OPERATION MEDVEDEVOPERATION MEDVEDEV
Boris Yeltsin died on April 23, 2007. I already eulogized him and his legacy in chapter 5, but I would like to focus on an overlooked aspect of his passing. As was likely required by both his health and his peace treaty with Putin, Yeltsin had kept a very low profile after leaving office on December 31, 1999. The only time I can recall his name in the news after that was when he and Mikhail Gorbachev publicly, if mildly, criticized Putin’s power-grabbing reforms after Beslan.
Putin also seemed to uphold his side of their bargain. No member of Yeltsin’s family, or his extended “Family” of allies and cronies, has ever been pursued by Putin’s government. Although Yeltsin stayed out of the limelight, I think his presence weighed on Putin’s mind. Putin may have become the Godfather, but Yeltsin was the founding father of Russian independence and democracy. Destroying Yeltsin’s legacy completely while the man was still alive might have been risky even for Putin. With Yeltsin gone, another of the thin restraints holding Putin back from totalitarianism was severed. Yeltsin had limited himself to two terms and surely would have expected his successor to leave power as well.
This mattered because in 2007 Putin was faced with the biggest decision of his life. His second term as president was coming to an end the next year, and according to the Russian constitution he couldn’t run again. The election would take place on March 2. First there was the matter of the Duma elections on December 2, 2007. It was a foregone conclusion that Putin’s United Russia Party would win overwhelmingly, but we did our best to track the “irregularities” that took place anyway. The art of rigging an election, you see, lies in making the election itself entirely meaningless. You don’t have to worry about who votes, or even who counts the votes, if you control the entire process and who appears on the ballot to begin with.
United Russia, with the sitting president at the top of its list, enjoyed every imaginable advantage, both legal and illegal. Opposition groups, including our own Other Russia coalition, were denied access to the ballot by meticulous new election laws designed for exactly that purpose. The alternatives left for voters on Sunday were mostly Putin supporters or parties that had made deals not to oppose Putin if they were allowed to stay in the parliament or on the ballot.
In the first category there was “A Just Russia,” whose first move after the election was to propose an extension of Putin’s presidency. Some opposition! In the second category were the Communists, who received, or you might prefer “were allowed,” 11.6 percent of the vote (around 20 percent according to an independent count), for 57 of 450 Duma seats. This low number angered Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who rumors said had been promised at least 90 seats by the Kremlin for his loyalty. Zyuganov started making charges of election anomalies. As I joked in an article after the election: “I hate to say it, Gennady, but I told you so!” As the joke going around had it, the difference between democracy and the Putin system was like the difference between two chairs: one leather and one electric.
Not that it really mattered, but the most damning of all were the official statistics in places like Chechnya and Dagestan where there was little monitoring at the polls. With an outlandish 99.5 percent voter turnout, 99 percent of Chechen votes went to United Russia. Do not forget this is a party led by Putin, the author of the second Chechen war that razed the Chechen capital Grozny to the ground. As usual, the truth is visible in the actions of lackeys who are too eager to please their Kremlin masters. My wife commented darkly that the only ones who didn’t vote in Chechnya were those who died on election day.
One can only imagine what the United Russia bosses thought of Hugo Chávez losing a referendum by a measly 1 percent on the same day. What an amateur! Meanwhile, despite the absence of real alternatives on the ballot and with all the chicanery included, United Russia barely topped 50 percent in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It’s no coincidence that the residents of these cities had much greater access to news not provided by the Kremlin thanks to greater Internet penetration and Echo of Moscow, the one radio station where a variety of views was still heard.
It was a clear indication that Putin considered these elections important when he gave several frenzied speeches to get out the vote. The vicious language he used could barely be called coded as he warned against “enemies within” and “jackals” supported by the West. It was less Russian than what we might call Putinese, with a vintage Austrian-German accent.
Why bother making such an effort when the Kremlin’s control was apparently so absolute already? First we should recall that even Stalin held elections in 1937 during the Terror. The results on that Sunday weren’t in any doubt either, confirming our return to the rule of an all-powerful single-party state. But the elections were important to Putin’s regime for several reasons, starting, of course, with financial ones: Putin’s. Putin’s close relationship with Western leaders served as a guarantee to his ruling oligarchs that their money was safe. Had he discarded the last vestiges of democracy too blatantly at that stage this cozy situation might have ended, a risk Putin was not yet ready to take.
