A sign of the falsified times

Sigh.

Predictably, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov has been disqualified from running for president by Russia's Central Elections Commission. The move clears the way for a nice smooth run for Vladimir Putin's chosen successor, Dmitriy Medvedev. He will now run virtually unopposed in the Russian Federation's fifth presidential elections since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yes, there will be opposition, but only of the token sort. Medvedev's remaining "opponents" are a pair of multi-time losers in Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as well as a virtual unknown, Andrey Bogdanov. Kasyanov was the only figure Russia's fractured liberal opposition could potentially have rallied around.

Opinion polls showed him trailing badly with less than 2 per cent support (compared to somewhere between 60 and 82 per cent for Medvedev, if the numbers are to be believed), but Kasyanov and his supporters never expected to win power through the Kremlin-controlled ballot boxes.

Though the odds were long, their aim was always to replicate Ukraine's Orange Revolution, with masses crowding Red Square on election day to peacefully protest a vote that everyone knows in advance will be deeply flawed. For that to have any chance of working, they needed a Viktor Yushchenko, a popular candidate to rally around.

One by one the other potential Yushchenkos dropped out or were forced out of the race by the Kremlin: Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Boris Nemtsov. Now Kasyanov's gone too. So, by and large, is any lingering hope of peaceful democratic change in Russia in the near future.

(It's worth noting here that even Belarus's tyrannical Alexander Lukashenko at least allows an opposition candidate or two to run for president every five years... as did Putin in 2004 when he was confident of his personal popularity. It appears that despite the opinion polls, the Kremlin is less sure than it's letting on about Medvedev's real popular appeal.)

The Kremlin understood the stakes, which is why it pulled out one of the most farcical excuses in their playbook: the falsified signatures charge.

Anyone who doubts this is a canard only has to look back at how it's been used in Russia and across the former Soviet Union over the last 17 years. Either there's a very organized ring of international signature forgers at work (usually in league with those opposed to oppressive regimes) or the autocrats are scared to put their so-called popular support to a real test.

Here's an incomplete list of the invalid signatures phenomenon in post-Soviet elections:

November 1993: The Russian All-People's Union, which included elements of the old Communist Party, is barred from running in the first post-Soviet Duma elections due because of 20,000 falsified signatures.

July 1995: Eight parties barred from Armenia's first post-Soviet parliamentary vote because of falsified signatures.

March 2000: Konstantin Titov, Yevgeny Savostyanov, Ismail Tagi-Zade, and Umar Dzhabrailov are all barred from running for president over allegations of, well, falsified signatures. The elections, you may have heard, were eventually won by a Vladimir Putin.

October 2000: Citing falsified signatures, Azerbaijan's Central Election Committee bans the National Democratic Party from taking part in parliamentary elections .

September 2003: Malik Saidullayev disqualified from Chechnya's presidential elections over falsified signatures. Eventually all serious candidates are forced out of the race, clearing the way for the pro-Kremlin Akhmat Kadyrov (the deceased father of Ramzan) to run almost unopposed.

July 2004: Belarussian human rights group Viasna-96 (or Spring-96) loses its legal standing over charges that it falsified signatures on its registration papers.

December 2004: All opposition parties (all the real ones, anyway) in Uzbekistan are barred from parliamentary elections over signature issues.

November 2006: Opposition candidate Andrei Safonov is barred from running for the post of "president" in Moldova's pro-Russian breakaway province of Transdniestria. Wanna guess the reason?

March 2007: The liberal Yabloko party is barred from running in St. Petersburg municipal elections over falsified signatures.

October 2007: Russia's Green Party, along with the People’s Union and the Party for Peace and Unity, is barred from running in Duma elections over illegal John Hancocks.

January 2008: Kasyanov disqualified.

The list speaks for itself. Managed democracy, indeed.

Ah hell, why not take credit on this rare instance that it's due? As the Why Democracy? website notes in its weekly news roundup, "Canadian journalist Mark MacKinnon predicted Putin's falsified signatures approach a week ago." (See last post.)

I wish it hadn't been so easy. Like I said at the start - sigh.

S Novom Godom!

Я желаю Вам хорошее здоровье, удачу и успех в новый год!

Now back to business. I went silent for a little while. Very, very silent. Largely because my day job has been all-consuming of late, what with President Bush's tire-spinning visit to my current home, the Middle East.

That said, I'm off to Baku tomorrow for a weekend of pure relaxation by the Caspian Sea. The thought of returning to even the edge of the old USSR has me thinking:

Candidate Kasyanov - He's got the two million signatures. Does the Kremlin have the courage - and the barest commitment to democracy - to let him run against their man, Dmitriy Medvedev? Or are we going to see another "falsified signatures" charge in the coming days that will again prove that Russia is not inching towards democracy, but sliding back towards authoritarianism.

