Posted on 03/01/2008 5:06:46 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Russia is a country with more than its fair share of idiosyncrasies, yet even by its standards tomorrow's presidential vote takes peculiarity to the extreme. Those Russians who choose to cast their ballots will be participating in an election that is not really an election, in order to choose a president who, most likely, will not really be a president.
Add to this the fact that Vladimir Putin is also only sort-of stepping down - he will instead return as prime minister - and you have a classic example of what the Kremlin once called "managed democracy".
Everyone in Russia has known for the past three months who their next president will be. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy prime minister and a longtime Putin acolyte, was chosen by a small group of Kremlin cronies at a papal-style conclave in December and presented to the people.
How many will bother to go through the charade of voting is almost irrelevant - although Russians are a dutiful bunch, and slackers have been tempted with prizes or threatened with the sack. Even if this goes wrong, peripheral matters such as turn-out and margin of victory are fairly easy to fix, especially as Western observers are boycotting the vote.
Just to be on the safe side, the Kremlin has also banned any of Putin's serious critics from standing. Three unelectable misfits have been allowed to mount token challenges.
Most Russians don't seem to mind that they have so little say. They would much rather Putin dispensed with such niceties as the constitution - which precluded him from serving a third term - but they will happily take a Putin-Medvedev package so long as Putin remains in charge.
Western leaders are less happy. Moscow's diplomatic corps would like to believe that Medvedev could shed his mentor's influence and move Russia away from Putin's confrontational approach. A few cling to encouraging traits: unlike Putin, the 42-year-old is not a former KGB spy - he was a lawyer and a businessman - and is a relative liberal on the economy. He has also been less caustic towards the West than his mentor.
However, the consensus is that such optimism is misplaced. From the time that he began sharing a desk with Putin at St Petersburg city hall in 1992, Medvedev has shown nothing but subservience towards his boss, who is a decade older. Even if he did try to break free, the Kremlin machine is against him. Medvedev would need to create a faction of loyalists, and, as the administration is full of Putin's ex-KGB comrades, his chances seem slight.
Indeed, Medvedev has shown no inclination of pursuing his own course. He has even had voice coaching lessons to make him sound more like Putin, and this week promised to change nothing that his predecessor has done.
For Russians, this is welcome news. Since Putin came to power in 2000, Russia has become a much better place to live for many.
In the chaotic decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Russians lived in misery, deeply resentful of the tiny cadre of oligarchs that accumulated vast wealth at their expense. The income disparity is still stark, but an energy-driven boom has given Russia new lustre. With the economy expanding at about 10 per cent and a small but aggressively consumerist middle class finding its feet, this is a country transformed.
Many still cannot get to grips with the idea of a disposable income. "I feel like I'm bathing in chocolate," says Irina Babinsteva, the wife of a construction company proprietor in Tyumen. Whereas once she had to save for six months to buy an illicit pair of Levi jeans, Babintseva now takes four holidays a year and does her shopping in Miami and Milan.
Russians are so terrified that instability will cause a return to the 1990s, or the shortages of Communist times, that many support Putin out of self-preservation: even the poor believe that he represents their best chance. He has also restored a sense of national pride and his attacks on the West are broadly welcomed.
In exchange for the promise of prosperity and stability, however, Russians have been asked to sacrifice democracy. Freedom of expression has been curtailed, the independence of parliament crushed and concepts of transparency and accountability ditched.
Just as Putin has used the trappings of Soviet and Tsarist rule to make Russia appear formidable again, so he has resurrected some of the more unwholesome attributes of the communist past. Local human rights activists say that Putin has jailed hundreds of people - possibly many more - for political reasons.
As the number of prisoners has increased, so penal conditions have grown more brutal, to the point where some are starting to make comparisons with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
Recent video footage posted on the internet shows naked inmates screaming as they are beaten at a prison camp near Yekaterinburg. The video was handed anonymously to Lev Ponomaryov, a tireless campaigner for prison rights, by a guard.
In many other countries, the tape would have caused an outrage. But Russians reacted barely at all. Instead, Ponomaryov was accused of "insulting a civil servant" after publishing claims that at least 40 of Russia 's 700 penal colonies had unofficially been redesignated "torture centres". He faces a possible three-year prison sentence.
The testimonies of many inmates paint a grim picture, in which prisoners were beaten, forced to swallow nails and tortured with blowtorches. One told of having his mouth sewn shut after protesting about the conditions, others of losing their legs from gangrene or suffering paralysis after their spines were broken. Sodomy is rife.
The worst beatings were often administered by "red armbands", fellow prisoners given privileges for acting as informants and enforcers - a recent innovation that mimics the system used by the Nazis. Suicides are common. In December, 700 prisoners slashed their wrists in a symbolic anti-torture protest. Another inmate bit off his own tongue, hoping to bleed to death. Although the state denies the allegations, human rights groups claim to have substantiated them.
