Master and Margarita elections, part two

This is Behemoth, or at least an unknown artist's conception of the fast-talking, hell-raising black cat who was the hero (at least in my reading) of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel The Master and Margarita.

The book revolves a visit by the devil himself (in the company of his nefarious furry friend) to officially atheist Soviet Russia. Following his arrival, a Moscow that doesn't believe in the devil's existence rapidly descends into surrealist chaos, a place where Satan wows the crowd with magic shows and naked witches fly over the city.

Marat Gelman, the spin doctor who was involved in both bringing Vladimir Putin to power and making sure he stayed there, once told me that the 2003 Duma elections that marked the rise of United Russia and the 2004 presidential campaign that secured Putin's second term were, in his mind, Russia's "Master and Margarita elections."

Gelman called them that because he understood well the kind of system he had helped to create. He had been personally responsible for shaping the message on state-run television - hailing Putin and United Russia while either ignoring the oppoistion completely or portraying them as dangerous extremists - and knew the goal was never to test the public's support for what was going on.

Putin was always going to win a landslide with something close to 70 per cent support, not too much more but certainly nothing less (he ended up with 71.3 per cent). United Russia was going to emerge as the first party to completely dominate the country since the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In the system Gelman and his colleagues would come to call "managed democracy," there would be elections every four years, but no real chance that anyone but a Kremlin-appointed candidate could win. The appearance of choice, but no one to choose between.

"After the elections, our politicians stopped being able to influence anything. There remained only one politician in the country - Putin," Gelman told me when I visited him afterwards at the art gallery he runs in Moscow's trendy Zamoskvareche neighbourhood. The elections, he said, marked "the end of politics" in post-Soviet Russia.

But shortly afterwards, even Gelman and his colleagues started to question the stability of the system they had helped to build. The Orange Revolution in neighbouring Ukraine jolted that country out of its semi-authoritarian stupor, and many were wondering whether the same thing couldn't happen in Russia itself.

The "democracy promoters" funded by the U.S. State Department began to investigate the possibility, and opposition leaders like Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov began investing their hopes in the idea that the wave of pro-Western uprisings that had washed over Belgrade, Kiev and Tbilisi in recent years could eventually hit Red Square too.

But the three years since the Orange Revolution have given the Kremlin plenty of time to prepare. First we saw the rise of groups like Nashi and now Zaputina, which serve the purpose of imitating and confronting the pro-Western civil society that was so critical to mobilizing popular opinion in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.

More dangerously, we've seen the complete suppression of the media and nearly all dissent, as evidenced again by the heavy handed police response to this weekend's marches by The Other Russia opposition movement.

I used to argue with my friends over whether the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine were good news for Russia's democrats. They believed in the "wave of freedom" theory, and thought Russia too would eventually be hit by it.

Perhaps. But my fear was always that the pro-American non-government organizations who helped fund and fuel those uprisings were so partisan in their behaviour (it's a "free and fair election" if Washington's candidate wins, a disturbing backslide on the country's commitment to democracy if they don't) that the response in Russia and other post-Soviet countries that were already tipping towards authoritarianism would be to tighten the screws on the things that made the "colour revolutions" possible - namely free media and civil society.

In 2003, with the exception of the Baltic States, Eduard Shevardnadze's Georgia and Leonid Kuchma's Ukraine were the freest and most open of the states that emerged from the collapse of the USSR. By using the political space that Shevardnadze and Kuchma gave to their opponents and critics to push for rapid radical upheavals, the revolution-makers scared the bejesus out of the authorities in other former Soviet republics.

The lesson people like Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko and Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov took away from the Rose and Orange revolutions was that Shevardnadze and Kuchma had spent too much time worrying about where they ranked on the Freedom House list, and it had cost them control of their countries. Better to crack down fast and hard, take the international tsk-tsking that comes with a "not free" rating from Washington, and keep your job and all the loot that comes with it.

Putin, it's now very clear, has drawn the same conclusion. Who cares what the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe election monitors have to say? They're all tools of the State Department, after all. The opposition? They're all dangerous thugs who belong in jail. The media? Some die, some live. It's really not worth investigating why that is.

So here comes another round of elections without a choice. Behemoth walks the streets of Moscow again.

The cult of personality, evolving

Yesterday's "Za Putina" (For Putin) rally at Luzhniki Stadium was disturbing to watch.

On one level, it was little different than an American political rally - all banner waving and adulation for the leader. Except the man they were saluting wasn't some new candidate on the rise, but an outgoing president at the end of his constitutionally mandated eight years in office.

What was most remarkable (other than Putin's attacks on the opposition as "jackals" who beg for money at foreign embassies and desperately want to keep Russia weak) was that this was Putin, actually campaigning.

He spurned such rallies during both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, arguing he was too busy handling the affairs of the nation for such silliness. It was an effective tactic that was aided in large part by the Kremlin's control over the media, which reported on his every move so fawningly that he didn't need to stoop to debates and campaign speeches.

