Russia chooses authoritarianism

It was, as Vladimir Putin has proclaimed the morning after, a "doubtless success." According to official results, his United Russia party won upwards of 64 per cent of the vote in yesterday's Duma elections. According to Vladimir Vladimirovich himself, that translates into 315 of the 450 seats in parliament.

That two-thirds majority in the Duma allows Putin and his acolytes to alter the constitution. They can abolish term limits so that Putin can run again in the presidential vote this spring. They can rename the country Putinistan.

There's no question now that Vladimir Putin will continue to dominate the Russian political scene after his term ends next year. If he doesn't find a way to retain the presidency (and I remain convinced that he will), he'll be the most powerful prime minister Russians have had since the post was created. If he's neither president nor PM, he'll be the man who yanks the strings on both.

It all seems so anti-democratic. And yet, yesterday's election results - and the passivity with which Russians went to the ballot boxes to lend their endorsement to what's going on - reminds us again that Putin has done all this with the consent of the vast majority of Russia's 142 million citizens.

Never mind the weak protests from the OSCE and American-backed NGOs like Golos. The West can kick and scream all it wants (with justification) about media manipulation and suppression of dissent under Putin. But take a drive 100 kilometres outside of Moscow - or better yet, fly to any city east of the Ural Mountains - and you'll see that the liberal elite whose rights we're so concerned with don't represent more than a tiny minority of Russians.

The masses voted for Putin yesterday - and will again if he finds a way to run for president - because their lives are far better now than they were under the Western-sponsored "freedom" and "democracy" of the Boris Yeltsin years. They, like the country, are back on their feet again economically after the economic chaos of the 1990s, and they give Putin nearly all the credit for the turnaround.

(A recent Kommersant examination of the Putin era found that "the country’s history has hardly seen another period when the prosperity of the population improved at such a fast rate." The newspaper reported that Russians' real incomes had grown from 6,087 rubles a year in 2000, the year he took office, to 11,425 in 2006.)

That Putin could preside over eight years that included the Kursk submarine disaster, the Nord-Ost theatre siege debacle and the Beslan school massacre and still be seen as a "stability" president speaks to how disastrous the Yeltsin years - and Western policy towards Russia immediately after the end of the Cold War - really were.

Much has been made of the Kremlin's near-complete control over the airwaves, and rightly so. The fact that most of the country gets little news beyond what they see on state-controlled television has definitely warped the Russian political map in Putin's favour. But whenever I travelled in Siberia and suggested as much to the reputedly brainwashed people who lived in the Russian heartland, they'd scoff indignantly. They're not stupid, was the reply. After decades of living in the Soviet Union, they know when they're being told the truth and when they're not. Better than any Westerner, they can spot propaganda when they see it.

My argument here is not that the elections were "free and fair." I've written just last week about what a fraudulent process this election is. No one can or should believe that 99 per cent of Chechens voted for United Russia, as Ramzan Kadyrov and his thugocrats are claiming.

What I'm saying is that Russians aren't fooled as easily as many seem to think. Rather than rising up and demanding better, they went to the polls yesterday and cast their ballots. By doing so, whether they voted for United Russia or not, they tacitly backed what Putin's been doing, and whatever he'll do next.

Yes, there were instances of intimidation, but so far such reports are few and far between. With far more thought and experience than most outsiders give them credit for, the majority of Russians have chosen resoundingly chosen to back Putin's vision for their country's course.

They've chosen security and oil-fuelled economic growth over freedom and democracy. Likewise, they've backed an independent, often anti-Western course on the international scene rather than bowing to Washington's leadership.

A day after Putin's "doubtless success," it's time the West accepted that, together with all its many implications.

(For more on this theme, Mikhail Gorbachev, in a fascinating interview with the Wall Street Journal, said he supports Putin and the "transitional democracy" he believes Putin is creating. Gorbachev also claims Dick Cheney once admitted to him that the West wanted to keep Russia on his knees. For those without a WSJ account, lawyer-blogger Robert Amsterdam has posted a full transcript here.)

Candidate Kasyanov

It's finally happened. The Russian opposition appear to have unified around a single candidate. Can it be?

According to The Moscow Times, figures as disparate as Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov and Eduard Limonov all spoke out in support of Kasyanov at a weekend conference in which The Candidate promised "better apartments for half the population and free health care for all." I'm a little unsettled that we haven't heard from Grigoriy Yavlinsky, but only a little.

