Putin's Wars (19 page)
Another interesting resemblance between Putin’s and Mussolini’s systems was the diarchy
at the top. Mussolini was prime minister and
Duce
, but until the armistice in 1943 Italy was a monarchy and Mussolini had to deal with
King Victor Emmanuel III, the Italian head of state. In Mussolini’s case this diarchy
was not of his own making. It was forced on him by the specificity of the Italian
situation. After the election of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president in March 2008
and Putin’s appointment to prime minister, there was created, in Russia also, a diarchy,
called
the tandem
. But unlike the Italian situation, where the diarchy was an unintended consequence
of a historical situation, the diarchy in Russia was the result of a deliberate
choice
. In the beginning there was a lot of speculation about the reason for this construction.
Some Western observers obstinately wanted to believe—even as late as the fall of 2011—that
this diarchy did have some real substance. It did not. The reason for Putin installing
the tandem was to guarantee Putin’s iron grip on power for at least another decade.
The second reason was to hide this manipulated usurpation of state power behind a
smokescreen of formal legality. The Russian constitution did not permit a president
to run for a third term. Putin easily could have changed the constitution, but he
chose to step down and leave his place to his young cabinet chief Dmitry Medvedev.
Medvedev was the ideal choice for Putin. He had no political experience, no apparent
power ambitions, nor an independent power base in society, and he was, moreover, totally
devoted to his boss. Playing the game of “the constitutional president,” who “scrupulously
applied the existing legal rules,” Putin planned to become a “legal” ruler who would
remain in office longer than any of his foreign colleagues.
[51]
Putin served as a prime minister under Yeltsin for almost five months, was subsequently
president for more than eight years, remained prime minister for another four years,
which already makes altogether twelve and a half years. During Medvedev’s presidency
the presidential term for the next president was extended from four to six years.
After his reelection on March 4, 2012, Putin had, therefore, theoretically the possibility
of remaining at the apex of the Russian power system until 2024, which would make
for a reign of almost a quarter of a century. This would bring the total time span
of his reign close to that of an average Russian tsar (Alexander II, for instance
reigned from 1855 to 1881 and Nicholas II from 1894 to 1917). It even comes close
to the almost thirty years’ reign of Putin’s admired geopolitical genius, Joseph Stalin.
[52]
Quoted in Boris Yeltsin,
Midnight Diaries
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 330.
“Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Met with Members of the Sixth Valdai Discussion Club,”
Ria Novosti
(September 19, 2009).
http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20090914/156117965-print.html
.
These were the Christian-Democratic Union, the Liberal-Democratic Party of Germany,
the National-Democratic Party of Germany, and the Democratic Peasants Party of Germany.
Apart from the political parties, also representatives of communist mass organizations
(youth and women’s organizations, the communist trade union FDGB, etc.) were also
on the National Front’s list.
As a member of a delegation of the Dutch Social-Democratic Party, I personally had
the opportunity to visit, on June 14, 1981, a polling station at the Alexanderplatz
in East-Berlin, during the elections of the
Volkskammer
, the parliament of the German Democratic Republic. I was able to observe how all
voters were given the “National Front” ballot paper and deposited it straight into
the ballot box. In a corner was a voting booth covered with white sheets, but nobody
entered it. On my question to the director of the polling station why nobody went
into the booth, he said that voters “were free to go in the booth, delete some names
on the list or even invalidate it.” When I said that entering the booth, “might, perhaps,
attract some unwelcome attention,” he went to a table and came back with a booklet.
It was the constitution of the German Democratic Republic. He leafed through the booklet,
then read aloud a paragraph that said that elections in the GDR were “free and secret.”
Next day the party paper
Neues Deutschland
published the results under the heading “Great Victory for the National Front.” In
total 99.86 percent of the electorate had voted for the National Front. East German
citizens told me the next day that entering the voting booth and deleting names would
diminish your chances of getting an apartment, a promotion, or a permit for traveling
abroad. Not one of my interlocutors had, himself or herself, ventured into the booth.
Vladimir Putin,
First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 69–70.
United Russia was formed in April 2001 from a merger between the Unity Party of Russia
and the Fatherland-All Russia Party, led by the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov.
Richard Sakwa,
Russian Politics and Society
(London: Routledge, 2000), 187.
“Gorbachev alarm at Soviet echoes,”
BBC
(March 6, 2009).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7927920.stm
.
“A Just Russia” was originally a merger of three parties:
Rodina
(Fatherland Party),
Pensionery
(Pensioners’ Party), and
Zhizn
(Russian Party of Life, led by Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Federation Council,
the Russian Upper House). The
Rodina
party, led by Dmitry Rogozin, was the most important of the three: it got 9 percent
of the votes in the legislative elections of 2003.