While we're at it, will Yavlinsky, Nemtsov and co. have the good sense to put their egos aside and back the only man with a hope of giving the Kremlin machine a run for its oil money?

Oleg Kozlovsky - His story is a warning, not only about fading freedom of speech in Russia, but about the biggest peril that many talented young Russians face - the draft. Many of my Russian friends spent most of their 20s doing anything - anything - to avoid being sucked into the dark and dangerous pit that is the Russian army. I've seen kids press-ganged off the streets of St. Petersburg while out walking with friends, and met soldiers in Chechnya whose parents didn't even know they were in the army, let alone stationed in Grozny. I'll wholeheartedly sign on to the Free Kozlovksy campaign, but add a note that there are thousands more like him, leading lower-profile lives, who also deserve our concern.

Much More Misha - Four more years of Saakashvili starts off with his government laying charges against tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili. Patarkatsishvili's no saint, but neither are Vladimir Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. If this was Putin laying charges against another oligarch, wouldn't we all be asking questions about whether the President isn't really just trying to quash all political opposition?

British Council tomfoolery - If the Russian government thinks the British Council is a den of spies, it should produce the evidence and expel those it no longer wants in the country. Otherwise, it should sending spooks to follow Council staff around St. Petersburg. It's an embarrassing saga, and not for the British.

Kosovo: I've asked the question before: why is the West so insistent that Serbia is divisible, but not Kosovo? (And not Georgia or Moldova?)

Azerbaijan 2016 - C'mon, really? This what President Ilham Aliev wants to spend all the oil money on? An expensive, sure-to-fail Olympics bid? What about the hundreds of thousands of Azeris who live in poverty, just outside the Baku bubble?

February 5: If it was the $26.95 that was keeping you from buying The New Cold War, never fear. The paperback edition hits bookshelves Feb. 5.

President Dmitry Medvedev

So now we know. It will be Dmitry Medvedev, not Sergei Ivanov (and not Vladimir Putin) who succeeds Vladimir Putin. Putin, it's just been announced, "fully supports" Medvedev's candidacy to replace him when he leaves office after his second term expires in the spring.

So all hail President Dmitry. There is, of course, the small matter of elections to be sorted out, but you can be sure that the Kremlin - unless this decision creates a major rift behind the red walls - will make sure Putin's man is elected. The liberal opposition is self-destructing anyway, choosing not one, but three candidates to run for the presidency in April.

So what can be deduced from this, in these first minutes after Putin's announcement? To me, it says that Putin, instead of choosing someone else from inside the siloviki, the cadre of security service veterans who run the country, has chosen someone personally loyal to him. Medvedev is not a chekist (ex-KGB agent) like Putin and Ivanov, he's a Putinist.

Medvedev has been at Putin's side since the early 1990s, when Putin was chief of staff to St. Petersburg mayor Anatoliy Sobchak and Medvedev was a foreign affairs advisor.

As Putin rose to power, Medvedev followed. First he was chief of staff to Putin after he was appointed prime minister in 1999 by Boris Yeltsin. Then he ran Putin's 2000 presidential election campaign and afterwards became deputy chief of staff to President Vladimir. Next he was installed as chairman of the board at Gazprom, the giant gas company that Putin has turned into the Kremlin's most effective foreign policy tool.

When Alexander Voloshin quit as Putin's chief of staff over the sordid Mikhail Khodorkovsky affair in 2003, Medvedev was brought in to replace him and get the Kremlin back on course. Two years ago, in the first hint that this moment might eventually come, he was made First Deputy Prime Minister (along with Ivanov).

What does all this mean? Two things.

The first is relations between Russia and the West may yet recover some. The 42-year-old Medvedev is seen as more liberal and pro-Western than the hardline Ivanov. Ivanov was the tough guy you always saw in military fatigues noddling gravely at the testing of new Russian military hardware. Medvedev was the mild-mannered man in the suit that you rarely saw at all until he was made deputy PM in an effort to build up his public persona (although he was theoretically also the guy who made the decision to turn off Gazprom's taps to Ukraine and Belarus when those countries bucked the Kremlin's will...).

The second is that real power will remain in the hands of our old friend, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Putin's choice was between a man unquestionably loyal to him (Medvedev) and a man unquestionably loyal to the system (Ivanov). He chose the former.

Medvedev owes Putin everything. If Putin asks him to do something - to make him prime minister, or even to relinquish the presidency because Vladimir Vladimirovich misses the comforts of the Kremlin - he'll do it.

Problematic Putin porn

So Vladimir Putin has a chiselled (if oddly hairless) chest. In the words of a presidential admirer who left their thoughts on the Komsolmolskaya Pravda website, it's one "vigorous torso."

