The Vengeance of
History
(Russian elections follow-up)
By Israel Shamir
1. The Likes Parade
Moscow saw its biggest demo in a
decade last Saturday. It was a feel-good peaceful
manifestation of youthful Facebook users, and it was
already nicknamed the Likes Parade, as the prospective
participants had clicked on “like” in response to the
call to demonstrate. The predictions were dire: some
expected clashes and bloody martyrdom, others hoped for
a conquest of the Kremlin and revolution. However things
went smoothly. Police were friendly too; riot police
were stationed far away near Kremlin gates so as not to
annoy the people. The speakers stressed their desire to
avoid revolutionary upheaval; there were speakers from
diverse groups including nationalists, the far left,
liberals and the far right.
The big winners of the elections (the
communists of KPRF and Fair Russia) sent some token
representatives but stayed away en masse, leaving the
ground to small opposition groups. Crowd assessments
varied from 30 to 90 thousand; not too many for a city
of 15 million inhabitants, but undoubtedly impressive.
It could also serve as a wakeup call
to the Putin administration: for too long a time, they
banked on their hold on the mainstream media and on the
passivity of the people. Now they have begun to act: the
state-owned TV broadcasted pictures of the demo and
provided overwhelmingly conservative commentary. Until
now, this TV network had preferred to show
non-political entertainment, completely blocking out
real current events.
The TV program included frightening
stories from Cairo, where the Tahrir revolution
undermined the economy and brought the Islamists within
reach of power; pictures of the Russian aircraft carrier
Admiral Kuznetsov on its way to Syria; and even a
previously lost interview of the late writer Alexander
Solzhenitsyn speaking against revolutions in general.
Memories of traumatic 1990 were brought back to scare a
lot of ordinary Russians. The message was for peaceful
and consistent changes, as against revolutions and
upheavals, and this resonated well with rather
conservative Russian public outside of the big cities.
However, there are strong voices for
change; and these voices found comfort in US Secretary
of State Hilary Clinton’s support. The communists could
not stay away from the protests, fearing their own
marginalisation; they will demonstrate on December 18th.
Putin has some time left until March
when he is due for re-election or removal. There is a
feeling that he will lose if he should continue to rule
by the old methods and rely on the same people.
Apparently he understands that, and has decided that
his campaign will be run by the recently formed
Popular Front instead of tarnished United Russia. But
this is hardly enough. The opposition is demanding a
recount and/or reelection; this call may be beaten only
by more impressive real deeds.
Putin has to find broad popular support -- rely upon the
communists, the winners of the parliamentary elections,
and remove the most hated and most corrupt officials he
inherited from Yeltsin’s administration. This would
entail parting ways with neoliberalism's model and
embracing nationalization of resources, mobilization
economics, putting an end to the offshore activities,
repatriation of funds from overseas banks, progressive
taxation (if not confiscation) of the super-rich and
their assets.
This is a tall order, for Putin played ball with the
“offshore aristocracy” and supported the neoliberal
agenda. But he may do it in order to survive. US
ex-presidential candidate McCain recently threatened
Putin with the fate of Kaddafi, and this threat was
repeated by some pro-Western protesters in Moscow. This
will hardly make him more flexible to Western pressure:
Kaddafi followed instructions from Washington for the
last five years until his murder -- Putin will not
repeat his mistake.
2. Was there election fraud
to any great extent? Up to a point. The United Russia
did well in the countryside, in small towns (above 50%)
and in the national (ethnic) republics (above 80%). It
did less well in the big cities and in Russian (as
opposed to ethnic republics) heartland – about 35% of
the vote. The total probably is similar to the official
result.
The best tool to judge are the
polls: if the results were manipulated, they would be at
great variance with the predictions. The US Moscow
embassy confidential cable
09MOSCOW2530 available to us courtesy of Wikileaks
assesses Russian pollsters as rather reliable: “Russian
public opinion polling firms and their staffs exhibited
a thorough knowledge of current survey methods, and the
staff we spoke with demonstrated high standards of
professionalism. Presnyakova felt that, all other issues
aside, the well educated analysts working at the four
organizations maintained a high level of professional
ethics. She said they would not "massage" data to
achieve a particular result. Nothing we found
contradicted this sentiment. …The Duma elections of
December 2007 provide a worthwhile test of the four
polling organizations. By comparing how these
organizations predictions square with actual results, a
clearer picture emerges of how well each firm does in
estimating public opinion”.
“The table below provides the
estimates for the organizations in the week just prior
to the Duma elections. The bottom line provides the
actual results.
