THIS BOOK WAS being completed right at the time of Russia’s own version of the ‘Occupy’ – primarily directed against economic and social inequality – movement, the recent rallies in Moscow and other Russian cities in the aftermath of the alleged ballot-rigging in parliamentary elections. The protests began as numerous official reports of election irregularities came to light across the country, including allegations of vote fraud, obstruction of observers and illegal campaigning. Members of the Just Russia, Yabloko and Communist parties reported that voters were shuttled between multiple polling stations to cast several ballots. The Yabloko party reported that video footage was withheld from observers, and that they were not given access to ballot boxes, not allowed to monitor the sealing of boxes and were ‘groundlessly removed from polling stations’. LDPR, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, also complained of many attempts to ‘hamper the work of observers’. Even the ruling United Russia Party alleged that their main rival, “CPRF” (the Communist party,) had engaged in illegal campaigning by distributing leaflets and newspapers at polling stations and that at some polling stations the voters had been supposedly ‘pushed’ to vote for Communists...
‘In a perfect world, even a single violation would be one too many’, writes Anatoly Karlin, a blogger who’s finishing a degree in Political Economy at UC Berkeley. ‘And by all accounts there were many, many violations in this election: ballot stuffing, forced voting, roving “carousels”, the works. But the world isn’t perfect and elections are never entirely flawless, even in advanced democracies such as the US. For instance, the 2004 US presidential elections featured “caging” scandals, dodgy voting machines in Ohio, and a turnout exceeding 100 per cent in several Alaskan districts. But few would go on to argue that Bush’s win was fundamentally illegitimate, because ultimately the official results reflected the will of the electorate. And why should standards be any stricter for the Russians?’ The reality is that at the federal level, the results are fairly accurate – they perfectly correlate to pre-election opinion polls...
This suggests that the aggregate level of falsifications is probably at around 5 per cent, and almost certainly less than 10 per cent... Either way, “United Russia” won, and it won resoundingly; the will of the Russian people was not fundamentally subverted. When Hilary Clinton says that the Russian elections were ‘neither free nor fair’, she contradicts the opinion even of the OSCE observers, who were highly critical – as they have been with every Russian election after Boris Yeltsin left power – but acknowledged that, despite numerous technical flaws, ‘the voters took advantage of their right to express their choice’.
And what prevented the opposition from handing in their mandates, an act which would have automatically annulled the recently held elections and triggered a rerun? Not doing so was perceived by many as confirmation that the opposition’s claims to power are not serious.
ON 15 DECEMBER 15 2011 Putin gave a nationally televised press conference in which he dismissed the protests for trying to provoke ‘coloured revolutions’, and said that the white ribbons worn by the protesters looked to him like condoms (from an anti-AIDS campaign). Many were shocked by the comparison, but perhaps the revelation that the web site promoting the White Ribbons was created 2 months before the disputed elections, fomented Putin’s sarcasm towards this new ‘symbol’ and fitted the theory that the protests were ‘engineered’.
Engineered or a spontaneous ensign, the white ribbon didn’t catch on as the Russian people, even the protesters themselves, largely reject the idea of any ‘revolution’. ‘As far as I understand,’ BBC-quoted Twitteruser Arina said, ‘the white ribbon is a symbol of revolution, whether it’s white, snow-white or anything else. And this is not something that Russia needs.’
However, one unexpected thing that the protests demonstrated was that the notion of a notorious ‘Russian riot, pointless and merciless’ is clearly outdated and serves as a perfect example of ‘literaturecy’ and cliched thinking. Even if the protesters’ criticism was supercharged and ‘used’ by some opposition leaders, the protests so far have been measured, intelligent and civilised – compared to London’s riots (with burning cars and burgled shops, etc.) or with what’s going on in other European countries. In a way, Moscow is further away from the ‘Arab Spring’ than London, not only because of Russia’s leadership, but first and foremost because of Russian people, their education and their intelligentsia. Yes, a change is in the air, but this change (not just for Russia, but perhaps for the world) is coming not at bayonet-point, but with the pen. One of these pens may be – Putin’s, if he will subscribe to a certain reform (be it the creation of a much-needed public TV – Russia’s own BBC – or the return of elections for local governors).
So Putin will have to prove himself at home as much as on the world stage. For his people in many ways are much more demanding than those who elected Obama on the promise of a change and have it not-yetdelivered.
