Spotlight on Russia

Sunday’s regional and municipal elections in Russia were widely seen as a dress rehearsal for December’s parliamentary poll. Some 24 million people — a quarter of the electorate — were eligible to participate. The vote confirmed what analysts have long been suggesting: as the regime’s support base shrinks, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party is forced to rely on increasingly blatant fraud to preserve its legislative majorities. The tricks were on ample display: the removal of observers and journalists, ballot-stuffing, voter bribery, multiple voting with absentee certificates — even an underground factory of fake ballot papers. And those are just the documented cases.

Since its creation in 2005 for the purpose of preventing an “orange revolution” in Russia, Nashi (translation: “Ours”), a Kremlin-sponsored youth movement popularly dubbed “Putinjugend,” has served its political masters loyally and without too much scrupulousness. Those who crossed the regime’s path, be they domestic opponents or foreign diplomats, could count on Nashi’s attention. In at least two cases of assault on opposition leader Boris Nemtsov — in November 2007 and in March 2009 — the attackers were identified as current or former Nashi operatives (in the latter case, during the Sochi mayoral campaign, Mr. Nemtsov’s eyes were doused with ammonia). The opposition leader was not the only target.

The scope of corruption in Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been much discussed, documented in expert reports and quantified in international ratings. Transparency International estimates the country’s annual corruption market at $300 billion; its Corruption Perception Index placed Russia in 154th place, behind Congo and Libya. As economist Anders Ǻslund has noted, there is only one country in the world that is both richer (in terms of GDP per capita) and more corrupt than Mr. Putin’s Russia — and that is Equatorial Guinea. Yet despite many suspicions, Mr. Putin himself has not been openly named in relation to a specific scheme — until now.

The loss of moral legitimacy is an unscientific but sure warning sign for any authoritarian regime. Television channels, electoral commissions, and security services may still be safely under control, but once public association with the ruling elite becomes at best unfashionable, and at worst shameful, there can be no going back.

Vladimir Putin on trial in Moscow — an almost unimaginable idea in the context of today’s Russia. Yet the precedent, albeit in a somewhat farcical way, was set earlier this week as a Russian court — for the first time in Mr. Putin’s eleven-year rule — admitted and heard a case with the Russian leader acting as a defendant.

On December 16, 2010, during a live televised question-and-answer session, Mr. Putin accused opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, and Vladimir Milov of stealing money from the state. “What do Nemtsov, Ryzhkov, Milov, and others really want?”, the prime minister read from a viewer’s question, before asserting: “Money and power, what else do they want?! In their day they wrought havoc, in the ’90s, they stole quite a few billion along with the Berezovskys and others who are now in prison.”

In the latest annual Press Freedom Index, Russia ranked 140th in the world, between Ethiopia and Malaysia. Even putting aside the all-too-frequent murders, the origins of which are difficult to prove, Russian journalists have faced an increasing array of Kremlin-sponsored tricks designed to suppress “unwanted” information, from financial pressure and censorship to the forced closure of independent TV stations.

This week Russia marked the 80th anniversary of the birth of Boris Yeltsin, the country’s first democratically elected leader. The occasion was accorded official status. President Dmitri Medvedev, unveiling a ten-meter marble statue of his predecessor in Yekaterinburg, declared that “Russia should be grateful to President Yeltsin” and praised his “strength of character.” In Moscow, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised the audience at a stately remembrance evening in Bolshoi Theatre to “continue along Yeltsin’s path, to transform Russia into a strong and free country where human rights are fully protected.” Exhibitions dedicated to the former president opened in Moscow, Kazan, and Yekaterinburg. Tatarstan is hosting the 2011 Yeltsin Cup international junior tennis tournament. This year will see the unveiling of the Yeltsin Presidential Center and Library, built with a 3 billion ruble (US $102 million) grant from the federal budget.

Another year, another terrorist attack in Russia. On January 24, a suspected suicide bomber detonated an explosive device in the arrivals zone at Domodedovo, Moscow’s busiest airport. Thirty-five people were killed and more than a hundred were injured. As Vladimir Putin prepares for this year’s parliamentary “elections” and a possible return to the Kremlin in 2012, his “pacification” of the North Caucasus has once again been proven a failure. Not that more proof was needed after last year’s attack on Lubyanka metro station – literally under the nose of the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service.

