but I am far from naive. I understand that every democratically elected head of state will do what is necessary to protect the interests of his or her people. In foreign policy, sometimes that will mean shaking a hand with blood on it or trading with a country with atrocious labor practices. We can, however, demand transparency and accountability for these deals. We do not have to like it and we can let our politicians know that it must change.

The world’s dictators are very aware of the power wielded by the free world today. This is why nearly all of them role-play at democracy with sham elections and perform other acts of theater to stay in the good graces of the world’s largest economies and militaries. Unfortunately, the free world is too uninformed, callous, or apathetic to use this influence. They enjoy the benefits of engagement with dictatorships—oil from the Middle East, gas from Russia, everything else from China—while the dictators use the money to fund repression. But not all dictatorships are the same.

The pro-democracy sit-in protests in Hong Kong that started in September 2014 led to speculation about why such an Occupy-style movement has so far failed to materialize against the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia. It’s an awkward comparison at best; the student Hongkongers who could barely recall the 1997 handover from the United Kingdom to China were accustomed to their special status of rights and democracy relative to the rest of China. The flame of Russian democracy flickered only briefly before Putin squelched it, and the memories of the chaos and corruption of the 1990s are not fond ones for most Russians.

A more concrete answer is that the Communist dictatorship in China needs its people, especially its young and educated people. Hong Kong is still a large and strategically critical piece of the Chinese economy. That economy also depends almost entirely on consumers in the free world, consumers who have far more information about the protests than nearly anyone in heavily censored China. A Tiananmen massacre in Hong Kong, transmitted around the world on millions of Chinese-made iPhones, could make “Made in China” into a bloody mark. Anti-China boycotts could hurt the Chinese economy enough to lead to wide-scale unrest.

Putin, on the other hand, has no use for the people of Russia, especially its young and educated people. He and his junta have turned the country into a petro-state, and exporting natural resources to an insatiable global market doesn’t require entrepreneurs or programmers, let alone writers and professors. Boycotting oil and gas also requires coordinated political will, a substance Putin now knows is far rarer in the free world than the platinum and diamonds in Siberia.

Decades of economic and political engagement with the West and improved standards of living were supposed to liberalize these dictatorships and provide leverage against them. But leverage is only useful if applied, and it is also double edged. Europe buys four-fifths of Russia’s energy exports, giving it tremendous economic leverage over Putin, who has made the Russian economy totally dependent on oil and gas. But instead of aggressively developing alternative supply routes in order to be able to use that leverage to stand up to Russia, Europe dithers and cries foul when Putin blackmails Eastern Europe with the gas supply as winter approaches.

China and Russia have similar social compacts with their dictatorial governments: economic stability in exchange for their citizens’ human rights. They both have heavily censored state propaganda instead of news, sham elections, and minimal freedom of speech and assembly. The skyrocketing price of oil through the 2000s allowed Putin to fulfill, if minimally outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, his promises of pensions and payrolls— and oil is also why stoking Middle East instability that keeps the price high is always a priority for him. China started from a much lower point and managed to raise a billion people out of poverty by turning an entire nation into the world’s factory.

Globalization, economic integration with rich free economies, made both the Russian and Chinese scenarios possible.

The reality is that most consumers in the developed world would rather not know where their phones and gas come from as long as the prices are low. If you know, you must act, so it is better not to know. The occasional scandal over inhuman working conditions in Chinese factories (or women’s rights in Saudi Arabia) allows some liberals to feel better when a Nike or Apple announces an investigation that is quickly forgotten by the time the next shoe or gadget comes out.

Now then, is the case of China really such a failure, you might wonder. Should we have condemned those billion souls to poverty and hunger for the sake of politics? This is empathy from the innocent but it is also the false choice the autocrats love to present to the world. It is the false choice between freedom and food, between repression and stability. There is no reason China could not have enjoyed similar or greater economic success with a more liberal regime. In fact, there’s a great deal of evidence that democratic countries perform better. Do not fall for the false choice. Repression may begin as a means to an end, but it always ends up being an end unto itself.

The protests in Hong Kong were also a refutation of what I have mockingly referred to as the genetic theory of democracy. For years I have been told that Russians (or Arabs, or Chinese) simply aren’t disposed to democracy. They require a “strong hand” or “love a tough leader.” This is just one of many theories people born in the free world use to mask their privilege, their inaction, and their shame. How could this be true when Taiwan is composed of the same people but is a flourishing democracy? What about East and West Germany, North and South Korea?

There are countless reasons democracy fails to take root, or why some military coups succeed and others fail. None of these reasons are based on ethnicity or geography. Our governments are human constructs, as are our traditions and beliefs. As Milton Friedman said, “Society doesn’t have values. People have values.”

We must decide what we value and decide what is worth fighting for and then—the most important part—we must fight for it. If we fail to do this we will lose to those who believe in other things, in worse things. We will lose to those who don’t believe in the value of human life or liberty, and who are willing to fight to impose their dark vision for humanity on others.

We may call the rights we cherish inalienable or universal, but this isn’t the same as being entitled to democracy, or even to basic human rights. No, these things must be fought for. And if it takes brave students in Hong Kong to remind the world of this, then their protest was a success, however brief it may have been.