Spotlight on Russia

If anyone needed proof that personal travel bans are the most effective way for the West to put pressure on authoritarian Kremlin officials, it is now before us. Just days after Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, meeting legislators in Washington, suggested imposing US visa sanctions against senior figures implicated in corruption, electoral fraud, media censorship, and other violations of Russia’s OSCE commitments, two leading blacklist candidates abruptly changed their public tone. No legislation has yet been introduced or even drafted, no lists with specific names published. But the very suggestion appeared to have seriously racked some nerves in Moscow’s highest offices.

Western “realists” who want to hear nothing about democracy or human rights when it comes to relations with Moscow often argue that any pressure on the Kremlin would be futile and counterproductive. Even those who accept that Western democracies have not only moral but legal obligation (OSCE statutes specifically designate human rights issues as “matters of direct and legitimate concern to all participating States”) to protest against violations, worry that public criticism may be used by Kremlin propaganda to portray the West as “anti-Russian” and to paint Russia’s political opposition as a “fifth column.”

In Vladimir Putin’s mythology, the 1990s were a dark and shameful period, a time when Russia was on its knees before Western governments and greedy oligarchs. The official propaganda tone was set by Mr. Putin’s infamous 2007 speech at Luzhniki in which he demonized former Russian leaders for “acting against the state” and accused the pro-democracy opposition of “groveling at foreign embassies.” This line (which ignores the fact that, under Mr. Putin, the levels of corruption and lawlessness have far exceeded anything seen in the 1990s) is obligingly parroted by state-run television.

Few countries have memorial days that were initiated in jail. On October 30, 1974, Soviet political prisoners in Mordva and Perm camps and Vladimir prison held simultaneous hunger strikes to commemorate the victims of communist repressions in what became the first Political Prisoners’ Day. The idea, proposed by dissident Kronid Lubarsky, took hold: this day has been observed, in one way or another, every year. The largest number of political prisoners — more than 300 — participated in a hunger strike on October 30, 1981.

For all the Kremlin’s efforts to remove checks on its power — from shutting down independent TV to turning parliament and courts into rubber stamps — there remains a factor it has been unable to deal with. Russia’s cautious integration into European political and judicial structures in the 1990s may be the one legacy of the Yeltsin years that has proved long-lasting. This week former Russian prime minister turned Kremlin critic Mikhail Kasyanov was in Washington to discuss the US-Russia “reset” and the opposition’s prospects for the 2011–12 elections. On the way here Mr. Kasyanov had a stop in Helsinki where he represented Russia at the 31st annual congress of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform party (ELDR).

It is not at all important who and how will vote… It is extremely crucial who and how will count the votes.
— Joseph Stalin

Elections in Russia have long ceased to interest even the seasoned talking heads. The last competitive national vote was held in December 1999; since then a succession of legislative and political changes rendered voting practically meaningless. The electoral process is still diligently organized: thousands of polling places opened across the country; millions of ballots printed; no budget resources spared to ensure smooth procedures. Yet with most opposition organizations removed from the party register (and thus barred from elections), with direct parliamentary district elections and gubernatorial elections abolished, and with political censorship operating in major media outlets, “multiparty” elections in Vladimir Putin’s Russia are no better than farcical “votes” held in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

Meet the latest addition to Russia’s growing chorus of Kremlin critics: Yuri M. Luzhkov, 74, until last week the powerful mayor of Moscow, co-chairman of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, and loyal supporter of the regime. After his dismissal by President Medvedev on September 28, Mr. Luzhkov underwent an astonishing transformation. He resigned from United Russia, calling it a “servant party”; accused the Kremlin of censoring the media, suppressing democracy, and subjugating the judiciary; demanded the return of direct gubernatorial elections abolished by Mr. Putin; and vowed to fight for a “democratic society” in Russia as the new leader of the Movement for Democratic Reforms, a defunct political organization inactive since 1993, but still officially on the federal register.

