President Putin's Third Term
JOHNSON, REUBEN F.
President Putin's Third Term Russia is a democracy in name only. by Reuben F. Johnson Americans might be pardoned for thinking that the presidential race is an out-of-con-trol, ever-lengthening...
...One of the few who has spoken out is the well-known reform politician Boris Nemtsov, who was a deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and later served as an adviser to Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution...
...Unfortunately, he was right, and the emphasis increasingly has been on the dictatorship rather than the law...
...It is offensive that the level of corruption is now twice what it was under Boris Yeltsin, which has earned Russia shamefully low marks in international corruption ratings every year...
...It is simply nauseating to see how Sergei Iva-nov, Putin's best friend and likely successor, was promoted [from defense minister] to first deputy prime minister despite the vile gangsterism that is rampant in the nation's army barracks...
...What Russia's 2008 election promises to deliver is a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" regime...
...There are two frontrunners now," he stated, "the two First Deputy Prime Ministers [Sergei Ivanov and Dmitri Medve-dev...
...This was a kinder, gentler label than Putin's own...
...But defects in our presidential selection process are trivial in comparison with the sinister pantomime that is the March 2008 Russian presidential election...
...You need to know that the good old days when you could lie to Russia and steal from Russia, when you could trample on Russia—all those days are over...
...There used to be 100 million voters...
...president's administration...
...It is reprehensible that police beat people with truncheons, not because they are guilty of crimes, but because they have taken to the streets to demand justice...
...This means belligerence and a search for scapegoats bordering on the irrational will be the order of the day...
...Russian spokesmen and the Kremlin's professional spinmeisters take full advantage of the fact that the average person elsewhere is largely ignorant of what takes place inside Russia...
...It would have done the Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky proud: "The Putin course will continue," Sitov declared...
...Unfortunately, this type of debate takes place only too rarely, and when it does, it's almost always somewhere outside of Russia...
...It is offensive that Moscow is swimming in wealth while the rest of Russia lives like a poor colony...
...This is none of your business...
...Miner's conclusion was that "one puts down this hefty book with a nagging worry...
...According to recent polls, fully 40 percent of Russians are prepared to vote for whomever Putin supports—no questions asked...
...These are the reforms that Putin has instituted as president of Russia...
...When Putin assumed power in 2000, Russia was said to be a "managed democracy...
...In other words, questioning Russia's pretense to being democratic will be greeted as an intolerable attack on Russia's sovereignty...
...Any attempt at verification will be regarded as unfriendly and as meddling in Russia's domestic affairs...
...Kremlin propagandists have to work overtime to maintain the illusion...
...Petersburg lawyer and former head of Putin's administration, and Ivanov, the former defense minister and an old KGB crony of Putin's, are members of the same ruling cabal that has been progressively tightening its grip on Russia...
...In 1995, longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin released his memoirs, In Confidence, which were reviewed by Steven Merritt Miner in Foreign Affairs...
...Back in early June on WAMU's Diane Rehm talk show, Andrei Sitov, the Washington-based representative for Russia's government-owned and controlled ITAR-TASS news service (and himself a government spokesman pretending to be a correspondent), portrayed the Russian election as analogous to the U.S...
...It is offensive that we have resigned ourselves to accepting as Putin's successor whomever he happens to slap on the back...
...It is offensive that Putin's portrait hangs in every public office...
...But it isn't...
...Dobrynin has advanced a stab-in-the-back theory explaining the Soviet collapse...
...But carrying as it does a sense of betrayal, xenophobia, and imperial longing, it is a dangerous sentiment...
...What was once "managed democracy" is now officially deemed "sovereign democracy...
...You are welcome to elect whom you choose," they tell us, "as long as it is one of the candidates we have put forward...
...tirade from TASS's Sitov towards the end of the WAMU broadcast...
...by Reuben F. Johnson Americans might be pardoned for thinking that the presidential race is an out-of-con-trol, ever-lengthening marathon...
...Under the rule of President Vladimir Putin, political scientists and Kremlin spokesmen have had to invent new terms to describe Russia's system of government...
...He is saying this to the future U.S...
...Twelve years later nothing could be clearer than that it is the reigning ide-ology—and will continue to be so—in Putin's third term...
...try to present the manner in which "sovereign democracy" is practiced in Russia as being just like democracy elsewhere...
...This "Kremlin coinage," as Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Endowment puts it, "conveys two messages: first, that Russia's regime is democratic and, second, that this claim must be accepted, period...
...It is disgusting that the Kremlin spends millions of dollars to bring students to Moscow by bus and train from all corners of Russia to participate in pro-Putin meetings...
...How widespread this view is among the Russian elite remains to be seen...
...Second, all of the television stations from which Russians get their political news are either owned or controlled by the state...
...It is appalling how all of the famous journalists who disagreed with the Kremlin were fired...
...Petersburg clan in the Kremlin controls billions of dollars in wealth...
...It is truly disgusting that people's opinions don't mean anything...
...Now there is only one...
...But the greatest calamity is that nobody is allowed to utter a word in protest regarding all of this...
...One hopes it never becomes the reigning ideology...
...Keep quiet," the authorities seem to say, "or things will go worse for you...
...Even worse, the new man will be trying to show that, like Putin, he can rule with an iron fist...
...They Reuben F. Johnson writes frequently on Russian politics...
...The former secret policeman had at first declared that his would be a "dictatorship of the law...
...In a piece that he wrote last week for Russia's respected Vedo-mosti newspaper, Nemtsov pulled no punches: It is disgusting to watch the Vremya nightly news on Channel One, which reminds me of the broadcasts during the Brezhnev era...
...Sitov went on to explain how these two would be promoting themselves to the Russian electorate just as American presidential candidates would do after the two parties have completed their nomination process...
...For a taste of things to come, ponder the anti-U.S...
...It is disgusting that the St...
...A comparable situation in America, clarified Stanford's Michael McFaul, would be "if George W. Bush decided that Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice would be the two candidates and all opposition Democratic candidates would not be allowed to run...
...At which point the U.S...
...commentators cried foul, explaining that Med-vedev, a St...
...It will be— in everything but name—a third term for Putin since the same band of Chek-isty (Russian slang for those from the intelligence and secret police ranks) will still be in charge...
...An intriguing possibility is that [Putin] will say 'I endorse both—you choose'—the Russian people choose...
Vol. 12 • August 2007 • No. 46