United Just Russia
KPRF LDPR
VTsIOM 62
12 8 7
Levada Center 66
12 8 6
Election Results 64
12 8 8
Apparently their prediction ability
is quite good. As for last week elections, they
predicted the results with a similar degree of
precision:
ВЦИОМ, 19-20 ноября 2011
54 %
17 % 12 %
10 %
Левада-центр, 11 ноября 2011
— 53 %
20 % 12 %
9 %
Election
results 49% 19%
11%
For this reason, one should take the
cries of fraud with a grain of salt. This does not mean
the elections were fair and honest: the communists and
the opposition had very little access to the mainstream
media. I was told by an editor of a large Moscow
newspaper that the communists refuse to grease the
media's wheels, and as a result they are being blocked
from the printed media as well. United Russia, I was
told, pays very well, and this ensures its good image in
the press. This is the case on the public TV as well.
Though state-owned TV is not allowed to charge parties,
my TV contacts told me that other parties pay for their
coverage with funds provided by the Kremlin, while the
communists get no funds and do not pay. In short, the
Russian elections are as unfair as anywhere in the
money-based world.
Vengeance of history
However, the most interesting part of
the story remained obscured for Western readers, and
that is the comeback of communists. In the 1990s, the
story of the decade was the demise of communism. It was
supposed to be dead for good, this aberration of sacred
property rights; and celebrating its death, Francis
Fukuyama declared The End of History. But apparently
rumours of its death were somewhat exaggerated.
The comeback has some good reasons in
the Russian experience. While for the West the 1990s
were not bad, the Russians (and other post-Soviet
states) had an awful time. Their leaders derailed the
country in order to kill communism, as they admitted
later. Research institutes, hospitals, military and
industry – all the innings of the superpower - had been
turned off at the source and sent to “make money and to
become self-reliant”. In scientific centres this drastic
‘market reform’ led to starvation and to mass
immigration; while the father of the reform, the late
Egor Gaydar, called for “adjustment to the means”.
Though things have improved greatly since 1992, they are
still not as good as they were in Soviet days. Now
people refuse to view the restoration of capitalism as
the last word which can’t be overturned.
This success of communists is not
surprising to careful readers of the Wikileaks cables.
In a cable called “Communist Party: Not Dead Yet”, the
US Ambassador in Moscow reported to the State Department
in 2006: “Most observers describe the Communist Party (KPRF)
as a party on life-support sustained by nostalgic
pensioners. The cliché has it that as party stalwart's
die off, so too will the KPRF. This assessment, however,
ignores a relatively constant level of support, despite
the demographics, and the attraction that some feel for
a well-defined political party structure. The KPRF
accommodates not only the "Soviet" socialist
traditionalists, but also a new generation of
intellectuals who wish, literally, to overthrow Russia's
current system which they believe only helps a select
few.”
For a while (between 2003 and 2008)
the Party lost its following as Russia received oil
revenues and Putin stabilised economy, but after the
2008 crisis, it picked up again. The US Ambassador wrote
in 2009: “The Communist Party has benefited from the
economic crisis by attracting increased membership and
strengthening its position as a populist alternative to
the party of power, United Russia. The invigorated
Communists demonstrated that they can organize rallies
across the country, and most observers expect KPRF will
pick up votes in March 1 regional elections. These
successes have resulted from the party's three-pronged
strategy: parliamentary initiatives aimed at pocketbook
issues; public protests and actions that demonstrate
party vigor; and an "ideological campaign" to
communicate their message and appeal to new and younger
voters.”
“Communist leaders have lambasted the
ruling government's handling of the economic crisis,
claiming that it favors the rich and ignores systemic
weaknesses of the capitalist system. In a February 5
meeting, KPRF Deputy Chairman Ivan Melnikov told us that
the government's anti-crisis strategy was 'not
effective' and was 'the same as the Titanic's after it
hit the iceberg...to save the first-class passengers
first.' The KPRF has responded to the government's
anti-crisis measures with far-reaching proposals for
nationalization and aggressive state intervention to
bolster production and employment. KPRF Chairman Gennadi
Zyuganov has repeatedly called for complete government
takeover of all natural resources in Russia in order to
distribute the country's wealth directly to its
citizens. Zyuganov also called on Putin and Medvedev to
sack Finance Minister Aleksey Kudrin for his alleged
bungling of the government's anti-crisis policies”.
This wish of communists was recently
fulfilled, and Alexei Kudrin has been sacked.
The financial crisis in Europe and in
the US makes this shift of Russian public opinion
especially important. The position of the 99% (using the
meme coined by the OWS) went south with the destruction
of the communist option in 1991, when the 1% succeeded
in convincing the rest that there is no alternative to
their version of the market and that resistance is
futile. With the resurrection of Russian communism,
Americans and Europeans will regain some leverage
vis-á-vis their elites, and, who knows, perhaps
they will find their own way out of the impasse.