Rodina
was barred from the elections for the Moscow City Duma in 2005 for inciting racial
hatred after it had broadcasted ads with the slogan “clear our city of trash,” showing
a group of Caucasian people littering a park with watermelon rinds. Its xenophobic
tradition seems to have been taken over by its successor, A Just Russia, which was
accused by SOVA-Center, a Russian NGO, of having three anti-Semites on its list of
candidates for the State Duma. One of them, Yury Lopusov, a leader of the youth movement
Pobeda, quoted Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
in an interview published on the party’s website. (Cf. “‘Spravedlivaya Rossiya’ beret
antisemitov, rogozintsev i lubiteley ‘Mein Kampf,’’” (A Just Russia is welcoming anti-Semites,
Rogozin adepts and admirers of ‘Mein Kampf’),
SOVA-Center
(September 24, 2007).
http://xeno.sova-center.ru/45A29F2/9DF6F26
. In 2006 Dmitry Rogozin resigned as party leader of Rodina. His appointment in January
2008 to the important post of ambassador to NATO was a sign of his excellent relationship
with Putin.
The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality in a country (0 = total equality
and 1 = total inequality) was on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union 0.29.
In 2006 it had risen to 0.41—which was above the average of the EU.
The Moscow Times
(October 30, 2006).
Stuart D. Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession,”
CRS Report for Congress
(Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2008), 2.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34392.pdf
.
Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession.”
Anna Politkovskaya,
Putin’s Russia
(London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.
Primakov,
Le monde sans la Russie? À quoi conduit la myopie politique?
111. Primakov also criticized the fact that in the Federation Council “one could even
find individuals with a criminal past or present.”
Cf. Anatoly G. Vishnevsky,
Russkiy ili Prusskiy? Razmyshleniya perekhodnogo vremeni
(Moscow: Izdatelskiy dom GU VShE, 2005), 325: “The history of the emergence of the
LDPR is surrounded by rumours according to which this party would be a creation of
the KGB.” Cf. also Dimitri K. Simes and Paul J. Saunders, “The Kremlin Begs to Differ,”
The National Interest
no. 104 (November/December 2009), 42.
Owen Matthews, “Moscow’s Phoney Liberal,”
Newsweek
(February 26, 2010).
The party program can be found at
http://www.patriot-rus.ru/#partyProgramm
.
“Attacks of the Clones,”
The Economist
(March 19, 2011).
Politkovskaya,
Putin’s Russia
, 282.
Cf. Roland Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy,”
Russia Profile
(October 13, 2009). According to Oliphant, “VTsIOM’s General Director Valery Fyodorov
tried to anticipate the discrepancy in a press release, citing the experimental use
of SMS technology and saying that such differences are ‘normal,’ because ‘the goal
of the exit poll is not to check the work of electoral commissions, but to capture
the general trends of the vote and report them to the public as soon as possible.’”
“That may be so,” wrote Oliphant, “but a 20 percent margin of error is well beyond
the generally accepted standard, as some commentators have already pointed out.” In
the exit polls the Communist Party got 17.7 percent, Yabloko got 13.6 percent, and
A Just Russia 8.4 percent. The two last parties were above the 7 percent hurdle and
should, normally, have been represented in the city council. Cf. also “Oppozitsiya
budet protestovat protiv itogov vyborov v Mosgordumu,”
Newsru.com
(October 16, 2009).
Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy.”
Mikhai Tulsky, “Falsifikatsii: narusheniya i vbrosy v tsifrach i faktakh,”
Novoe Vremya
no. 37 (October 19, 2009).
“Mikhail Gorbachev: Na glazakh u vsekh vybory prevratili v nasmeshku nad ludmi,”
Novaya Gazeta
no. 116 (October 19, 2009).
“Regional Elections Go According to the Kremlin’s Script,”
RFE/RL Newsline
(October 12, 2009).
http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1849659.html
.
According to
Gazeta
these elections were no cleaner compared with those of October 2009. Pressure was
exerted on state-sector workers. There was also manipulation of absentee voting and
early voting. (Cf. Kynev, Aleksandr. “Preodolevaya Vertikal,”
Gazeta
(March 15, 2010).)
Julia Ioffe, “A Happy Defeat for the Kremlin,”
Foreign Policy
(March 16, 2010).
Robert Coalson, “Victory in Defeat,”
RFE/RL
(March 15, 2010).
