The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 14

MANAGED DEMOCRACY

People in the West are sometimes puzzled about the nature of power in Russia. There is a lack of clarity about how the political system works and whether Russia is a democracy. The Western media carry reports of votes and elections, opposition candidates and campaigns and debates; yet Vladimir Putin appears to go on and on, seemingly wielding power in the style of a tinpot dictator. Because of the confusion about these conflicting perceptions, it may be worth mentioning a few things that help to explain the reality behind the appearance.

Boris Yeltsin retained and expanded the democratic institutions introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, including broadly free elections and an (initially) independent parliament. The 1993 constitution declared Russia a democratic, federative, law-based state with a republican form of government. State power is divided among the legislative, executive and judicial branches. Diversity of ideologies and religions is sanctioned, and a state or compulsory ideology may not be adopted. The right to a multiparty political system is upheld. The content of laws must be approved by the public before they take effect, and they must be formulated in accordance with international law and principles. But the economic chaos of the 1990s led many Russians to lose faith in the free-market democracy Yeltsin had developed. He acknowledged this in his resignation speech, when he handed over the baton to Vladimir Putin in December 1999. As I touched on earlier, first indications were that the new man would continue to uphold the democratic values of his predecessor, as Putin pledged to preserve free and fair elections, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the media and private ownership rights.

An early sign of what Putin was actually planning came with a manifesto he published in 2000, titled Russia at the Turn of the Millennium. In it he pays lip service to democratic principles, but his warmest words are reserved for the personalised model of state power that he would go on to introduce in Russia. He describes the liberal reforms of the 1990s as a Western imposition that must be overthrown. ‘The experience of the 90s vividly shows that our country’s genuine renewal cannot be assured by an experimentation with models and schemes taken from foreign text-books. The mechanical copying of other nations’ experience will not guarantee success … Russia cannot become a version of, say, the US or Britain, where liberal values have deep historic traditions.’ Putin’s questioning of ‘liberal values’ was contrasted with his praise for statist autocracy: in place of individual rights, a strong state and centralised authority. ‘Our state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and its people … a strong state is not an anomaly to be got rid of. Quite the contrary, it is the source of order.’

To correct the mistakes of the ‘Western’ experiment, Putin said there would need to be a return to traditional ‘Russian’ values. Some of the values he listed evoked elements of Russia’s authoritarian past.

Patriotism: Patriotism is the source of the courage and strength of our people. If we lose patriotism and national pride and dignity, we will lose ourselves as a nation. Belief in the greatness of Russia: Russia was and will remain a great power.

Statism: The Russian people are alarmed by the weakening of state power. They look forward to the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state.

Collectivism: Cooperative forms of activity have always prevailed over individualism. The collectivist mindset has deep roots in Russian society. The majority of Russians believe that the support of the state is the key to improving their prospects, not individual effort and entrepreneurialism.

The New Russian Idea: The New Russian Idea will come about as an amalgamation of universal principles with traditional Russian values.

When I read Putin’s manifesto in 2000, I was struck by the similarity of his ‘Russian’ values to the founding principles of Alexander III, the most repressive of the later Romanovs, who decreed that the state must be built on Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost – Orthodoxy, Autocracy and the Nation. Putin’s downplaying of individual enterprise and his insistence on the supremacy of the state appeared to me alarming and backward looking. Even the name he chose for his model of state power – the New Russian Idea – was redolent of old thinking. The ‘Russian Idea’ was first introduced to the West by the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev at the end of the nineteenth century to denote Slavophile anti-Westernism, and a belief in Russian cultural supremacy. The ‘Russian Idea’ was one of Russian exceptionalism, the conviction that Russia has been chosen to play a special role in the history of civilisation, with a unique identity that points her to a different path from the rest of the world, in opposition to the liberal, individualistic freedoms of Western Europe.

In Putin’s version of ‘The Russian Idea’, the powerful state is identified with a powerful leader; national unity is embodied in and represented by a single collective spokesperson: the president. His claim that the Yeltsin years had been an unwelcome aberration, and the experiment with Western-style government proof of Russia’s unsuitability to such a system, appealed to some sectors of public opinion, including those who recognised Putin’s message that Russia becomes ungovernable without a strong state to impose order. A ‘strong state’ might have been justified in the transitional period needed to build a free civil society, but a free civil society never got built. And Putin’s supporters gave ‘The Russian Idea’ a new, added dimension: the notion that only Vladimir Putin could guarantee stable governance was so widely repeated and promoted that, like Louis XIV, he came to believe l’état c’est moi – the state is me. When Putin’s chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin, said in 2014, ‘there is no Russia today if there is no Putin’, it was not a joke, but a consecration of the one-man state.

