There is an "election" going on in Russia. Not an election, but an
"election." This is not an election that falls short of international
standards. It is not a democratic, a flawed democratic, or even a
pseudo-democratic process. According to a recent RFE/RL poll, nearly
two-thirds of voting-age Russians don't believe the elections will be
conducted honestly. Nearly half say if they do vote, it will be out of a
sense of "duty."
The Kremlin, regardless, is expending
considerable effort to create the illusion of a democratic process, with
the Kremlin-controlled election agencies, the Kremlin-controlled
legislature, and the Kremlin-controlled media, which constantly intones
the mantra that Russia is following its own democratic path, that the
country has a reliable democratic system. "We don't need helpers in
organizing elections like in Africa or Kosovo," a Central Election
Commission member said in October. "We have an established democratic
system."
Here are five myths the Kremlin's political spin machine has been
working nonstop to promote.
1) President Vladimir Putin is popular.
Polls consistently show Putin with a
popularity rating of 60 to 70 percent. But these polls are part of an
antidemocratic system, one where conformist political messages are
drummed into the populace constantly while high-profile examples of the
consequences of dissent -- from dispossession to exile to murder -- are
frequently reinforced. No other political figures in Russia have even
minimal name recognition, and even people who regularly appear on state
television to sycophantically praise the leader are not known to the
public by name.
"Popularity" in Russia is something the Kremlin gives and takes away.
Six days after the largely unknown Viktor Zubkov was named prime
minister in September, a poll found that 40 percent of Russians thought
he'd be the next president of Russia. Because Putin is the only
political figure with any significant stature in Russia, he attracts
personal credit for everything that happens in the country, all of which
is positively spun in the state-controlled media. However, the
presidential administration understands how quickly setbacks can erode
even Putin's support, as it learned in 2001 when Putin was lambasted for
failing to show sympathy for the trapped crew of the "Kursk" nuclear
submarine and in 2005 when pensioners took to the streets in the
thousands calling for Putin's resignation because of a controversial
social-benefits reform.
Putin's popularity ratings are a bubble that exist within a political
vacuum, a bubble that nonetheless needs to be continuously pumped up
with injections of hot air from state television.
2) Parties matter.
Putin and his team have worked hard over the
last seven years to bring the political-party system under control, and
they have succeeded. Although there was some evidence the plan was to
create a system based on two Kremlin-friendly parties, the Kremlin's
commitment to that idea was never solid. Now it appears Soviet-era
political impulses have taken over and the efficiency of a single-party
monolith has proven too attractive.
There are 11 parties participating in the current campaign, but only one
counts. Propped up by Putin and more than two-thirds of Russia's
regional leaders, plus thousands of mayors and other apparatchiks, the
Unified Russia party has -- as it did in 2003 -- ignored the other
parties and focused entirely on using its vast financial and
administrative resources to persuade a cynical public that since there
is no beating them, you'd best join them.
Since its creation, it has followed the direction of the presidential
administration, which in turn has not even bothered to create the
impression that it takes the party's opinions into consideration. Party
leaders were stunned when Putin announced unexpectedly on October 1 that
he would head Unified Russia’s list of candidates for the Duma
elections.
As for the other parties, some -- the Liberal Democratic Party of
Russia, A Just Russia, and Civic Force -- are Kremlin-controlled
pseudo-opposition groups designed to muddle the situation and siphon
votes away from independent organizations. The real opposition parties
are financially starved groups that must spend all their resources
merely in order to comply with the strict laws on forming and
registering parties; that are shut out of the national media; and that
are harassed, ridiculed, and parodied by Kremlin-inspired pseudo-NGOs.
3) Issues matter.
The platform of Unified Russia's campaign is
a collection of Putin speeches nebulously called "Putin's Plan," and it
is not discussing any issues more sophisticated than the slogan "Putin's
Plan Is Russia's Victory."
As it did in 2003, Unified Russia has refused to participate in campaign
debates with opposition parties. Nonetheless, because of the party's
domination of state-television news coverage, 8 percent of Russians in a
recent poll said they remembered seeing Unified Russia members in
televised debates and 69 percent of Russians who said they watched the
debates thought that Unified Russia performed well in them.
Although Unified Russia has turned the elections into a referendum on
Putin and his course, observers know that "Putin's course" is whatever
Putin and his inner circle deem expedient at the moment.
Policy pronouncements by the minor also-rans are ridiculed at best, and
as a rule ignored. In addition, because the violations of election
standards by the authorities, by Unified Russia, and by bespoke
“nongovernmental” outfits like the militant Nashi youth group have been
so frequent and so outrageous, opposition parties spend the lion's share
of their time and effort cataloging and complaining about them. There is
literally no time to discuss matters such as the creeping
renationalization of the economy or the systematic dismantling of civil
society.
4) Election rules matter.
Any party advertisement that does not include
a direct, literal appeal to vote is not considered part of the campaign
and is not covered by campaign or campaign-finance laws, the Central
Election Commission has ruled in connection with complaints about
Unified Russia flooding the country with T-shirts, notebooks, backpacks,
and bottles of vodka.
On the other hand, the Federal Security Service, the KGB successor
organization charged primarily with preventing terrorism, is
investigating a Communist Party leaflet that contains jokes about
Unified Russia and Putin. Police in cities around the country have
confiscated campaign materials of the Union of Rightist Forces on
pretexts ranging from the need to test them for narcotics to the need to
analyze their content for signs of extremism or hidden advertising.
Opposition activists have been questioned by police in their homes and
detained without cause on the streets. Garry Kasparov, head of the
opposition Other Russia coalition -- which can't even participate in the
elections because the Kremlin refused to register it -- spent five days
in detention for participating in an unsanctioned demonstration, while
six more Other Russia activists were sentenced this week to six days in
jail for allegedly resisting arrest. Ivan Bolshakov, a leading Yabloko
youth activist and Duma candidate from Nizhny Novgorod, was arrested on
November 20 in Moscow hours after filing a complaint against Putin with
the Central Election Commission on charges stemming from a demonstration
he attended in May. Yabloko activist Farid Babayev was shot dead in
Daghestan following his criticism of the republican administration's
manipulation of the election campaign.
Unified Russia has filed 11 cases against newspapers in the city of
Saratov alone, having recently won a hefty decision against one
cash-strapped paper. Neither Putin nor the vast majority of the nearly
70 Category A officials (federal ministers and regional heads) running
for the Duma on the Unified Russia ticket is taking administrative leave
during the campaign. The governor of Novosibirsk Oblast told journalists
he can't leave his post because of upcoming events like "the celebration
of the harvest, the 70th anniversary of the oblast, and the coming of
winter."
5) Election results will reflect the public will.
This myth is perhaps the most important from
the Kremlin's point of view. Analysts in Russia and the West have argued
Putin is seeking a landslide in the elections so he can -- under the
cover of an apparent popular mandate -- affect some unspecified major
overhaul to the state structure and/or the constitution. Those changes
will likely institutionalize Putin's increasingly totalitarian political
system by introducing further antidemocratic measures such as the
elimination of the direct election of the president.
No one knows what those changes -- "Putin's Plan" -- will be. So no one
can vote for them. But even if Russians did know what that plan is, a
political system without alternatives cannot produce an endorsement of
that plan. Fewer than one in five respondents in the RFE/RL poll believe
the results of the vote will reflect the true will of the electorate.
The Russian legislative elections will produce a "landslide," but it
will be no more meaningful than similar landslides that are produced in
other controlled political systems, such as those in most Central Asian
countries. Unified Russia's victory will be a victory for Putin and his
circle. But it won't be anything more than that. |