To Vladimir Vladimirovich, I say congrats. It's likely not easy staying in shape whilst plotting your country's return to superpower status. The days, surely, are already filled with meetings about how to marginalize the pro-Western opposition, bring Ukraine to heel or what journalist to silence next. It's gotta be doubly tough when etiquette requires your attendance at myriad sour cream-laden banketi, which I know did nothing for my physique.

The question that comes to mind, though, is why are we being shown these pictures now. After all, Vladimir Vladimirovich is stepping down next year, heading into graceful retirement at age 55. Right? With presidential elections just half a year away, shouldn't we be pondering the pecs of Sergei Ivanov and Dmitriy Medvedev, Mikhail Kasyanov and Garry Kasparov?

Why is Komsomolskaya Pravda still telling kids to "Be Like Putin" on its front page? Is it because you're not going anywhere after all, Vladimir Vladimirovich?

Though I make no claim to being a political strategist (it's Mark McKinnon - no relation - who used to work for George W. Bush), I have to agree with Yevgenia Albats who worried aloud on her Эхо Москвы show that the pictures - which ominously were posted on the official Kremlin website - might be the strongest statement yet that Putin is planning on sticking around after his second term expires next year.

These photos are campaign material, pure and simple. They're meant to show the Russian public (and the world) that Putin is fit and ready to remain at Russia's helm past 2008, if he so chooses.

Vladimir Vladimirovich, of course, is constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term next year. But two of his closest allies, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, have changed the rules in their neighbouring ex-Soviet republics so that they can run as often as they like. Nazarbayev recently urged Putin to follow suit in the interests of Russia's stability.

Sergei Markov, a Kremlin advisor, told the Associated Press that the pictures emphasized again that Vladimir Vladimirovich was "cool" - at least in the eyes of the Russian public. "That's been the image throughout the presidency, cool," Markov said.

Markov is one of those in the Kremlin's inner circle who's been tasked with finding a successor to Putin, be it Ivanov, Medvedev or one of the other siloviki. The decision to publish the Putin porn tells me they haven't yet found anyone "cooler" than Vladimir Vladimirovich and that "Operation Successor" as its known inside the Kremlin, may be morphing into "Operation Incumbent."

The eternal (losing) candidate

What is Grigoriy Yavlinsky thinking? Can he really be this vain and out of touch with reality?

The Moscow Times is reporting today that Yavlinsky, who ran and lost (badly) for the presidency in 1996 and 2000 is planning another run in 2008.

Just two weeks ago I was celebrating the fact that Russia's liberal opposition had finally got its act together and was apparently ready to throw its support behind a single candidate, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. I tempered my enthusiasm by noting we hadn't yet heard from Yavlinsky, but assumed that even he wasn't blind enough to the best interests of the country to mess up what was clearly a good thing.

The question Russians have to answer in the next election should be a clear one: "Is the country heading the right way under Putin and Putinism, or has too much been sacrificed in the name of stability?" A fair and open race that boiled down to the Kremlin's candidate (who increasingly appears to be deputy prime minister and ex-KGB man Sergei Ivanov) against Kasyanov, representing The Other Russia, would put that question provocatively before the public.

(For more on Ivanov, see the profile in London's Sunday Times newspaper. It's written by Mark Franchetti, who is one of the best scribes in the Moscow-based foreign press corps.)

Yavlinsky getting involved, however, will allow the Kremlin to get away with portraying the various liberal candidates (Yukos chairman Viktor Gerashchenko and Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky are also both toying with the idea of candidacy) as a bunch of Yeltsin era rabble. Look for the Communists and the far right to be built up so that the Kremlin can once more convince the West that its Putinism or the real baddies.

Yavlinsky, in his two presidential runs, has received 7.4 and 5.8 per cent of the vote. Those numbers will never make him president, but that support might mean the difference between Kasyanov getting into a second round against whoever the Kremlin puts forward.

Yavlinsky is a decent man, who might have been Russian president if the Russian people admired him even half as much as the Western media did in the 1990s. Now, however, someone has to convince him that his moment is well past and it's time to put the country ahead of his ego.

While I'm talking about the 2008 presidential race, I should note that Kommersant had an interesting piece over the weekend that suggested that it might not be Ivanov who ends up as the Kremlin's chosen one. The article quotes Kremlin aide Igor Shuvalov suggesting that "Operation Successor" may yet yield someone other than Ivanov or Dmitriy Medvedev, the other presumed frontrunner for Putin's blessing.

"People are talking of two potential candidates, but my president might yet surprise everyone, and by the end of this year you might learn of yet another potential figure," Shuvalov said. "We have two active individuals - they are the senior deputy prime ministers, with different spheres of responsibility. Both are very liberal-minded, although one is a former KGB officer. Either of them could win. Personally, however, I think that yet another figure may emerge."

Very interesting. Though I have to wonder if he isn't talking about Vladimir Vladimirovich himself.

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.