Along with reimposing law and order, Putin pledged to return Russia to her former standing as a world power. Boris Yeltsin had viewed the dismantling of the Soviet empire as his greatest achievement, a liberation of independence-seeking republics that would allow Russia to re-join the global community of nations; but Putin described the demise of the USSR as ‘the biggest geo-political tragedy of the century’. He berated the West for humiliating Russia and for expanding NATO to Russia’s frontier. He would strive to offset domestic economic decline and his own falling poll numbers by foreign adventurism, including the annexation of Crimea and the fomenting of revolts in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere.

Putin would restore a semblance of economic stability, albeit with sluggish rates of growth and pitiably low income levels. But these modest successes were accompanied by the abandonment of the democratic reforms of the Yeltsin years. It was these reforms that had created the economic growth which, together with the rise in oil prices, allowed Putin to strengthen his hold on power. Having consolidated his position, however, he turned the clock back. Under Putin, the powers of parliament have been weakened and those of the president enhanced. Opposition parties suffer discrimination and harassment; they are excluded from the media; political rallies are broken up and protestors jailed. Freedom of the press has been restricted; the legislature, the courts and most of the media – including television news – are once again controlled by the Kremlin.

This is what Putin calls ‘managed democracy’. In reality, it is not democracy at all; Russia is governed by imitation democracy. Putin’s simulacrum of democracy shows the Russian people and the West the facade of democratic structures, but behind it there is nothing. One of our most perceptive political commentators, Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center, describes it very accurately:

The external wrappings of democracy are present: elections, parliament and so on, but the essence is absolutely different. In the Russian case, we are dealing with … the deliberate use of democratic institutions as Potemkin villages in order to conceal traditional power arrangements … The political regime that has consolidated itself resembles the ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ of Latin American regimes in the 1960s and 1970s. It has all the characteristics: personalised power, bureaucratisation of society, political exclusion of the populace … and an active role for the secret services (in Latin America it was the military).

For much of the early 2000s, Putin continued to call himself a democrat, while suggesting that the suppression of some civil liberties was justified by the need to restore state control. ‘Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history,’ he wrote. ‘For the first time in the past two or three hundred years, it is facing the real danger of sliding to the second, if not third, echelon of world states. We are running out of time to avoid this.’ Putin’s swagger on the international stage won him support from those Russians who yearned for a strong leader to restore national prestige after a decade of weakness. He pandered to nostalgia for the days of Soviet belligerence by reinstating the Soviet national anthem (albeit with new words) and military parades through Red Square with convoys of missiles and tanks and marching regiments shouting ‘Hurrah!’ to their president. Putin’s picture was hung in schoolrooms and public buildings. He acquired a taste for pomp and ceremony, making regal entrances along red carpets with trumpets blaring.

His personality cult has become reminiscent of that of Stalin. He now appears in military uniform at army and naval bases, piloting a fighter plane into Chechnya or standing beside a tank, tranquillising a Siberian tiger, driving a Formula One car, diving to recover antique treasures from the seabed, shooting a whale with a crossbow, scoring unopposed goals in ice-hockey games, even flying a microlight to guide migrating cranes on their journey to the south. When a photoshoot of the shirtless president boosted his standing among female voters, he was delighted; when it was co-opted with ribald comments by Russia’s gay websites, he was furious. The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda splashed the he-man photos under the headline ‘Be Like Putin!’ and a pop song titled ‘Putin Is a Man of Strength’ shot up the charts. There have been sarcastic suggestions that it might soon be time for St Petersburg to be renamed Putinburg.

Vladimir Putin strutting his stuff in Tuva, 2007

The adulation inflated Putin’s self-importance; slights to his dignity, even constructive criticism, were met with vengeful punishment. When the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea in August 2000, he didn’t return from his summer holiday; when the vessel was finally lifted, all 118 of those on board were dead. When the ORT television channel voiced criticism of the Kursk operation, its controlling owner Boris Berezovsky was targeted by the Kremlin and soon found himself in exile. Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of another independent television channel, NTV, was arrested and held in jail until he agreed to hand over his business interests to the state, and then expelled from the country.