“In Russia, you must live long — and it will become interesting.” This saying, attributed to poet Korney Chukovsky, has been validated once again. Yuri Luzhkov, until four months ago the powerful mayor of Moscow and cochairman of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, who faithfully delivered the capital’s votes to the Kremlin and sent his police to break up pro-democracy rallies, has applied for a residence permit in the Republic of Latvia. According to press reports, Mr. Luzhkov deposited 200,000 Lats (US$378,000) in subordinated capital at Rietumu Banka — an investment that, under Latvian immigration laws, qualifies him for permanent residence. The former mayor explained that Latvian (and thus EU) residency will allow him “freedom of movement.”

Russian officials have a selective approach to holidays. When it came to arresting opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on New Year’s Eve and sentencing him on January 2 (a Sunday), no effort was spared. Yet when it came to hearing his appeal, Tverskoy Court remembered that January 1 to 10 is a period of vacation. By law, an appeal against administrative arrest must be heard within 24 hours. The former deputy prime minister has been in detention since December 31, but his appeal has still not been reviewed due to “holidays.” The latest attempt to submit it to court, on January 8, ended with Mr. Nemtsov’s lawyer, Timur Onikov, being escorted out by bailiffs. On January 11, the appeal was admitted as a priority case — by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

In Russia, New Year’s Eve is usually a joyful family occasion. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov spent it in a police detention cell — a five-by-ten feet concrete cubicle with no windows, no ventilation, no plank bed, not even a mattress. The Moscow Public Supervisory Commission, a prisons watchdog group, reported that conditions of his detention violated the most basic rules. On January 2, the former deputy prime minister of Russia was driven from his cell to Tverskoy Magistrate Court and sentenced to 15 days in prison for “disobeying police.” Judge Olga Borovkova, who forced Mr. Nemtsov to stand for the duration of the trial (more than four hours), disregarded statements from 13 witnesses as well as the video of his arrest. The conviction was based on the words of two police officers who asserted that Mr. Nemtsov was “cursing” and “attempting to block Tverskaya Street” (Moscow’s main avenue). He is currently being held in a detention center on Simferopolsky Boulevard.

For nearly three years, Dmitri Medvedev has diligently performed his role of “good cop,” charming Russian and Western wishful-thinkers with eloquent words about “freedom that is better than non-freedom,” laments about “legal nihilism,” and a generally civilized and soft-mannered appearance — the opposite of his mentor, Vladimir Putin. Just last week, the president treated television audiences to yet another show, this time with pointedly respectful references to Russia’s opposition leaders, including Boris Nemtsov, whom Mr. Putin days earlier accused of scheming to “sell off Russia.” But this time the “good cop” show fell flat. On December 27, Presiding Judge Viktor Danilkin of Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court began reading the verdict in the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, Russia’s most prominent political prisoners, spelling an end to any remaining illusions about a “Medvedev thaw.”

On December 15, hundreds of people who gathered at Moscow’s Khamovnichesky Court to hear the verdict in the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev were told that it was being postponed until December 27. Optimists took the delay as a sign of an internal Kremlin struggle over the fate of Russia’s most famous political prisoners, under arrest since 2003 and now facing the possibility of extended prison sentences to 2017. Realists countered that a lenient verdict would hardly have been slated for the period between Western Christmas and New Year’s Day, when most of the world takes a holiday from politics. Like their Soviet predecessors, today’s authorities in Moscow like to bury bad news. “They are trying to minimize [public opinion] costs,” remarked writer and legendary Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the many public figures who came to hear the verdict in the Kremlin’s show trial.

Moscow’s new chief, Sergei Sobyanin, has recently marked his first month in office. It is hard to call him “mayor” without using quotation marks, for the very idea of Europe’s largest city having a mayor imposed by federal appointment seems ludicrous in the 21st century. In a mock online mayoral election organized by the newspaper Kommersant and the website Gazeta.ru, Mr. Sobyanin placed seventh (with 2.8 percent), behind, among others, prominent lawyer Alexei Navalny, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and the “against all” option. The result is hardly surprising: Mr. Sobyanin, a former governor of the Tyumen region of Siberia, only became a resident of the capital in 2005 — as Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff at the Kremlin.

The format of a head of state’s annual address to legislators is a good indicator of a country’s political mentality. The US president makes the journey to Capitol Hill to read his State of the Union address in the “people’s chamber” — the House of Representatives; the Queen of England rides from Buckingham Palace to Westminster for her speech at the opening of Parliament. In Russia, it is legislators who are summoned to the Kremlin — the presidential residence — to hear from the nation’s leader. This was the case even in the 1990s, when the president and Parliament were elected by voters (and mattered). It remains true today, when both are a decorative stage set for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian government.