So - and I keep coming back to this - why is he doing this now? Because he's concerned that United Russia might not cross the 70 per cent barrier in the Duma elections? (The latest poll from VTsIOM has them at 63.8 per cent, with the Communists the only other party to cross, barely, the 7 per cent barrier needed to win seats in parliament.)

Unlikely. This is still about the presidency and creating the impression that the people are wild about Putin (sadly true) and don't want to see him go. Having him as prime minister won't satiate these Putinmaniacs. They want him, need him as the country's uncontested leader.

Putting aside the niceties of the constitution, how can Vladimir Vladimirovich not answer such rabid public demand? My feeling is that the Kremlin is creating a scenario where he'll seem to have no choice but to give the public what they want. I think Putin's time out of the Kremlin will be measured in days, not years.

As Vladimir Vladimirovich himself obliquely told the crowd at Luzhniki: "If there is a victory in December (the Duma elections), then there will be a victory next March (the presidential vote) as well."

If you want to read more about the rally yesterday, check out Andrey Kolesnikov's coverage in Kommersant. It's laugh-out-loud, sigh-in-despair brilliant.

(There. Since I've linked to Kommersant, I can justify swiping the photo above... gotta love leopard print.)

Day of shame

Perhaps one day, people in Russia will come to see Oct. 7 as a day of mourning.

First, it's the anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya's murder, a sad day for anyone who cares about free press in the country. Whatever you think about her writing, and whoever ordered her murder, the end result is that fewer Russian journalists, writers and intellectuals feel comfortable expressing dissent. For a country with Russia's dark past, that's very bad news.

(For plenty of great material on Politkovskaya - pictured - and her life and death, see today's edition of La Russophobe and the special English page done by the staff at her old newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.)

Just as disconcerting, some 10,000 people, many of them wearing shirts emblazoned with Vladimir Putin's name and image, marched along the Moscow River today to celebrate the president's 55th birthday. They shouted birthday greetings, as well as slogans like "Putin is our future." The rally was organized by the ever-creepier Nashi youth movement.

(As an aside, only a few hundred people commemorated Politkovskaya's life at a rally in Moscow today, and demonstrators attending a conference marking the anniversary in NIzhny Novgorod were briefly arrested by police there.)

There will be those who will say that Putin's "birthday party" was just another demonstration of how beloved the president is. That's nonsense.

Yes, Putin is popular. But these sycophantic rallies evoke the "popular" demonstrations organized by dictators the world over. I've been to rallies like the one I saw today in Syria, Pakistan and Belarus. That's not a list any country should aspire to join.

We're not witnessing the evolution of Russian democracy, but the creation of a one-man personality cult. Again, for a country with such a tortured history, that's frightening to watch.

I could go on, but I have a plane to catch. Suffice it to say that Oct. 7, 2007 was a dark day in Moscow.

The rise of Nashi

The AFP newswire just moved an interesting story about the growing rent-a-crowd trend across the former Soviet Union. The clearest example of this in recent months was Viktor Yanukovych's limp "Blue Revolution" on the streets of Kyiv, where protestors spoke openly of having been paid $10 (sometimes more) to stand in Independence Square and wave a blue flag.

Those demonstrations were so pitiful as to be almost laughable. But some aren't funny at all.

Take Nashi. The Kremlin-founded youth group has staged protests in Moscow, Pskov and Tallinn during the ongoing Bronze Soldier dispute between Russia and Estonia, at one point putting physical chase to the Estonian ambassador to Moscow.

In the eyes of some, Nashi are the modern equivalent of the Komsomol, the Young Communists of the Soviet era. Then, and increasingly now with Nashi, being a member put you on track to a more successful career, and past membership was effectively a prerequisite if you aspired to a job in the bureaucracy or the security services.

To others, Nashi are the Brownshirts of an increasingly despotic Russia.

Nashi (the word means "Ours") are the creation of Vladislav Surkov, Putin's deputy chief of staff and powerful Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky. Charged in the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution with making sure revolutionary tents were never pitched on Red Square, the two decided to implement strict new restrictions on Western NGOs (read Surkov's paranoid secret speech on NGOs and conspiracies against Russia here). Then they created Nashi, a group they hoped would serve as a counterweight to rabble-rousing pro-Western groups like Kmara in Georgia, Pora in Ukraine and now Oborona in Russia. Today the group claims to have tens of thousands of members.

My fear about Nashi is that it dangerously plays with one of the most disturbing trends I witnessed during the three years I lived in Moscow: the growing "Russia for the Russians" sentiment across the country. Towards the end, it seemed like that there was another report every day in the newspaper of a foreigner being beaten or stabbed by ultranationalist thugs.

At the group's founding meeting at a summer camp outside of Moscow two years ago (an event closed to the foreign press), Pavlovsky made clear two a crowd of 3,000 young activists what their role was going to be: "You must be ready to disperse fascist rallies and physically oppose attempted anti-constitutional coups." In other words, make sure that any attempt at a peaceful revolution like the one that happened in Ukraine the year before doesn't stay peaceful for long.