The first indications were bad. Nicolas Sarkozy had touted himself as a tough guy but seemed to have gone weak in the knees after a few drinks with Putin. The French president wasted no time in calling his counterpart to congratulate him on his big win. Putin always watched these signals from the West carefully, looking for signs of any real pressure. Most comments about the blatantly fraudulent elections weren’t favorable, especially in the media, but how much danger could there be if Sarkozy and Putin’s old buddy Tony Blair called him?
The other purpose of the Kremlin campaign was to provide the regime with pseudodemocratic cover for whatever machinations they were going to come up with to keep their hold on power after the March 2 presidential elections. Putin couldn’t run again, or at least the constitution said he couldn’t and he had promised not to change it—if you wished to value the promise of a KGB lieutenant colonel.
After eight years blessed with record oil prices and a compromising West distracted by the “war on terror,” the Putin regime had reached its crisis. The Kremlin’s presidential candidate had to be named soon. Would it be a feeble puppet, leading, by “popular” demand or maybe a health emergency, to Putin’s return? Or could they find someone foolish enough to step in and risk taking the blame when the neglected Russian infrastructure and economy finally collapsed? Or would they change the system, eviscerating the constitution in some way so Putin could keep power in some new role?
After Putin’s friendly visit to Iran in October 2007 I wrote in an article that perhaps he was considering a new title for himself, one above the petty responsibilities of prime minister or even the old grandeur of the general secretary of the party. “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Putin” had a nice ring to it, I wrote, and I was sure he had always dreamed of running things from behind the scenes, without the petty annoyances and appearances of the presidency. My joke was closer to the mark than I could have imagined.
I was tempted to reproduce in this book a sort of protest that I employed in an article I wrote on the state of Russia in 2009 by not mentioning the name of Dmitry Medvedev even a single time. Ignoring him completely would be a fitting treatment of the man who held the presidency of Russia from 2008 until 2012, when he handed it back to Vladimir Putin like a dog bringing a stick back to its owner. There is no sense obscuring this story for the sake of personal protest, but I will keep my remarks on him brief.
Medvedev the human being was, and is, completely irrelevant. But the idea of a Medvedev, the idea of a young liberal president who might turn the country back toward the path of modernity, that was very, very useful. You can almost envision Putin and his inner circle in a laboratory, designing the ideal Medvedev. He had to be fresh-faced and bright-eyed and capable of spouting reformist jargon for the intelligentsia and keeping a straight face while politely acknowledging that things in Russia weren’t all great, but were definitely going to improve. The Medvedev also couldn’t have any mind, ambition, or power base of his own, just in case. Finally, he also needed to be shorter than Putin and with even less charisma, a very rare combination indeed. Fortunately for Putin, he happened to have one on hand right in his own cabinet.
On December 10, 2007, Putin made a big fanfare of endorsing his first deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, to succeed him in the presidency. He was quickly nominated by United Russia and its puppet parties, and a week after receiving Putin’s blessing Medvedev was officially the candidate. His first priority was to announce that, should he be so lucky as to win the election, he would make Vladimir Putin his prime minister. Putin graciously accepted and that was that. (Medvedev also resigned as the chairman of Gazprom in order to run for president, leading to jokes about his being demoted to the presidency of Russia.)
One response from the Western leaders to the news will serve as an example of nearly all of them. The day after Putin’s endorsement of Medvedev, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had a round-table discussion with the editorial board of the newspaper USA Today. They covered Iraq, Iran, and then moved to Rice’s former area of expertise, Russia. She made several solid remarks about how “democratic processes have taken a step backward in Russia” and “it’s not an environment in which you can talk about free and fair elections.” But then she went on to say that she knew Medvedev, and that he was “intelligent” and “of another generation,” as if any of that would matter, true or not.
The most revealing moment in Ms. Rice’s comments came when the topic of Mr. Medvedev as the next president was first broached. The official transcript reads:
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I guess, they’re still going to have an election in March. (Laughter.)
