Vladimir Kara-Murza: Spotlight on Russia

Contrary to popular belief, not all Soviet bloc countries were one-party states. Some had “multiparty” systems, with the Communists formally sharing power with other political groups: People’s Party and Freedom Party in Czechoslovakia, Democratic Party and United People’s Party in Poland, the Christian Democratic Union and Liberal Democratic Party in East Germany. Indeed, the Socialist Unity Party did not even have an overall majority in the East German “parliament”, which was for years chaired by CDU politician Gerald Goetting. Needless to say, all “non-communist” parties faithfully towed their governments’ (and Moscow’s) line, for all intents and purposes serving as subsidiaries of the regime.

The system created by Vladimir Putin, who once served in East Germany, remarkably resembles this model. The Russian Duma comprises four parties: Mr. Putin’s United Russia (which controls 70 percent of seats) is joined by three “opposition” groups that have passed through the filters of the justice ministry and the central electoral commission. The presence of these groups that occasionally oppose government initiatives (deputies from Fair Russia apparently voted against the 2010 budget after a personal request from Mr. Putin) is meant to distinguish Russia’s legislature from its counterparts in North Korea or Turkmenistan. When it comes to issues sensitive to the Kremlin, however, the “parliamentary opposition” drops all pretenses, as was the case with the Duma’s 447 to 0 vote to recognize the “independence” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – a decision not only contrary to international law, but dangerous as an example to Russia’s own separatist-minded Caucasus regions.

The real opposition in Russia does not sit in the rubber-stamp “parliament” and has no access to state-controlled television. Its strength lies in the thousands of supporters willing to risk comfort and safety by openly protesting the authoritarian government. After the 12,000-strong anti-Putin rally in Kaliningrad in late January, the opposition held similar gatherings in Irkutsk, Archangel and Penza, and is now planning a nationwide protest for March 20. If the first two months are anything to go by, 2010 will be the year when anti-Putin forces go on the political offensive.

The Kremlin is understandably worried. Mass protests across Russia’s 11 time zones will seriously damage the regime’s image of “strength” and “popularity”. All stops are being pulled in an effort to disrupt opposition plans. Apart from the usual administrative methods, such as harassing activists and denying access to planned protest sites, the government decided to act through its satellites. Last week three “opposition” parties – the Communists, Fair Russia and Patriots of Russia – sent simultaneous directives to their regional affiliates prohibiting participation in the March 20 rallies organized by Solidarity, Russia’s leading pro-democracy coalition. The phrasing left the impression that the statements were drafted in the same Kremlin office: “prevent the participation… of charlatans and political crooks” (Communist Party), “alliance with the ‘young reformers’ of the 1990s… is impossible” (Patriots of Russia), “we do not share the ideology and methods of… [Solidarity leader] Boris Nemtsov” (Fair Russia). While unlikely to sabotage nationwide protests (regional party activists often act independently from the Moscow leadership), this desperate act shows the true nature of Russia’s pro-Kremlin “opposition”.

Last week, days after hosting the official delegation from the Russian Duma, members of the U.S. Congress welcomed Solidarity leader Boris Nemtsov. In his discussions with Reps. Howard Berman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman and ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Tom Price, Sens. John McCain, Mark Begich and Roger Wicker, Mr. Nemtsov presented an uncensored view of the situation in Russia and the rising tide of anti-government protests. Kremlin propagandists would have the outside world believe that its puppet “parliament” and its sanctioned “opposition” parties represent the full spectrum of views in Russian society. The Solidarity leader’s meetings on Capitol Hill are proof that the world knows better.

The “good cop, bad cop” trick must be one of the oldest in the book. Yet, unfailingly, this unsophisticated tactic continues to yield results, as illustrated by Russia’s ruling tandem of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.

Mr. Medvedev, we are told, is a “reformer.” We are reminded that, unlike Mr. Putin, he never served in the KGB. That in the first (and last) competitive elections for the Soviet Parliament in 1989, he campaigned for pro-democracy leader Anatoly Sobchak. That during his own presidential campaign in 2008 he declared that “freedom is better than non-freedom” and committed to make the protection of civil liberties his “most important task” in the Kremlin.

Last week the world was treated to yet another example of Mr. Medvedev’s “liberalism.” By a vote of 444 to 0, the Russian Duma, the only parliament in the G-8 that happens to pass major decisions unanimously, approved the president’s proposal granting minor parties one (1) seat in regional legislatures if they receive 5 percent of the vote.

