Making sense of the
Russian elections
By Israel Shamir
Moscow is unusually warm: the
temperature refuses to dip below zero degrees
Centigrade, the freezing point. Instead, it is wet and
dark. The sun gets up late and goes to sleep early. To
make matters worse, President Medvedev decided to keep
Russia on daylight savings time throughout winter. To
offset this stupid decision, Christmas illumination was
turned on a month before the usual time, in order to
cheer up the voters. Now it lights the way for the
armoured vans of the riot police sent in to pacify the
cheery electorate.
The parliamentary elections were
deemed in advance as a futile and vain exercise of no
practical importance. “It does not matter how you
vote, what matters is how they count”, pundits
said. But the results were quite impressive and they
point to great changes ahead. The Russians have said to
communism: “Come back, all is forgiven.” They
effectively voted to restore the Soviet Union, in one
form or another. Perhaps this vote will not be acted
upon, but now we know – the people are disappointed with
capitalism, with the low place of post-Soviet Russia in
the world and with the marriage of big business and
government.
If communists proved the fallacy of
their ideas in 70 years, the capitalists needed only
twenty years to achieve this same result, quipped Maxim
Kantor, a prominent modern Russian painter, writer and
thinker. The twentieth anniversary of the restoration of
capitalism that Russia commemorated this year was not a
cause for celebration but rather for sad second
thoughts. The Russians loudly regretted the course taken
by their country in 1991; the failed coup of August
1991, this last ditch attempt to preserve communism, has
been reassessed in a positive light, while the brave
Harvard boys of yesteryear who initiated the reforms are
seen as criminals. Yeltsin and Gorbachev are out, Stalin
is in.
Despite the falsifications of
election results(discussed below), the communists (CPRF
and their splinter party the Just Russia or SR) greatly
increased their share and can be considered the true
winners. The ruling United Russia (ER) party suffered
huge losses. A loose confederation of power-seeking
individuals, it could easily fall apart. There is a
distinct possibility of the communists being able to
form the government, that is, if they should be asked to
do so by the President.
Pro-capitalist and right-wing parties
were decimated by the voters. Neoliberal Right Cause
(PD), the party of choice for market believers,
languished with less than one per cent of the vote. The
liberal, pro-Western Apple Party (half-jokingly referred
to as “the Steve Jobs party”) did not cross the
electoral threshold. Many Russians think that,
discounting falsifications, the communists “really” got
over 50%, while the ER actually got less, perhaps much
less. Given the chance, the people voted for communists,
as had been predicted a few months ago by VT Tretyakov,
a senior Russian journalist and chief editor, during an
address to a Washington DC think tank. He correctly said
that in fairly honest elections, the communists will
carry the day, and the liberals will be gone, and he was
right. If this change of heart does not find its
expression in political action, people will feel
cheated.
This turn towards communism took
place with Russia busily restoring its lost legacy:
·
The North Stream
pipeline connected Russian gas with European consumers
directly, leaving Poland (and by proxy, the US) without
a point of leverage. Oil and gas pipelines are being
built towards China, promising Russia a choice of
customers.
·
Putin’s idea of a
Eurasian Union began to take shape. The Ukraine has
made friendly gestures, the crisis of Belarus is over,
Kazakhstan is firmly inside.
·
The Russian Navy
aircraft carrier went to the shores of Syria, in a rare
display of power, while Qatar’s ambassador in Moscow has
been sent packing, as this tiny but rich emirate is
apparently leading the anti-Syrian campaign.
·
Last month, the
fabulous Bolshoi theatre was lovingly and expensively
restored to its purple-and-gold old glory. To
conservative viewers’ chagrin, Glinka’s
Ruslan and Ludmila opera (with wonderful American
singer Charles Workman) was directed in an avant-garde
manner, showing that the theatre will not act as a
museum piece but will produce up-to-date art.
·
Sochi is about to
become the most expensive and luxurious sea-and-mountain
resort ever in preparation for the Winter Olympics;
·
Moscow has been
beautified; thirty-foot-high elaborately decorated
Christmas trees have been placed at prominent locations
around the city, making the darkness of its northern
nights almost bearable. City parks have been granted
huge budgets for improvement; skating rinks have been
prepared. Even fountains that collapsed twenty years ago
have been rebuilt.
·
But the most important
recent sign of a resurgent Russia took place this month:
A holy relic, the Virgin Mary’s Sash, has been brought
to Moscow from its repository at sacred Mount Athos. A
staggering three million Muscovites venerated it,
queuing up for twenty-four hours on average in freezing
temperatures. This was Russia's asymmetric response to
America's Black Friday shopping-mall queues.