I’m sure everyone there had a good laugh about referring to Medvedev’s inevitable installation as president as an election. And, to be fair, our elections were laughable. But why wasn’t the next question to Rice, “So why is Russia still in the G7 if Russian elections are such a joke?” Or “Why has the Bush administration invested so much time, blood, and treasure in trying to build democracy in Iraq and elsewhere while virtually ignoring what Putin has done to the world’s largest oil-exporting nation, which also has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal?” Not that anyone advocated or expected Bush to invade Russia, of course, but a little consistency wasn’t too much to ask of a man who so actively promoted what he called the “US Freedom Agenda.”
A few days before the Rice interview, Time magazine named Putin its 2007 Person of the Year. They took obvious pains to explain that the award was “not an endorsement” and that it went to the person who made the most news “for better or for worse.” But the article nonetheless praised their selection for restoring his country to prominence in the international arena, dispelling “anarchy,” and recovering national pride. The magazine did express concern about his “troubling” record on human rights.
The exact same things could have been said about Adolf Hitler in 1938, when he took his turn as Time’s Man of the Year. “Fascism,” Time wrote then, “has discovered that freedom—of press, speech, assembly—is a potential danger to its own security.”
Again these words applied equally well to 2007’s winner. Most of the criticism leveled against Putin regarded “alleged” abuses or came directly from known critics. In my opinion this abdicates the journalist’s role to report the facts as facts. And consider the timing of this announcement, coming right after fixed parliamentary elections that crowned Mr. Putin’s steady record of eradicating democracy across Russia.
Of course the Time article was trumpeted by Kremlin propaganda as another endorsement of Putin and his policies. The focus was on the myth that Putin had built a “strong Russia,” when in fact he and his cronies had hollowed out the state from within.
On March 2, Medvedev’s coronation as the king of nothing was completed and the last remaining element of democracy in Russia, the transition of power, was destroyed. As expected, the election itself was a complete sham and the Kremlin didn’t even bother to cover its tracks. Opposition candidates were forced out of the race. The state-run media promoted Medvedev while either slandering or just not mentioning the other candidates. Several overenthusiastic precincts reported Medvedev receiving over 100 percent of the vote in the initial returns.
Medvedev’s 70 percent fell just short of Putin’s 71 percent in 2004, an additional indicator of who was really in charge, in case one was necessary. You may wonder why they bothered rigging the results when they already possessed so many unfair advantages. It was a designed display of loyalty by the regional politicians and bureaucrats to prove they could, and would, produce the results demanded by the Kremlin. This is not the way a democracy works, but it is very much the way a mafia works.
We in the Russian opposition waited anxiously to see what the rest of the world would say about Russia’s return to outright despotism. Now, at long last, surely the leaders of the free world would have harsh criticisms after they had allowed Russia to join the G7 and had treated Putin as a democratic equal. Of course they would be outraged at having been played for fools. Perhaps, we hoped, enough external pressure would mount over this scandalous transfer of power to help weaken the Kremlin’s stranglehold in Russia.
What happened instead could not have been more devastating. Western administrations lined up to applaud Medvedev on his outstanding victory, although most handed off this distasteful task to spokespeople. One or two statements managed to work in a few words about unpleasant “incidents” during the Russian election process.
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy showed no such qualms. He telephoned Medvedev to congratulate him and to invite him to France. (I take for granted that Putin’s long-term business partners Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhardt Schröder sent personal notes.) The West’s acceptance of Medvedev as a democratically elected leader was another turning point. The last hurdle to Putin retaining power forever had been cleared. It signaled that the United States and the European Union would play along with even the most absurd charade in order to avoid confrontation.
For the Russian opposition the Western reaction was a disaster. Our coalition of nationalists, leftists, and liberals had little in common beyond a belief in the power of the democratic process. With no access to mass media and under constant persecution, our members attempted to spread the word about the importance of these principles. In one stroke, the free world announced that democracy was a scam, a cover-up for business as usual, just like Putin and his allies always said it was.