Like other examples of Kremlin “liberalism,” this measure is a farce. Changes in electoral law implemented by Mr. Putin and kept intact by Mr. Medvedev abolished single-member districts that permitted individual candidates to compete for parliamentary seats, and only allowed officially registered parties to submit nationwide lists. The new rules on party registration, in turn, ensured that only groups loyal to the Kremlin could receive a license on political activity. Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov’s party, People for Democracy and Justice, and former Duma member Vladimir Ryzhkov’s Republican Party, to name just two examples, were denied registration. Solidarity, Russia’s main pro-democracy movement led by Boris Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, and Vladimir Bukovsky, also lacks registration and access to the ballot. The only registered liberal party, Yabloko, has been disqualified from the March 14 regional elections—an indication of the true worth of Mr. Medvedev’s “thaw.” The only people benefiting from the president’s latest initiative are those from the Kremlin’s own pool of puppet political parties.

If Mr. Medvedev really did want to open up the electoral system, he wouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel. All he would need to do is annul the changes brought by his predecessor and return to the laws of the 1990s, when Russian parliaments—freely elected by voters from a wide variety of parties, coalitions, and candidates—represented the full spectrum of political views.

The “democratic reformer” has been in the Kremlin for two years. Yet political prisoners remain behind bars, television remains under government control and opposition rallies are still dispersed by police. In fact, Mr. Medvedev effected only two noticeable political changes, raising the presidential term from four years to six, and establishing the Interior Ministry’s “Center Eh” tasked with monitoring political dissent—the equivalent of the infamous Fifth Main Directorate of the Soviet KGB.

Dmitry Medvedev has a different style from Vladimir Putin. He speaks in a soft and intelligent manner. Unlike his mentor, he never talks of “wiping out the terrorists in the shithouse” or “cutting it off so that it never grows again.” But it is Mr. Medvedev’s record, not his words, which should serve as the only true measure of his presidency.

This spring, for the first time in half a century, Moscow will be draped with official portraits of Joseph Stalin. Three-by-five feet images of the dictator will be on display near the Bolshoi Theater, by the entrance to Gorky Park, and in other prominent places around the capital. According to the authorities, the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II would be incomplete without posters of the “commander-in-chief.” The plan will go ahead despite protests by prominent cultural figures, opposition leaders, and human rights activists who describe it as an insult to the memory of millions killed by the communist regime.

Within months of becoming president, Vladimir Putin reinstated the melody of Stalin’s “Anthem of the Bolshevik Party” as the national anthem of Russia. In 2002, he decreed that past employment in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union should be equated to Russian government service. The bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet terror machine, was returned to Moscow police headquarters, and monuments to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov were installed in Rybinsk and Petrozavodsk. New textbooks teach Russian children that Stalin’s mass purges were “adequate to the task of modernization.” A recent OSCE resolution that stated the obvious by condemning “two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought genocide, violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against humanity” was passionately denounced by the Kremlin as a “distortion of history.”

It is hardly surprising that a former KGB officer who famously referred to the dissolution of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” should be nostalgic for totalitarian symbols. What is unforgivable, in retrospect, is the misplaced magnanimity of the victors of Russia’s democratic revolution, who in the early 1990s decided against full-scale decommunization that was pursued in other states of Eastern and Central Europe. Soviet rule was condemned by the highest judicial authority: In its ordinance #9-P, dated November 30, 1992, the Russian Constitutional Court declared that “governing structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were initiators…of the policies of repression directed at millions.” Yet there were no lustrations for former regime officials, no Nuremberg-style trial of the Leninist-Stalinist ideology, no designation of the KGB as a criminal entity. The leaders of democratic Russia, wary of perceived “witch hunts,” ignored prophetic warnings from Galina Starovoitova and Vladimir Bukovsky that “witches”, if not dealt with, will return—and begin a “hunt” of their own.

No one will ever know how many people were killed by the Soviet regime in the 20th century. Russia’s Memorial Society puts the number at 12 million. The U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation estimates it to be 20 million. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote of 55 million. Peasants, priests, poets, scientists, military officers, deported nations, and anyone who fit the dictatorship’s definition of “enemies of the people”—from the first victims of the Red Terror in 1918 to the young men crushed by tanks in Moscow in 1991—were destroyed by the ruthless system.

For a future democratic Russia, to honor their memory is a moral imperative, and to prevent another return to the past—a practical necessity. Those who will guide Russia to restoration of democracy must never forget the hard-learned lessons of the 1990s.

For all the numerous definitions of democracy offered by political scientists and international organizations, one simple test stands out: an election that results in an opposition victory and a peaceful transfer of power.

By this standard, Ukraine “graduated” to the democratic club in 1994, barely three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when then-President Leonid Kravchuk lost to his challenger, Leonid Kuchma, and duly passed the baton. A decade later, in 2004, it took thousands of people on Kiev’s Independence Square and a principled stand by Western powers to defend Ukrainians’ democratic choice, but in the end the presidency was handed to the opposition. This year, Ukrainians cemented the tradition, choosing an opponent over both the incumbent president and prime minister. Paradoxically, while rejecting leaders of the Orange Revolution, Ukrainian voters upheld its ideals.