A January 2018 report for the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate, titled ‘Putin’s Asymmetrical Assault on Democracy’, summed up the very undemocratic means by which he gained and now maintains his hold on power:

Vladimir Putin gained and solidified power by exploiting blackmail, fears of terrorism, and war. Since then, he has combined military adventurism and aggression abroad with propaganda and political repression at home, to persuade a domestic audience that he is restoring Russia to greatness and a respected position on the world stage. All the while, he has empowered the state security services and employed them to consolidate his hold on the levers of political, social, and economic power, which he has used to make himself and a circle of loyalists extraordinarily wealthy … Putin’s overarching domestic objectives are to preserve his power and increase his net worth.

The senators describe Putin’s model of state power as ‘authoritarianism secured by corruption, apathy, and an iron fist’; but they are careful to note that this is not the fault of the Russian people, who should not be tainted by the crimes of the regime that rules over them. Put simply, Putin is not Russia and Russia is not Putin.

All anti-democratic regimes fear independent scrutiny; the illegitimate nature of their right to rule makes them unwilling to countenance open debate, so they move to suppress it. Putin has done so through intimidation and violence, backed up by fabricated legal restrictions and administrative penalties. Legislation introduced in 2005, then reinforced in 2012, banned foreign NGOs from operating in Russia, as well as any native organisation deemed by the Kremlin to be a ‘threat to the national interest’. Scores of groups have been shut down, including nearly all of those monitoring human rights and democracy.

Civil society activists have been subjected to abuse and physical attacks. Politically motivated prosecutions against myself and other critics of Putin’s leadership, with concocted charge sheets, automatic guilty verdicts and ‘exemplary’ sentences, were a signal to others that speaking out carries great risk to one’s personal wellbeing. Smear campaigns, fake sting operations and lies have been used to demonise political opposition figures, with the pro-government media characterising criticism as disloyalty and critics as traitors. In February 2015, the leading political activist and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov was shot dead within sight of the Kremlin walls, following a concerted campaign of vilification against him. Nemtsov had been organising protests against the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement and was due to release a report on Russia’s interference in Ukraine.

At the same time, Putin has cosseted institutions willing to support the Kremlin and speak on its behalf. While harassing genuine political opposition, he has created ‘rubber-stamp’ parties that play the game of providing ersatz competition in bogus elections. He has granted the Russian Orthodox Church special recognition under Russian law, while targeting other religions with onerous registration processes and restrictions on proselytising. The Orthodox Church’s hierarchy have benefited from presidential grants and the restitution of property forfeited under communist rule. In return, the Church has bestowed its blessing on Putin and promoted his policies as a willing instrument of the Russian state. Patriarch Kirill has declared Putin’s reign a ‘miracle of God’ and given thanks that he has corrected the ‘deviation’ of Russia’s flirtation with liberal democracy. In February 2012, Church and state cemented their alliance with a shared paroxysm of righteous indignation after the rock group Pussy Riot performed their ‘Punk Prayer’ in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin!

Banish Putin, banish Putin!

The priest’s black robes have epaulettes,

And all parishioners crawl and bow.

Liberty’s a phantom, gone to heaven,

Gay-pride’s in chains in Siberia now.

The KGB chief, their holy saint,

Leads protesters to prison vans.

Women, don’t offend His Holiness!

Stick to making love and babies.

Shit, shit, this God stuff is all shit!

Shit, shit, this God stuff is all shit!

Pussy Riot perform their Punk Prayer at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, be a feminist!

Be a feminist, be a feminist!

The Church now praises corrupt dictators,

A cross-bearing procession in black limousines.

… The Patriarch believes in Putin!

Mary, Mother of God, join in with our protest!

Patriarch Kirill was the first to fulminate against Pussy Riot’s lese- majesty. ‘The Devil has laughed at all of us,’ he thundered. ‘We have no future if we allow such mockery … if people think this is acceptable as some sort of political expression.’ In response to calls for mercy to be shown to the women, Kirill refused, saying that hearing Orthodox believers ask for such indulgence made his ‘heart break with bitterness’. Putin followed up with more outrage, planting the thought that Pussy Riot were the agents of hostile foreign powers sent to undermine Russia’s moral fibre. Russia, he said, must look to its traditional spiritual values, ‘to the power of the Russian people with Russian traditions … and absolutely not the realisation of standards imposed on us from outside’. A couple of months later, he signed a new law that made it a criminal offence to ‘insult the feelings of religious believers’, punishable by fines and up to three years in prison. The three Pussy Riot women could count themselves lucky that they ‘only’ got two years in jail for ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’.