Five months later, in what I called then the culmination of Putin’s feeling of impunity, Russian forces invaded neighboring Georgia in August when given the first hint of an excuse in South Ossetia. Putin had no reason to believe there was anything to fear over something as minor as punishing a neighboring nation led by his personal enemy, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. Putin was always good at reading other world leaders and, once again, he was right.
The world order has rules, but they are mostly based on the honor system and are infrequently tested. Putin has learned that the brutal methods of his KGB world are equally effective on the global stage. Violence returned on cue to the Caucasus, where Putin made his reputation as a strongman when he first came on the Russian political stage in 1999. Maybe it was a present for Medvedev. A war is always useful to build up a new Russian president’s domestic reputation.
The real catastrophe, the one that gave Putin the confidence to shed blood across an international border, took place on March 3, 2008, the day after the election. That was the date on which the international community of free nations had a chance to sound the alarm about the Putin dictatorship, a chance to send an unambiguous message that democracy mattered. No alarm sounded. The election wasn’t important. The world’s reaction was.
As the worst of the violence between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia wound down, I was reminded of a conversation I had had in 2005 in Moscow with a high-ranking European Union official. Russia was much freer then than it is today, but Putin’s onslaught against democratic rights was already picking up speed.
“What would it take,” I asked the official, “for Europe to stop treating Putin like a democrat? Maybe if all opposition parties are banned? Or what if they started shooting people in the street?”
He shrugged and replied that even in that case there would be little the EU could do, adding that “staying engaged will always be the best hope for the people of both Europe and Russia.” I expect the citizens of Georgia and Ukraine would disagree. Russia’s invasion of Georgia was the direct result of nearly a decade of this combination of helplessness and self-delusion in the West. Being left unpunished over Georgia invited Putin into Ukraine six years later.
In response to the Russian invasion of Georgia, the EU held its first emergency summit since the outbreak of the Iraq war. It quickly postponed meetings on the partnership agreement with Russia until the Kremlin moved its troops back to pre–August 7 positions. The EU statement, additionally weakened by a proud Silvio Berlusconi, included the phrase “We expect Russia to behave in a responsible manner, honoring all its commitments,” in addition to the evergreens “gravely concerned” and “strongly condemn.” How Putin and his billionaire and KGB buddies must have laughed at such quaint language.
On May 7, Dmitry Medvedev was sworn in as the president of Russia, behind closed doors. Putin was asked if he would, following tradition, hang a portrait of the new president on the wall of his office. Putin balked, but the joke going around had it that he would indeed have one: a portrait of Medvedev in the president’s office looking at a portrait of Putin. According to the Russian constitution, Medvedev was now the one in charge. But as there was never any actual evidence of his independence and authority, it was safe to assume that Medvedev still needed Putin’s permission to use the Kremlin lavatory. The real “smooth transition of power,” in the ironically perfect phrase of German chancellor Angela Merkel, was its move with Putin from the presidency to the prime ministry.
I’ve made well over a thousand international media appearances in the last ten years, nearly all of them to discuss Russia and Putin. Often a show’s producers will ask you in advance what title you prefer to be called on the air and what you’d like to appear next to your name on TV. Sometimes they do not ask. I have a long and complicated résumé, so I’m used to hearing all sorts of things in these situations. It’s similar with the introductions I receive at my business and political lecture events. They are always kind and usually flattering, but often they contain all sorts of spurious information about me gleaned from a quick Google search. I often have to follow up with a quick set of corrections and joke that I’m always interested in these introductions because I learn so many new things!
“Garry Kasparov, Russian human rights activist and former world chess champion” shouldn’t be too hard, no? I am also chairman of the New York–based Human Rights Foundation and a senior visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School, where I regularly have lectures and seminars. I’m also very proud to be the chairman of the Kasparov Chess Foundation, a global education nonprofit, and of being a modestly popular author and speaker. But that is all too long to put on TV.
The one title I truly dislike is one I hear quite often: “Garry Kasparov, former Russian presidential candidate.” This is not only inaccurate, but it is misleading in a damaging way. Yes, the Other Russia and other opposition groups held internal primaries in order to put forward candidates in 2008 and I was a participant. Yes, we had online and in-person voting to select candidates and I was one of the winners. Yes, several of us attempted to register to become candidates and I was one of them. But was I really a candidate for president?
