Winter is Coming (30 page)

And so I did not even get as far as being nominated by the deadline in order to have the pleasure shared by a few other opposition figures in having their paperwork dismissed by Mr. Churov. Former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov pushed the hardest, appealing to the supreme court after the CEC decided that too many of his nominating petition’s signatures were forged. Of course his appeal was denied.

That left the usual suspects on the ballot once again: the token nationalist nutcase, Zhirinovsky; the token Communist caveman, Zyuganov; and Putin, represented by his shadow, Medvedev. For a little flavor they also let Andrei Bogdanov appear on the ballot as a faux liberal alternative. He was even permitted to receive 1.8 percent of the votes before disappearing whence he came.

The Other Russia and other opposition organizations had held internal primaries in an attempt to foster and share a real democratic experience in a country that had very little of it. Volunteers set up polling places wherever they could, in gymnasiums, pubs, and homes, and often they had to do it in a hurry before police came to shut them down and con fiscate their equipment. We had policy statements, platform arguments, even online and offline debates. All these things existed completely outside of the official political processes at any level.

Our other goal was to expose the official elections for the mockery they were as clearly and loudly as possible. Enough of Western observers and foreign ministries lamely regretting “reported irregularities” and “media bias” in Russian elections. Putin had become a dictator, full stop, and it was time to say it. He wasn’t a president or a prime minister or anything else that connoted legitimacy or democracy. We knew this wouldn’t be reported by Russian media or pointed out by Russian politicians.

Tragically, it wasn’t much better outside of Russia. Heads of state had no interest in challenging Putin; that had been obvious for quite a while. It was less obvious, and it still is, why the majority of the free world’s most important media institutions also go along with the charade. Once again we heard about “flaws in the system” and “uneven access to the media” from observers and the foreign press. The Council of Europe was critical but declined to condemn the elections. Even when the chairman of the delegation of European members of parliament called them “still not free and still not fair,” he added that it “broadly reflected the will of the people.” Yes, the will of a handful of people in the Kremlin.

That “will of the people” remark is a good place to present a series of arguments that I could recite from memory after refuting them dozens of times in media appearances. I call it “The Myths of Putin’s Russia,” and at the top of the list is “Putin Is Popular.” Now that Putin has been in power for fifteen years, has invaded his second European country in six years, and goes on TV to snarl about Russia’s nuclear weapons, it may be difficult for some to recall how differently he was seen not so long ago. Until 2010 my harsh opinions about Putin were still regularly met with surprise from reasonably educated consumers of international news. “But Russia is a democracy and he was elected, wasn’t he?” “Okay, maybe the elections are rigged, but Putin is very popular and he would win anyway.”

“Well, Russians love a strongman anyway, and he did crack down on crime and improve the economy, didn’t he?”

The crime and the economy we’ve already discussed. Putin only cracked down on those who would not be loyal to him; those who were loyal were brought into the system as partners. He made it clear that either you were going to steal with him or you were against him. It is notoriously difficult to accurately measure the economic activity of a nation slowly dismantling a stagnant and corrupt socialist paradise. But before Putin took power, the Russian GDP was expanding at a steady rate as the painful market reforms took effect. Soviet industry was in no way able to compete directly with the West, or the Far East, but there was still a lot of industrial capacity in operation. By 2000, GDP growth was over 10 percent, even higher than the typically high rate of the former Soviet Bloc nations undergoing the transition to market economies.

Also important is that the price of oil in 1999 had gone as low as $13 a barrel, so the new Russian export industry was as yet far from being a powerhouse. The strength of the Russian economy under Putin is best seen not in GDP figures but in a graph showing the price of oil. Starting almost exactly when Putin took power, that price shot up to over $100 a barrel, dipping only during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Russia is the largest oil producer in the world, despite only minimal modernization of the Soviet infrastructure. It is this flood of oil wealth, transforming Russia into a dictatorial petro-state, that has enabled Putin to create the illusion of stability at home and to buy off or threaten his critics abroad. To those who say the source of money makes little difference as long as the pensioners and police receive their checks, that is exactly what the Kremlin seemed to believe—for a while.

Without a growing industrial or technology sector, without a vibrant business community and entrepreneurship, without a tax base of middle-class citizens, Russia is hollowing out demographically. Those who don’t have the connections or resources to thrive either struggle or leave the country. The bright city centers of St. Petersburg and Moscow stand in stark contrast to the increasingly impoverished outer regions. Add a total lack of political accountability to the equation and the result is a growing social crisis.

Putin and his gang have proven reluctant to manage a real economy and incompetent when they try. The last thing they will do is what is really needed: loosen the strict controls so that Russian business can experience real capitalism instead of the crony variety. Khodorkovsky was just the biggest example of what happens to business owners who try to do this without getting state approval, but there are many thousands more like him.

As for Putin being popular, I still hear this one all the time. Are you sure? Then why has he spent so much time and effort dominating the media, eliminating rivals, and installing a complicated system of rigging elections large and small? If Putin is so popular, why not have free and fair elections and a free media? Persecuting bloggers and arresting a single protestor standing in the town square holding an anti-Putin sign does not strike me as the behavior of a popular ruler.

The entire definition of approval and popularity of a democratic leader has no application in an autocracy. When there is only one restaurant in town and it has only one item on the menu, and no other restaurants are allowed to open, is it popular? Fifteen years of propaganda have created a powerful cult of personality that says Putin is the only person who can lead and protect Russia. It says that all his critics are dangerous traitors who should be jailed or murdered. (As they often are.) Anyone who might rise as a rival is demonized and cut down.

