Russian premier Vladimir Putin today blamed US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for fomenting political unrest following this week’s fraudulent elections (above).
It’s no wonder he’s upset, The Economist notes:
Russia’s elections are not intended to produce surprises, just as its streets are not meant to heave with protesters and its political leaders are not supposed to be publicly booed. The country’s ‘managed democracy’, with the media muzzled, only tame opposition candidates allowed and widespread vote-rigging, is designed to hand big victories to Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party.
So what happened to generate Russia’s biggest pro-democracy demonstrations – before troops suppressed the protests – in years?
Recent opinion surveys confirm that Russians are “hardly yearning for liberalism” but the prosperity-for-docility social compact that has buttressed Putinism is fraying due, as the comrades used to say, to its inherent contradictions:
In order to hold on to power, he has kept a tight grip on the economy. As a result both Russia and the regime’s patronage system remain heavily dependent on oil and gas. Corruption and inefficiency mean that the budget will not balance unless oil prices stay around $110 a barrel—which, given the grim global outlook, they are not likely to. Capital and talent are fleeing an economy that offers few opportunities. Growth rates are likely to come down. Without rising living standards, resentment against the government is likely to swell.
Putin won’t need reminding that twenty years ago a comparable contradiction brought down the Soviet Union.
Last week’s State Duma elections were “the most flawed” to date in Russia’s ersatz sovereign democracy, said Golos, the country’s leading election monitor.
But such elections are less about outcomes than sending signals, writes Leon Aron writes in The New Republic:
Two weeks before the previous Duma “election” in 2007, at a nationally televised United Russia rally in Moscow’s largest stadium, Putin compared pro-democracy opposition to “jackals” searching for “crumbs” near Western embassies. This time, he signaled the tightening of the screws by labeling “Judas” the only independent national election monitor watchdog, Golos, which receives grants from the Western governmental and non-governmental agencies —or as Putin put it, from those who “brief [Golos] on how to ‘work’ in order to influence the election campaign in our country.”
The result has effectively killed the Obama administration’s “reset” of US-Russian relations.
“Policymakers in Washington probably had hoped that détente’s momentum would bridge the ideological chasms separating the United States and Putin’s Russia,” writes Aron, author of the forthcoming Roads to the Temple: Memory, Truth, Ideas and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution 1987-1991.
“It must have come as a shock to the White House to behold the ferocity with which the Kremlin has set about demolishing the reset’s most cherished dreams,” but “Washington’s best hopes have broken against the ‘reality’ of the domestic political imperatives of an authoritarian regime, one in need of an external enemy.”
Russian history and culture may indicate an ingrained passivity or deference to state power, but today’s citizens are highly-educated, well-traveled and reportedly use the internet more than any other European country in Europe. In 1991, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in defense of liberty.
Recent events raise “the most important question of all,” Aron concludes:
How much longer? How much longer can all these offenses to dignity be tolerated? This question will loom, like a giant watermark, over increasingly meaningless Potemkin “politics” and will grow darker with each month. That the answer is not yet known doesn’t diminish by an iota the urgency and the fatefulness of the query.
Golos is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.