When people from democratic countries talk to me about polls, platforms, campaigns, and other normal elements of elections in a free country, I have to stop them short. None of those things ever really existed in Russia—not in 2008 and even less so now. In Russia the opposition isn’t trying to win elections; we’re trying to have elections. We had started out optimistically in 2004, hoping that Putin’s departure might open the door to a contested election. By 2007, after the crackdowns on the Marches of Dissent and our other activities grew worse and worse, we realized there was little hope of that. Until Putin and Medvedev made their little announcement on December 10 we weren’t sure exactly how the ax was going to fall, or when, but we knew it was very sharp and right over our heads.
Putin anointed Medvedev with what a Mexican friend called “el dedazo,” the endowing touch of a finger akin to the god of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel giving life to Adam. At that point the result of the election was no longer in question. The system could never allow anyone so designated to do anything other than win by a huge margin. It was also very clear that the Kremlin did not want the presidential ballot to be cluttered with too many names. The campaigns of the opposition candidates became a strange game of forcing the authorities to figure out different ways to disqualify us.
There was no shortage of hoops to jump through and the Central Election Commission (CEC), run by Putin’s henchman Vladimir Churov, was dedicated to making sure nobody but the approved candidates made it. The main obstacle was practically insurmountable on its face. An independent candidate had to collect 2 million signatures in just five weeks, and only 40,000 could be from a single region. So in Moscow, no matter how many you got, only 40,000 counted. So you needed signatures from fifty regions, minimum. Then, two weeks out of the five-week window was a general holiday. Lastly, when you came up with the signatures you could submit only 2.2 million, no more, and if 10 percent were disqualified for any reason you were out of the game.
Even to reach that stage would also turn out to be difficult. Each candidate was required to hold a nominating convention with at least five hundred supporters under one roof to sign a declaration with a representative of the Ministry of Justice there to observe in person. But as during my travels around the country, it turned out no venues in Moscow were willing to rent me a hall for this purpose. Well, that’s not completely true, since we did sign a contract for a hall for December 13 and even paid our fee up front. But two days before, we were informed that “for technical reasons the hall is not available on that date.” Of course on December 14 the very same hall was ready and waiting to host a nominating convention for the Kremlin’s new stooge candidate, Bogdanov.
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 confiscate 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 Václav 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 You-Tube 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.
At the World Russian Press Congress in Moscow on June 11, 2008, Medvedev pledged to “support media freedom.” Would there be any changes? The signs were not good. He touted the need for a “Cyrillic internet” and criticized the closing of Russian-language media enterprises in former Soviet states, where local languages were reasserting themselves after Soviet-era restrictions. Medvedev also added that Russian television is “one of the highest quality in the world.”
Kremlin paranoia about who and what appeared on Russian television had reached new heights by then. Vladimir Posner, president of the Russian Academy of Television, confessed that he submits a list of guests he would like to have on his own show to Channel One management, who then let him know whom he can and cannot invite. Needless to say, people like Nemtsov, Navalny, and myself have never appeared on his show.
The Kremlin’s subjugation of the Russian press was, along with the rise in oil prices of over 700 percent, the biggest reason behind the perceived success of Putin’s regime. The oligarchs of the 1990s may have been robbing Russia blind, but at least we could find out about it in the news. Those days are over and the elite circle of oligarchs around Putin have power and riches beyond the dreams of Yeltsin’s entourage. In 2000, when Putin took charge, there were no Russians on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s billionaires. By 2005 there were thirty-six. In 2008 there were eighty-seven, more than Germany and Japan combined, in a country where 13 percent of our citizens were under a national poverty line of $150 a month. Putin and his defenders abroad bragged about Russia’s rising GDP, but it was like taking the average temperature of all the patients in a hospital.