This leads into another of the myths, that the opposition was simply not competent or charismatic enough to challenge Putin. Who knows? I bring this up not to defend my own role or my own standing, but to illustrate the absurdity of talking about the Russian opposition as if it were a small, inept party in a real democracy. Our members were banned from the media, slandered, prohibited from holding meetings and rallies, frequently physically assaulted, raided and harassed by the police, and blocked from appearing on ballots. What brilliant and coherent message, what transcendent leader, would have led us to power under those circumstances?

As was increasingly obvious after 2008, the only way Putin was going to leave the Kremlin was feet first, either in a box or dragged out by a mob. As long as he enjoyed economic engagement with the free world and could prevent a million Russians from rioting in Red Square, he wasn’t going anywhere. That first ingredient, engagement, was important for the second. As long as the money kept rolling in to buy Russia’s vast natural wealth-oil, gas, metals, timber-Putin could afford the salaries, benefits, and armies of riot police that kept people at home.

As for polling, Russia is not the United States or France. When an anonymous voice calls an ordinary Russian at home and asks his opinion of the man who dominates the country, it takes great courage indeed to report anything less than enthusiastic support. Honestly, it is a testament to the courage of many of my compatriots that Putin does not receive the 99 percent approval scores that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi received-up until the minute they no longer had the power of life and death over their own citizens.

Now that Putin’s approval numbers have climbed into the 90 percent range during the Ukraine war and the fascist personality cult propaganda has been turned up to the maximum, I wonder if the foreign media will finally stop citing these figures so credulously. The despotic ruler of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, in power since 1989, was just “reelected” in April 2015 with 97.7 percent of the vote. (With a 95 percent turnout, of course.) I’m glad to say that a glance at the headlines about his remarkable electoral feat finds that very few Western media outlets give much credence to Nazarbayev’s overwhelming popularity with his people. Will Putin also have to top 98 percent before his supposed popularity gets the same skepticism?

That the Nazarbayevs, Putins, and Khameneis of this world still bother to hold elections is a worthwhile puzzle to ponder. Today’s dictators have learned the lessons of their predecessors and combined them with modern methods of information and image control. They understand the symbolism of the vote even if they have no desire to submit to its authority. That they feel the need to hold elections at all, however blatantly fraudulent, speaks to a degree of successful pressure from the outside as well as a longing for legitimacy, to be seen as a member of the club of lawful leaders.

The leaders of these countries—we might call them “hypocracies,” or use the term of a man who had great experience in covering Putin’s Russia, German journalist Boris Reitschuster’s
democratura
—are only partly concerned with duping their own citizens with the illusion of a voice in their government. A pervasive security force and domination of the mass media serve the dictator’s purposes well. Few people in Russia really believe in the electoral charade at this point. The polls are for the benefit of the international community and for the predetermined winners themselves.

I repeat my early example of Sarkozy’s shameful, or shameless, phone call to “warmly congratulate” Medvedev after his victory in 2008. The Russian media made a great fanfare about this call and the other encomiums from abroad, another indication of the importance the charade has for Putin and his allies.

There is more than ego and invitations to summits at stake, of course. The ruling oligarchy maintain their assets abroad and a chill in the cozy relationship between Russia’s leaders and the West could put those countless billions in assets at risk. Sarkozy aggressively promoted French companies like Alcatel, Total, and Renault in Russia, with some success. With that in mind, Sarkozy’s phone call was possibly one of the most lucrative in history.

So, no, I do not consider myself a former Russian presidential candidate. It was a civil rights protest, a corruption awareness campaign, and a way of helping people discover what real democracy could feel like. You can’t have real candidates without real democracy.

“How come I am still alive? When I really think about it, it’s a miracle.” Those were the words of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who for years fearlessly dug into the deepest depths of war-ravaged Chechnya. She is seen speaking the fateful lines in the documentary film
Letter to Anna
by Swiss director Eric Bergkraut. The film premiered in the United States on June 26, 2008, at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York City, a convenient moment in our chronology to again mention her work and her courage. She was as much of a crusader and partisan as a journalist, no doubt, and she didn’t try to hide that. Her passion made her work all the more essential and unforgettable.

Politkovskaya’s reporting on the atrocities in Chechnya usually took the form of conversations with families who had been ripped apart by war. She also served as a sort of confessor for Russian soldiers, even officers, who were ashamed of what was being done in Chechnya in Russia’s name. This sort of work made her enemy number one to a long list of powerful people and groups who had already shown their brutality many times over. It was still a heartbreaking shock when the forty-eight-year-old was murdered in October 2006.

For the sake of objectivity, here are two reviews, one from the KGB and the other from a famous dissident. Two days after Mrs. Politkovskaya’s death, President Putin, when asked at a press conference in Germany (not Russia, of course, where such a question would never be permitted), asserted that “her death caused more damage to the Russian government than her writings.” Former Czech president Vaclav Havel, at the film’s award-winning Prague appearance in March, stated, “It would be good if many people could see this film. Especially politicians who kiss and embrace Russian politicians, almost dizzy with the smell of oil and gas!” It may be difficult to find the film—I found it on YouTube in German and Russian but could not find it in English—but it is well worth tracking down. It’s a rare glimpse of an extinct species. By the time of Anna’s murder, independent journalism of the kind she produced was already cold in the grave in Russia.