Pussy Riot’s cathedral performance came at a difficult time for Putin. Allegations of fraud in the legislative elections of 2011 had sparked large street protests opposing his return to the presidency, which was scheduled for May 2012. Demonstrations in Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities had coalesced into a self-named Bolotnaya or ‘Snow’ Revolution, conjuring memories of the successful Orange Revolution against Ukraine’s pro-Moscow government. Crowds chanting ‘Russia without Putin!’ were an ominous signal of discontent. The Kremlin declared the protesters traitors to the motherland and bussed in pro-government supporters to mount counter rallies. Fast-track legislation was introduced to increase penalties for unsanctioned demonstrations and other infringements of public assembly regulations. Putin’s response to the protests was a sharp turn to the conservative right.

The cultivation of the Orthodox Church allowed him to appeal to the anti-liberal values of many believers, while ‘Western immorality’ was loudly denounced. He pandered to traditional Russian homophobia by passing laws criminalising ‘gay propaganda’ and to male chauvinism by decriminalising domestic violence. The Orthodox hierarchy – which has no opinion on domestic violence, but considers homosexuality a sign of the Apocalypse – gave him their enthusiastic backing.

Putin framed the measures as a campaign to protect Russia’s purity against outside efforts to corrupt her. ‘The West knows no difference between good and evil,’ he told the Valdai International Discussion Forum. ‘They have rejected the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They deny moral principles and traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual … They are implementing policies that put normal families on a par with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with belief in Satan. The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia … And they are aggressively trying to export this model [to Russia]! This would open a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound moral crisis.’

Having served their jail sentences, the Pussy Rioters might have been expected to keep their heads down, but they failed to learn the lesson Putin had taught them and made an unscheduled appearance at the Sochi Olympics. Sochi was one of Putin’s many self-aggrandising projects – he had spent over $50 billion of taxpayers’ money to put on an international display of his success as Russia’s leader – so, in February 2014, it was a natural target for dissent. Wearing their trademark fluorescent balaclavas, Pussy Riot hardly had time to sing the first verse of ‘Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland’ before a detachment of Cossack militia started to lash them with horsewhips.

Successive reports by international monitoring organisations reveal how rapidly the electoral process in Russia has been undermined since Putin came to power. Despite the upheaval of the 1990s, observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) described Boris Yeltsin’s final set of parliamentary elections, in December 1999, as ‘competitive and pluralistic’, marking ‘significant progress for the consolidation of democracy in the Russian Federation’. Three years into the Putin era, the OSCE reported that the 2003 parliamentary vote ‘failed to meet many Council of Europe commitments for democratic elections’ and queried ‘Russia’s fundamental willingness to meet European and international standards for democratic elections’. The 2004 presidential election was marred by problems concerning the secrecy of the ballot and the biased role of the state-controlled media, with OSCE observers concluding that ‘a vibrant political discourse and meaningful pluralism were lacking’. For the 2007 parliamentary elections, in which the pro-Putin United Russia party secured a two-thirds majority, and the 2008 presidential race, won overwhelmingly by Vladimir Putin, there was no monitoring because European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights and OSCE observers were refused visas by the Kremlin. The Council of Europe called the 2008 poll ‘more of a plebiscite’, or a one-horse race, than a genuine exercise in democracy, because the Kremlin had disbarred Putin’s only credible challenger, the former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, who had been dismissed by Putin in 2004. In subsequent elections, the OSCE has noted the increasing move towards a one-party state – ‘the convergence of the State and the governing party’ – and the absence of genuine choice for voters.

Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova attacked by a Cossack with a whip during the Sochi Olympics in 2014

In addition to manipulating the vote, Putin has subverted legal norms to ensure his continued hold on power. Article 81 of the Russian constitution stipulates that the same person cannot hold the office of president for more than two terms. Having come to the end of his second stint in the job in 2008, he declared that the rule actually meant two consecutive terms, so he would temporarily swap jobs with his compliant prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, before returning to the presidency in 2012. With his second set of consecutive terms due to end in 2024, Putin initially accepted that he would not be able to run for a fifth time, but later changed his mind. In July 2020 he rewrote the constitution and reset his term limit to zero, opening the way for him to appropriate two more presidential mandates and stay in the Kremlin until he is 83.

You will not be surprised to learn that the Russian people have discerned the truth behind the shenanigans and that electoral fraud figures high on the list of topics for the political jokes characteristic of our folk humour. My favourite is the story of the Kremlin lackey who rushes in to give Putin the results of the presidential election.

‘Mr President, I have good news and bad news,’ the lackey says.

‘What is the good news?’ Putin asks.

‘You won the election,’ comes the reply.

‘And what is the bad news?’

‘No one voted for you.’