Last week, US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder made headlines by merely stating the obvious: that Russia, as a European state, has the right to join the alliance in accordance with Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty. This is not the first time a senior US official spoke on this subject: earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she “can imagine” Russia as a future NATO member. Western European statesmen such as former German defense minister Volker Rühe have openly advocated Russian accession. Predictably, officials in Moscow are dismissing these offers: the chief of the general staff, Gen. Nikolai Makarov, declared that Russia and NATO have “differing goals,” while the secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Gen.

After eleven years in power, Russia’s regime has finally found the culprit for the country’s problems: its people. Speaking at a news conference titled “What hampers the modernization of Russia,” presidential adviser Igor Yurgens—hailed by the Kremlin’s Western apologists as the leading “liberal” in the Russian government—declared that the main obstacle to President Dmitri Medvedev’s “modernization” plans are the “archaic” Russian people characterized by “degradation, lumpenization, and even debilization.” Russians are “not citizens, but some kind of a tribe,” the presidential adviser asserted.

It has long been observed by biologists that intraspecific competition is among the most intense. This rule also applies to politics, as has once again been proven by the Kremlin. In the last few days millions of Russians, who after the silencing of the country’s last independent TV channel in 2003 have gotten used to docile reporting and constant eulogies to their leaders, were treated to a barrage of negative information about Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov — a close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and co-chairman of the ruling United Russia party.

Eighteen months from now, on March 11, 2012, Russia will hold what is still officially referred to as an “election” for president. Few doubt that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who left the Kremlin in 2008, but remained in power, wants to regain his old job (notwithstanding the latest Levada Center poll showing that only 27 percent of Russians want him back as president). Just this week, during the annual meeting of the Valdai Club, Mr. Putin repeated his line that it is “premature” to talk about 2012, but then, out of the blue, reminded his audience that “U.S. President [Franklin] Roosevelt was elected four times.” If this is indeed Mr. Putin’s goal, it means that his presidency would last until 2024 (two six-year terms from 2012). Such a scenario — as not only opposition leaders but, increasingly, the general public acknowledges — will be a disaster for the country.

Many of Vladimir Putin’s public pronouncements, from his promise to “whack terrorists in the shithouse” to his advice to a French reporter to get circumcised so that he will have “nothing growing back,” appear more in need of a psychoanalysis than a political one. The Russian premier’s latest interview with Kommersant newspaper is no exception. In the space of a few sentences, Mr. Putin threatened the opposition with physical violence, asserted that Western countries follow the same model of managed succession as today’s Russia, and pretended to be ignorant of major developments in his own country — all of it in a vulgar street language more suited for a gang leader than a head of government.

In the Russian judicial system, an indictment almost automatically means a conviction. The average rate of acquittals in Russian courts currently stands at 2.4 percent — astonishingly, four times lower than under Stalin. When it comes to opposition leaders tried on political charges, the rate of acquittals drops to zero. Or at least it did until this week. On Tuesday, the leader of the Solidarity movement and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov walked free from Presnensky magistrate court in Moscow after it ruled that there was “not enough evidence” to send him to prison. Officially the case was returned to the police. De facto, according to Mr. Nemtsov’s legal team, this amounts to an acquittal.

The last decade has brought endless setbacks for Russia’s pro-democracy forces. One after another, the regime claimed new targets in its drive to solidify power: media freedom, electoral competition, judicial independence, regional self-government. It is difficult to name what, if any, victories the opposition has scored against the rising authoritarian tide. Indeed, it seems there have been none – until this week.

On Monday Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party announced its shortlist of candidates for governor of Russia’s western-most region of Kaliningrad (one of the names on this list will be chosen by President Dmitri Medvedev). The list itself does not arouse much interest, except for one thing: it does not include Georgy Boos, the region’s current Putin-appointed United Russia governor.

Russia is famously a country with an unpredictable past. With a brief exception of the 1990s, regimes of the day freely rewrote the historical narrative for their own expediency. A famous Soviet-era joke advised that the latest edition of the encyclopedia had a regrettable misprint: instead of “distinguished statesman, hero of socialist labor” the paragraph should read “enemy of the people, convicted foreign spy.”