There is a Russian joke that the only political alternation the country has known
is between bald and not bald leaders. This is, indeed, striking, if one considers
the following succession: tsar Nicholas II–Lenin (bald)–Stalin–Khrushchev (bald)–Brezhnev–Andropov
(bald)–Chernenko–Gorbachev (bald)–Yeltsin–Putin (bald)–Medvedev–Putin (bald). As a
matter of fact,
this
kind of alternation worked well over the last century.
It was the result of a Kremlin-inspired merger of three parties: the liberal Union
of Right Forces, Civilian Power, and the Democratic Party of Russia.
Yekatarina Vinokurova, “Yo-Partiya: Mikhail Prokhorov gotov vozglavit ‘Pravoe Delo,’”
Gazeta.ru
(May 16, 2011).
Maria-Luisa Tirmaste and Natalya Bashlykova, “Mikhailu Prokhorovu pora zanyatsya svoim
delom,”
Kommersant
(September 16, 2011).
Pavel K. Baev, “Moscow Dithers over New Scandal and Forgets the Old Tragedy,”
Eurasia Daily Monitor
8, no. 171 (September 19, 2011).
Cf. “Rogozin’s New Rodina Registered,”
Moscow Times
(August 22, 2011).
Cf. Robert Coalson, “United Russia, Putin Prepare For National Elections,”
RFE/RL
(May 12, 2011).
“Ignatov: Narodnoy front: modernizatsiya ‘Yedinoy Rossii,’”
Yedinaya Rossiya ofitsialnyy sait partii
(May 10, 2011).
Andrey Kolesnikov, “Tea with Putin-2,”
Novaya Gazeta
(May 12, 2011).
Cf. Ilya Kharlamov, “Court Refuses to Register Russia’s PARNAS Party,”
The Voice of Russia
(June 23, 2011).
Cf. Jadwiga Rogoza, “The Kremlin’s New Political Project,”
Eastweek
, Centre for Eastern Studies (March 20, 2013).
“All-Russia People’s Front Organising Committees to Be Created in All Regions by May
20,”
Itar Tass
(May 6, 2013).
“Putin izbran liderom Fronta,”
Interfaks
(June 12, 2013).
“Surkov and Prokhorov Spin Election,”
Moscow Times
(December 7, 2011).
Julia Smirnova,“Wie Russlands patriotische Kosaken Moskau erobern,”
Die Welt
(November 28, 2012).
“Medvedev Invites Opposition to Speak,”
RIA Novosti
(March 27, 2013).
Cf. Aleksandra Samarina and Ivan Rodin, “Partiyno-politicheskiy modern,”
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
(April 7, 2010).
Emilio Gentile,
Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? Histoire et interprétation
(Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 41.
Renzo De Felice,
Brève histoire du fascisme
(Paris: Éditions Audibert, 2002), 46.
De Felice,
Brève histoire du fascisme
, 46.
Possibly different clans are behind the launch of different pro-Kremlin parties. According
to Philip P. Pan, Dmitry Medvedev was behind the launch of
Pravoe Delo
(The Right Cause), on February 18, 2009. The core of this new party was formed by
a former liberal opposition party, the Union of Right Forces, which had been convinced
by Vladislav Surkov to transform itself in a pro-Kremlin party. Leonid Gozman, one
of the leaders of The Right Cause, “said he considered the effort an attempt by Medvedev
to build a base of support.” But he immediately added that “he saw no serious differences
between Medvedev’s and Putin’s policies.” (Philip P. Pan, “Stepping Out From Putin’s
Shadow,”
The Washington Post
(February 9, 2009).)
Roy Medvedev seemed to anticipate this scenario in a biography of Dmitry Medvedev.
“[T]he power question in Russia has been resolved,” he wrote, “and not only for the
next four years. One can say with certainty that this question has also been resolved
for the next twelve [years], and, maybe, even more.” (Cf. Roy Medvedev,
Dmitry Medvedev: Prezident Rossiyskoy Federatsii
(Moscow: Vremya, 2008), 5.) That President Dmitry Medvedev was ready to play a subservient
role in his relationship with his future prime minister was evident in the words he
spoke before being elected: “As the President said, I will work with the government,
according to its wishes, like clockwork. I am a man . . . who worked with the President
for 17 years” (ibid.). Medvedev was exactly the kind of president Prime Minister Putin
needed.
This scenario was predicted by Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s prime minister
for almost four years until 2004, but has since fallen out with the leadership and
now heads an opposition party. “I am convinced,” said Kasyanov in 2009, “that Putin
will run in 2012 for two six-year terms.” “Putin’s bid,” he added, “[is] to become
the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Stalin.” (Conor Humphries, “Russian Ex-PM
Says Putin Will Rule to 2024,” Reuters (September 25, 2009).)