Russia is full of problems, too.
Russia lost twenty million lives in the transition to
capitalism with little to show for it; its villages
stand empty, a brain drain has sent the best and
brightest overseas. Capital flight bleeds Russia dry;
every search for a company’s owners ends at a
Cyprus-registered offshore trust. Bribes and extortion
are ubiquitous; infrastructure is worn down,
de-industrialisation has undermined the working class;
agricultural lands have been taken over by speculators.
The army is demoralised, its weapons outmoded, and
Russian education is as bad as anywhere.
The rich are too rich, and one per
cent of Russia’s population owns much of the country’s
wealth. This wealth is not considered legitimate by
people: the ongoing Berezovsky vs. Abramovich court case
offered legal proof that the fabulous riches of the New
Russians were obtained by embezzling national wealth.
What's worse, big business is fully integrated with the
government; oligarchs and government officials
intermarry and live separately from hoi polloi.
People are quite unhappy with what
they see as a dictatorial or even an “occupation”
regime. While Putin is considered a hostile leader by
the West, the Russians think he is too obliging to the
West, a centrepiece of the regime installed in the 90s.
They would prefer a stronger anti-imperialist position
any day.
The elections may have little direct
consequence: The Russian constitution was written by
Boris Yeltsin after he shelled Parliament in 1993 and
imposed his personal rule (to the standing ovation of
the Western media). This constitution allows the
president to disregard Parliament. But the election
results show the changed public mood.
And if that's not enough, a big
demonstration of some ten thousand citizens flared up in
the middle of Moscow – something unheard of since 1993.
The demonstrators protested against massive
falsifications of election results. Three hundred were
arrested, among them popular and populist blogger Alexei
Navalny who created the meme “Party of Thieves and
Cheats” for the United Russia. The next day police
dispersed another demo in the centre.
With Arab Spring in the background,
the authorities are worried. Troops have been dispatched
to Moscow. Though there is no immediate prospect of
riots, the traditionally heavy-handed Russian
authorities never use a few policemen if they can send a
brigade, and so they deployed the fearsome Dzerzhinsky
Special Force brigade.
Were the elections falsified?
Independent observers reported many irregularities in
Moscow; probably it was even worse elsewhere. It seems
that the ruling ER party activists inserted many fake
ballots, and probably skewed the results in their
favour. A poll made by NGO Golos on the basis of
a few polling places with no irregularities showed that
the communists won big, while the ER almost collapsed at
the polls. On the web, there are claims of massive
distortions following the vote count. It is hard
to extrapolate from the Moscow results to the whole
country, but the Russians believe that the results were
falsified. They are also tired of their Teflon rulers.
|
ER |
SR |
CPRF |
LDPR |
Official Results |
49% |
13% |
19 % |
11% |
Popularly believed
|
32% |
17% |
35% |
11% |
This should provide a pretext for a
revolution, but present-day communist leaders are not
made of stern stuff like their legendary predecessors.
They do not demand a recount, and generally accept their
fate equivocally. In 1996, the communists won the
elections, but accepted defeat as they were afraid of
Yeltsin’s hit men led by the ruthless oligarch Boris
Berezovsky. They are adamant about avoiding civil war;
and it is doubted whether the super-wealthy will give up
their wealth and positions just because ordinary people
voted this or that way. Many people believe that
communist leaders are just part of the same ruling
system, a kind of HM loyal opposition.
It is the right-wing opposition that
is more persistent in denouncing the electoral
manipulations, though no polls, independent or
otherwise, indicate that their parties were successful.
Moreover, this opposition is not famous for its love of
democracy. Prominent Russian right-wing journalist Ms
Julia Latynina has already called for the termination
of “the farce of democracy”: the Russian people are
too poor, she said, to be allowed the right to vote, as
they are likely to vote against their betters. This
opinion was published in the best-known opposition paper
Novaya Gazeta (owned by oligarch Mr Lebedev,
owner of the British Independent). For the Right,
this is a chance to attack Putin and his regime.
The right wing is strongly anti-Putin;
not so the communists who are ready to work with Putin
any time. Can Putin change his spots and become Putin-2,
a pro-communist president who will restore the Soviet
Union and break the power of the oligarchs? He could
certainly adopt some communist rhetoric and use the
communist support. Judging by his recent utterances at
the Valdai forum, he is likely to turn Russia leftwards,
with communists or without.
But stability of his regime is not
certain. Putin should act swiftly if he wants to ride
the wave of popular feelings, instead of being swept
away by it. Armoured vans are the last things he needs.
English language version edited by
Ken Freeland