Many republics of the former Soviet Union passed the “democratic test” early on—including, ironically, the now-autocratic Belarus, where in 1994 populist candidate Alexander Lukashenko prevailed over Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich. In Moldova, opposition came to power through elections in 1996, 2001, and 2009. In Latvia, the first re-election of a sitting government occurred in 2006, a full 15 years after independence—all previous votes resulted in prime ministerial reshuffles.

Russia has yet to pass this test on the national level. To be sure, the country did hold free elections that were won by the government’s opponents, and it did undergo numerous transfers of power. But the two somehow never went together.

Elections for the first-ever Russian parliament in 1906 were won by the opposition Constitutional Democrats—a party that strove to transform Russia along the British model of parliamentary monarchy. Yet the majority in the Duma in Russia’s post-1905 “semi-constitutional” system did not translate into executive power, and parliament was dissolved by Nicholas II after just 72 days of existence. The same fate the following year awaited its successor, after which the regime simply rewrote electoral rules to limit the opposition’s support.

In recent memory, Russian voters handed victory to the opposition in 1991, 1993, and 1995. The latter two were elections for parliament that, as in the early 1900s, did not control the executive. The 1991 presidential election, overwhelmingly won by the democratic opposition’s Boris Yeltsin over Communist candidate Nikolai Ryzhkov (57 to 17 percent), was held under the continuing Soviet rule, when Russia did not have sovereignty over its affairs. The real transfer of power from the Communists to President Yeltsin came later, after a democratic revolution in August and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

We cannot know when and under what circumstances Russia’s current authoritarianism will give way (or, more likely, will be made to give way) to democracy. But when an opposition leader, duly elected by voters, walks down the aisle of the Kremlin’s St. Andrew Hall to place his or her right hand on the constitution, we will know that it is happening.

Legend has it that when Vladimir Kryuchkov, KGB chairman and leader of the attempted coup in August 1991, was told that pro-democracy demonstrators could not be dispersed by force because of the sheer number of people, he did not believe it and demanded to be personally driven around Moscow. It was hard for a Soviet apparatchik to comprehend citizens willing to risk a crackdown to defend their dignity.

The experience of 1991 and the “color revolutions” that swept across the former Communist bloc in the early 2000s taught KGB operatives, who now dominate Russia’s government, that peaceful resistance can overcome repression. For years, Vladimir Putin was anxious to suppress even an embryonic protest movement. Opposition rallies were routinely “banned” (a procedure alien to the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of assembly) and dispersed by police, with dozens of activists detained and beaten.

Yet the protest movement in Russia is growing. And, ironically, it is Mr. Putin who contributed most to its emergence. In the past decade, he has diligently dismantled the institutions that hold the government accountable. Elections are heavily controlled with a wide arsenal of administrative tricks, television channels are strictly censored, regional governors serve as rubber-stamps for the Kremlin. During the period of “prosperity,” with high oil revenues and generous government handouts, many Russians were willing to accept this unwritten bargain—democracy in exchange for “stability.” But with the onset of the economic crisis—with 6 million (officially) unemployed, an 8 percent (official) GDP fall, and an 11 percent (official) decline in industrial production, coupled with the eternal problems of corruption and disregard for property rights—discontent has been rising. History shows that economic grievances and political powerlessness make for a dangerous mixture.

The regime may still count on its police to disperse a few hundred demonstrators. But coercion can go only so far. On January 30 various opposition groups came together to stage a protest rally in Kaliningrad, Russia’s most western city. The rally was organized by Konstantin Doroshok, leader of the local branch of the Solidarity movement and part of a new generation of regional pro-democracy activists. The initial reason was a planned increase in transport taxes, but, predictably, the demands turned political: resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, resignation of Kaliningrad’s appointed Governor Georgy Boos, return of gubernatorial elections abolished by Mr. Putin in 2004. Police units, batons in hand, duly arrived at the scene, but chose to remain in their buses. The anti-Putin protest brought out not the usual 300 activists, but 12,000 people—the largest opposition rally in Russia in a decade.

The regime panicked. The Kremlin fired its supervisor for Kaliningrad and dispatched a top delegation to the region. Mr. Putin summoned the president’s deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, for an emergency meeting (forgetting that Mr. Surkov supposedly answers to President Dmitry Medvedev). Governor Boos flew to Portugal, then immediately returned and offered to meet with the opposition. As Newsweek learned from its Kremlin sources, Mr. Boos will not be reappointed when his term expires in September. Such a retreat in the face of public pressure would be unprecedented for Mr. Putin’s rule.

Two years ago, during his symbolic run for the presidency (he was predictably denied access to the ballot), legendary dissident Vladimir Bukovsky said that before Russian democracy returns to the halls of parliament, it will first be reborn on the streets. The opposition’s success in Kaliningrad may well have been accidental. But it may also be the beginning of something new. Perhaps the winds of change in Russia are finally blowing from the west.