IN THIS SENSE, to paraphrase Pushkin’s ironic maxim that ‘what’s fit for London’ is not ‘too early for Moscow’, because ‘intelligentsia’ is, after all, a Russian word, and like Veche (a popular people’s assembly in ancient Russia) is ingrained in Russia’s soul. So, the Russian ‘protests’ are a lesson and an example not just for Russian authorities, but also for the world – both politicians and ordinary people. A lesson in civilised assembly. Without the values of education, without intelligentsia, democracy – in any country – can become ochlocracy (mob rule).
AS MUCH AS PUTIN needs to embrace the intelligentsia, the latter also needs to understand that it is far easier to criticise than it is to govern. Other than ‘New elections!’ what was the protesters’ positive programme? That has not yet been made clear.
Yet it is clear that during Putin’s reign an estimated 25% of the population has become part of what might roughly be called the new middle class: well-dressed, wired, connected to the Internet, able to travel abroad freely, and to splurge on consumer goods and appliances. Especially in Moscow and other major cities, shops and consumer malls bloomed. Construction cranes and scaffolding for reconstruction seemed to sprout everywhere. Food shortages disappeared, while private property ownership — and the number of Russians owning cars— soared. Indeed, in a sign of progress, Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Vladivostok and other major Russian towns began to be plagued by nightmarish traffic jams – unimaginable in previous times.
New service industries were born, advertising became as ubiquitous as propaganda had been in the Soviet era and, for the first time in memory, world-beating Russian hi-tech companies appeared, such as Kaspersky Lab, the fourth largest computer security firm in the world, ABBYY, the optical text recognition firm, or Aquaphor, the world leader in water filtration and purification technologies. And the list goes on. This new growing class of technocrats is also Russia’s quiet electorate, who are electing Putin by choosing his Russia as their base and entrusting it with their dreams.
‘Bring it on, Bandar-logs’, Putin said (with the audience breaking into applause) during his televised press conference, addressing those of his opponents who he suggested are pointless or impossible to deal with. ‘I’ve loved Kipling since childhood.’ One can say Putin’s reference to Kipling’s monkeys was quite offensive (yet one might find it a positive sign of a peaceful literary inclination). One way or another, but – deep inside – how many of us haven’t ever imagined themselves in Kipling’s universe, in the times when history was alive, to paraphrase Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History? How many of us haven’t ever dreamed about the brave and lively Jungle, which was an allegory of the politics and the society of the time, and, perhaps, a metaphor for Life? The Russian ‘Jungle’ is a paradox. The streets of Moscow are safer than London’s, yet indeed there are Akela, Kaa, Bagheera, Baloo and Bandar-log out there as well, all mixed in the amazing circle of life which is Russia.
Another book comes to mind: Time and Again by Jack Finney. A modern New-Yorker, a participant in a secret government project, goes back to 19th century New York and decides to stay. New York in 1882 is far from perfect, corruption is a big problem. But back then in New York ‘the streets could still fill with sleighs on a moonlit night of new snow, of strangers calling to each other, of singing and laughing. Life still had meaning and purpose in people’s minds; the great emptiness hadn’t begun.’
YOU CAN TRAVEL IN time or ... you can go to Russia. French banker and financial strategist Eric Kraus, the author of the well-respected Russia strategy monthly Truth and Beauty (and Russian Finance) did that 15 years ago when he fled his native Paris for Moscow, just in time to survive the 1998 financial crisis. He writes:
‘.......The challenge for Russia may be not the lack of democracy, but rather, its excess. In the 1990s, no Russian asked anything more of the State than to be left alone; this has changed, as a newly empowered middle class takes root, and the fearful turbulence of decades past fades from memories, the government has become mindful of its popularity ratings and exquisitely sensitive to the popular mood. A welfare state is rapidly taking shape, and though Russia is famously unpredictable, a European destiny seems most likely; at a time when the European social model seems threatened with imminent implosion, this may seem a counter-intuitive choice.
All of this is still for the future, and as of this writing, Moscow is the only European city in which one can still feel free. Thus, in closing, a word to my many Russian friends who constantly threaten to decamp to that Europe which I fled in despair – at the bureaucracy and immobility, suicidal political correctness and crushing fiscal inquisition – 15 years ago: the West has a great future – behind it. Go ahead, give it your best shot and good luck to you – but here’s betting that you’ll be coming back a lot sooner than you had imagined...”
And this new Russia, which even a cosmopolite would miss and want to come back to, has Putin’s DNA embedded in its recent history, and, perhaps, the future, regardless of his own political fortunes... Does this mean that Putin has already survived his toughest test: the test of time?