According to the 2015 numbers, even after a year of Western sanctions and plunging oil prices, there are still eighty-eight Russian billionaires on the Forbes list, which still doesn’t list Putin or several of his closest cronies. I find it impossible to believe that a man like Putin who holds the power of life and death over eighty-eight billionaires is not the richest of them all. The occasional leaks about mysterious Black Sea mansions and enormous bank transfers to nowhere add more circumstantial evidence to the case that by now Putin is likely the richest man in the world.
On October 25, 2011, I gave a lecture on Russia at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. Georgia was under great pressure from the United States and others at the time to allow Russia to join the World Trade Organization, despite two large pieces of Georgian sovereign territory still being occupied by Russian forces, as they had been since the 2008 invasion. Many in the media and even some governments still refer to Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “disputed territories,” not occupied, ignoring the fact they were taken by military force from Georgia by Russia.
Despite heavy pressure from Russia after the invasion, including economic boycotts, tiny Georgia had remained defiantly pro-democratic and pro-Western under Saakashvili, and yet it was clear that getting Russia into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was of greater importance to Europe and the US than protecting the rights and territory of an ally. Putin’s administration liked to boast about how they had kept Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO during the Bush 43 administration and that WTO membership would be another feather in their cap.
As part of my presentation, I put up a slide with an image of a set of folders, labeled like KGB case files. First came the folders for OPERATION YUKOS and OPERATION KADYROV. Khodorkovsky’s case has been well covered already. Ramzan Kadyrov is the Chechen warlord who boasted of killing his first Russian soldier at the age of fifteen and was put in charge of the devastated region by Putin in 2007. Kadyrov’s agents have assassinated Putin’s enemies in other Russian cities as well as on foreign soil. It is hard to compare what Putin has done to the Russian Caucasus to anything else anywhere. He is not interested in attempting to better integrate these peoples, who are, after all, Russian citizens. Kadyrov is still in charge in Chechnya and has become Putin’s most loyal soldier. How long that loyalty would last if the flow of money from Moscow dried up is yet to be seen.
The next folder was labeled OPERATION MEDVEDEV. I described it as Putin’s most successful operation of all. It was a variation of the old Soviet game, letting the West think there was a chance of promoting moderates, or of a possible rift in the hierarchy. Everyone would scramble to figure out what was happening inside the Kremlin, wasting their time and energy. Putin’s inevitable announcement that he would be reclaiming the presidency in 2012 made it clear that Medvedev was never anything more than the hoax many of us had said he was, that he had never been anything more than a shadow. But the United States spent considerable time trying to strengthen the imaginary “Medvedev faction,” dreaming about a split between Putin and Medvedev, and fantasizing about liberal reform despite all evidence to the contrary.
I briefly met President Bush in September 2008 at a lunch he hosted for global dissidents in New York City. He had strong words about Putin then, but this was right after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August, which by all accounts, including his own, had infuriated Bush. In his memoir, Decision Points, Bush writes, “My biggest concern was that the Russians would storm all the way to Tbilisi and overthrow the democratically elected Saakashvili. It was clear the Russians couldn’t stand a democratic Georgia with a pro-Western president. I wondered if they would have been as aggressive if NATO had approved Georgia’s MAP [Membership Application Plan] application.”
The answer is almost certainly no, though we have little way of knowing for sure, since Western leadership has consistently avoided even trying to stand up to Putin. And yet the mistake was repeated six years later in Ukraine, the other country on Putin’s hit list that had failed to gain MAP status in 2008 thanks to opposition from Germany and France, who were quite open about saying it was because they didn’t want to anger Russia. (In another memorable remark in the book, Bush writes, “At a G-8 dinner in St. Petersburg, most of the leaders challenged Putin on his democratic record. Jacques Chirac did not. He announced that Putin was doing a fine job running Russia, and it was none of our business how he did it.” Clearly the French president was a greater fan of fraternité than of liberté.)
Later in his book Bush dedicates considerable time to the freedom agenda and his various disappointments and satisfactions. He concludes the section with, “I met with more than a hundred dissidents over the course of my presidency. Their plight can look bleak, but it is not hopeless. As I said in my Second Inaugural Address, the freedom agenda demands ‘the concentrated work of generations.’”
It most definitely does, but any hope for bold American support for human rights and democracy abroad ended abruptly with the result of the 2008 American election.