"Putin hasn't created a totalitarian system, although it is authoritarian," Ponomaryov says. "But in the penitentiary system we have a totalitarian system and if we don't eliminate it, it will spread to all sectors of society."
It is unclear whether political prisoners are among the victims. Unlike in the Soviet past, political prisoners, of whom oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky is perhaps the most famous, are now held alongside normal inmates. But politicians are not the only nervous ones. In Akademgorodok, Siberia's fabled "science city", there is an almost tangible sense of oppression.
Scientists were the regime's first target. When Putin was still prime minister in 1999, a nuclear physicist was charged with espionage, and in 2004 sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment. Two months ago, Igor Reshetin, a rocket scientist, was sent to a "strict regime" penal colony for 11 years after being convicted of selling state secrets to China.
Yet according to the US and human rights organisations, none of the jailed scientists did anything illegal, most of them simply sharing information freely available on the internet.
In whispered conversations, Akademgorodok's scientists claim that life feels like it did in Soviet days. Sergei Dzuba, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is fearful of travelling abroad, worried that customs officers will accuse him, as they have several of his colleagues, of carrying illicit materials.
"The atmosphere has changed," he says. "We were very confident after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We became convinced that we would no longer have to live in isolation. But now, we are again distrusted."
With dozens of political and civil rights activists incarcerated, it might seem surprising that the public reaction has been so muted, especially in a country where millions died in Stalin's camps.
Perhaps an answer of sorts can be found across the Urals in Perm-36, an infamous former gulag in the village of Kutchino. It is now a museum, and I watch a school party of teenage girls trudge through the snow and into the solitary confinement block. Many weep on seeing the conditions.
Yet these are the exceptions: few pupils learn about the gulags any more. A Kremlin-sponsored history textbook introduced last month glosses over the prison camps, denigrates Boris Yeltsin and hails Stalin as the Soviet Union's greatest leader.
Sergei Kovalyov, the most famous survivor of Perm-36, is not surprised. "The Russian tragedy is that we have no notion of historical guilt," he says. "We always want to blame someone else for our suffering; the Jews, the Georgians, the imperialist West."
But, he says, the rewriting of history was inevitable with a man proud to be an ex-KGB agent running the state. Plans have just been announced to remove central Moscow's only memorial to the victims of the gulags from outside the KGB's former headquarters.
In other words, Putin leaves a disturbing legacy. Despite Medvedev's oft-quoted liberal economic credentials, there is little to suggest that he has much interest in democracy or human rights. Indeed, when many were embracing democratic ideals in the late 1980s, Medvedev proudly attended Communist Party rallies.
Russians are hoping for continuity rather than change. Whether Medvedev rules Russia as a proper president, or merely acts as a conduit for Putin, that is likely to be exactly what they get.
Will America have another Clinton?
Yes, most probably.
Are communists rulers of Capitol Hill
yes, they are.
P.S. At least Russia is not humiliated by own government.
Is Putin Stalin? Don’t think so. But is Putin a modern day Kaiser Whilhelm? Could be. And that might be worse.
Having energy is a curse, look at the Arabs.
Don’t you guys have a Russian site that allows freedom of speech?
Russia is now ruled by the KGB.
Doesn’t it seem like they would be more comfortable posting at RussiaFirst.com or DownwithBoosh.com?
Any Russian who dares criticize the Russian government gets murdered by Putin’s chekist jackals.
Chelsea???
It sure isn't going to be her mom.
Perhaps, but I would be more worried about America having a new Lenin or Leninist in the White House.
Check the polls again.
At least Russia is not humiliated by own government.
Only because Russians see nothing humiliating about their government murdering their own journalists.
When one lacks all sense of shame, it is impossible to be humiliated.
Russian site that allows freedom of speech?
Well, not Russian, but a commie site...
“Politkovskaya works for a small biweekly liberal newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Its editor, Dmitri Muratev, breathes fire at the latest tactic invented by the state to silence Politkovskaya - a smear that she has been secretly working for, and paid by, western benefactors, including the Soros Foundation.”
http://tchetchenieparis.free.fr/text/Politkovskaya-16-3-02.htm
“Putin has done his best to remove Chechnya from the headlines, not by finding a solution to the conflict but by suppressing independent reporting. After Russian authorities protested, Anna Politkovskaya, an award-winning journalist who had written eloquently about Chechnya, even had her invitation to a panel discussion at the Frankfurt book fair canceled. The reality is that the war in Chechnya rages on. Human Rights Watch has reported that last year the number of disappearances was the highest since the second war began in 1999. Despite the destruction and loss of life, Putin remains intent on using force to subdue the region.”
From: http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/articles/sorosonputin_20040616
For her, I have no tears. Nor should you. Nor anybody.
(i do despise killing of a woman though. Gulag is OK)
I’d say more like a Kruschev in a Armani suit.
Does this horrific picture not disturb you? How can you, as a Russian, even joke about the gulags?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.