Mikhail Kasyanov, unquestionably, was the right person to choose. Putting aside his "Misha Two Percent" reputation - thus far unsubstantiated allegations that he asked for a 2 per cent cut on all business deals he oversaw as prime minister from 2000 to 2004 - he's the only opposition politician who both a) can claim democractic credentials and b) claim some credit for the popular stabilnost of the Putin years. In other words, he's not just some holdover from the Yeltsin years, he's someone who can say "I helped Putin, but he went too far." That's a message that actually might sell with Russian voters who see the Putin years as far better than Yeltsin's time, but are beginning to worry about just where the siloviki are going with all this.

I once asked Marat Gellman, one of the spin doctors who created Putin and Putinism (though he now has his qualms about the monster he helped give birth to) about the possibility of Kasyanov eventually challenging the siloviki. “To answer that," he told me, "I need to know what kompromat [compromising material] there is against him.” Anyone who has been to the kompromat.ru website knows what he means.

“I don’t know of any and I don’t think [Putin’s allies] know. I think it’s with the Family."

In other words, the opposition just chose the right guy.

Yeltsin spurns the Communists one final time

So Boris Yeltsin will be buried at the Novodevichy cemetary, not along the Kremlin walls. It's a fitting resting place - alongside dissident writers like Mikhail Bulgakov, rebellious figures like General Alexander Lebed, and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who denounced Stalinism and was never forgiven by his peers in the Politburo.

It's a lot more fitting for the man who broke the USSR than the row of "heroes" graves behind Lenin's tomb on Red Square. I'm not sure Boris Nikolaevich would have slept well beside Stalin and Brezhnev.

For those who are interested, I'll be narrating some of the coverage of the funeral on CTV Newsnet tomorrow.

The struggle to define how Yeltsin should be remembered is already on. Liberal leaders like Boris Nemtsov have been quick to recall Yeltsin as the hero who stood up to the hard-line coup attempt in 1991, bringing about the fall of the Soviet Union. "We should fight for freedom in the memory of Boris Yeltsin because there is none left now," he told The Moscow Times.

More subtly, the Kremlin-run Itar-TASS news agency is emphasizing Yeltsin's later years as a bumbling, often drunk, figure. It's telling that only Putin is quoted in the story, reminding Russians that Yeltsin asked him to "take care of Russia."

The turnout and the tenor at the funeral tomorrow will be interesting to see.

Boris Yeltsin dies

Boris Yeltsin died this morning at the age of 76, it's being reported. Heart failure is said to be the cause.

The debate over how he should be remembered will begin immediately. Was he the great democrat who stared down the hard-line Communist coup in 1991? Or was he the weak, often drunk, leader who sold off the state's assets for a song to the oligarchs and presided over the 1998 financial collapse? Or the cynical deal-maker who handed the Kremlin keys back to the KGB in 1999 to spare himself prosecution?

Turns out he was all of these, to the disillusionment of millions. I know many in Russia who will mourn Yeltsin's death today not because they'll miss the man (he has largely disappeared from public life since Putin took office), but because they attach his name to the exhilirating hope they felt in 1991 when the Soviet Union finally broke apart at the seams. That's him aboard a tank in the photo to the left, on the day it became clear that the USSR was finished.

The hope then was that Russia was on its way to becoming a normal, free, country that would soon integrate with its new friends in Europe and the West. And for all his failings, the system Yeltsin presided over was remarkable as the freest Russians have experienced in their history. The media said what it wanted, the Duma was a place of genuine debate.

After seven years under Vladimir Putin, the man Yeltsin chose to succeed him, all that is gone.

Yeltsin largely refrained from commenting on the actions of his successor, something that was widely perceived to be a condition of the pact he struck to avoid prosecution. But in the aftermath of the 2004 school massacre in Beslan, and Putin's subsequent moves to use the incident to strengthen his personal power, Yeltsin gave us a hint of what he felt in a statement he gave to the Moscow News.

"We will not give up on the letter of the law, and most importantly, the spirit of the Constitution our country voted for at the public referendum in 1993," he wrote. "If only because the stifling of freedom and the curtailing of democratic rights is a victory for the terrorists. Only a democratic country can successfully resist terrorism and count on standing shoulder to shoulder with all of the world’s civilized countries."

I wish he'd said that more loudly and more often in the last seven years. Rest in peace, Boris Nikolaevich.