Russia: Other Points of View

THE THAW AT THE POLLS: TANDEM'S LIBERALIZATION POLICY ROCKS THE VOTE

COMMENTARY

by Gordon M. Hahn

Sunday’s election to the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, was stunning.  As I expected, it registered a sharp decline in support for the pro-Kremlin United Russia (Yedinaya Rossiya or YeR) led by President Dmitrii Medvedev and Prime Minister and Vladimir Putin, showed a significantly freer and fairer voting and counting process, but a continuing uneven playing field during the pre-election campaign favoring the United Russia (YeR).  Voters delivered a strong message of rebuke to the YeR for ongoing corruption, limited economic opportunity, and bureaucratic arbitrariness.  Perhaps more important though, the results appear to show that the level of fraud was much more limited than in past elections and cut across party lines, benefiting all parties more or less equally and thus not affording the YeR any significant advantage.  Less fraud and equal opportunity fraud helped shape the sharp decline in YeR support.

As usual, the Washington Post and New York Times produced knee-jerk, ready-made responses to the vote that reflected neither of the vote’s two main outcomes.  A Post editorial characterized the vote as nothing but a “farce” and focused on several of the most arbitrary administrative measures (“The Farce of Russia’s Elections,” Washington Post, 5 December 2011).  The NYT simply reported the OSCE’s assessment that there was an uneven playing field and significant voting irregularies, but it left out the first sentence and almost all the positive OSCE remarks in the following excerpt from the OSCE’s initial report: “The observers also noted that the legal framework had been improved in some respects and televised debates for all parties provided one level platform for contestants.  On election day, voting was well organized overall, but the quality of the process deteriorated considerably during the count, which was characterized by frequent procedural violations and instances of apparent manipulations, including serious indications of ballot box stuffing.  

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RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP

by Patrick Armstrong

Election results. The almost final results give a Duma with 238 seats for United Russia (down 77); 92 Communists (up 35); 64 Just Russia (up 26) and 56 Zhirinovskiy’s party (up 16). (Interactive map by regions). United Russia will dominate, but no longer be able to bully. Which is a step in the right direction.

Election fraud. There is a lot from the usual media outlets about widespread, even game-changing, fakery. I would suggest that those who believe this reflect on what might be termed the Prime Law of Election Fixing: Don’t fix it so that your party loses votes and seats. Especially when they have been saying that every previous Russian election was fraudulent. This should be obvious to anyone. Secondly the results accord well (as previous elections have) with opinion polling (indeed United Russia did a bit worse). This piece shows that the results are consistent with numerous polls (here’s a reasonably perceptive forecast from two months earlier and another, based on polls, from the day before). To persist in assertions of game-changing fraud in the face of these facts is just ridiculous. By the way, if you go by the English-speaking media you would think that foreign observers thought the elections were frightful: not so, here are a number of foreign observers saying that they were good enough. The OSCE report does not suggest big-scale fixing either; indeed it reads like other OSCE reports: administrative resources, lack of competition, some bad behaviour.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY REPORT

by Patrick Armstrong

On and on. The reaction. I’ve been reading a lot of reactions and I believe they can be summarised as follows. To Russophobes it was confirmation of their line that Russia is a dictatorship, always has been and always will be. Russian liberals are disheartened, some to the point of despair. There are the beginnings of mockery and the re-appearance of political jokes. (Here’s bald and hairy). People like myself (I leave the classification to you, Dear Reader)  are also disheartened and see The Decision as a failure of Putin’s imagination and confidence in the political system that he created. Many (probably most, in fact) Russians, however, support his return to the Presidency. And here I see several themes. A common one is that Medvedev was unsuccessful – a few are very condemnatory. They argue that he was unable to move “modernisation” forwards and failed to get much response from the West to his overtures. Another common theme is that Russia faces dangerous or difficult times ahead at home and abroad and that only Putin can be the timoneer. Some argue that with Putin at the top and Medvedev as PM, “modernisation” can be pushed through to the finish. Among these commentators we often see a conviction that stability and predictability take priority over everything else. And maybe that’s the clue. Russia had a pretty miserable time in the Twentieth Century and the Putin years do stand out as much better than anything then. Primum non nocere is engraved on Russian hearts. A quiet life is a lot better than the alternatives that Russia has lived, and died, through.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY REPORT

by Patrick Armstrong

Police reform. The Interior Minister says police who may be exposed to temptations of bribery will have to take regular lie-detector tests. He is pretty pleased with the results of the “combing” process. I think, to put it mildly, he’s over-optimistic. The Investigative Committee says that police officers have been charged with 70 crimes in the last 10 days. And that’s the ones they’ve been charged with. Obviously the teeth on the comb were set too far apart.

Politkovskaya. Perhaps a break-through: a former policeman, Dmitriy Pavlyuchenkov, was arrested and charged with organising her murder. The theory is that he was a contractor and the investigators say they know who ordered her death. The prosecution theory has always been that the man who ordered it is no longer in Russia. Pavlyuchenkov’s name came up early in the case but he seems to have been able to avoid charges and apparently functioned as a sort of secret witness for the prosecution. From the beginning I have believed that she stumbled – perhaps unknowingly – across some piece of information a Chechen “biznesman” didn’t want known. Nothing to do with Putin or the government.

IS THE TANDEM RUNNING OUT OF TIME? RUSSIA - TOWARDS ANOTHER REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT?

COMMENTARY

by Gordon M. Hahn

Is Russia’s ruling tandem and its strategy of gradual reforms short on time?  Is Russia inching towards another revolutionary moment?  Could be.  Revolutions typically begin as reforms and develop over long periods of time, in stages and waves.  For example, Russia’s early 20^th century revolution began in the 1860s and went through several stages before being hijacked by the Bolshevik coup in 1917.  Even after that a four-year long civil war was needed to settle the issue.  As in the late Soviet period that ended with Boris Yeltsin’s revolution from above, the first Russian revolution included several periods of limited reforms and two revolutionary crises:  one in 1905 and another a full 12 years later.

In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev began radical reforms of the decayed totalitarian Soviet system.  Those reforms developed such that by 1991 they could have ended in revolution from below or a transition to democracy, but instead a peaceful revolution from below led by state bureaucrats took the lead in destroying what was left of the Soviet Party-state and constructing the new post-Soviet Russia. 

Russian President Boris Yeltsin demobilized civil society and failed to institutionalize democracy.  His successor Vladimir Putin sought to address the chaos by restoring elements of authoritarianism, emphasizing state development rather than civil society or democratic development.  As we have covered in some detail, since the onset of Dmitrii Medvedev’s presidency, a new stage of reforms has begun, reflected by a gradual thaw or liberalization of domestic and foreign policy: a gradual, more cautious Perestroika 2.0.  However, there are real limits to the thaw that risk another period of instability and regime transformation.

US-RUSSIA RESET: WHATS BEHIND THE GINNED-UP CRISIS IN U.S.-RUSSIA RELATIONS?

REPRINTS

www.foreignpolicy.com, August 12, 2011

BY SAMUEL CHARAP 

Samuel Charap is director for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for American Progress. 

Storm clouds are gathering over what has been a signature shift in U.S. foreign policy under President Barack Obama: the "reset" of relations with Russia. The usual suspects, from the Weekly Standard to the Washington Times to hawkish cold warriors in Congress, see recent news as vindication of their argument that the reset represents dangerous appeasement of a relentless foe on the march, an adversary with which it would be folly to cooperate in any way. 

Some of the headlines, including a supposedly Kremlin-ordered attack on a U.S. Embassy, leave one with the impression that the U.S.-Russia relationship is on the brink of a return to the state of near confrontation that Obama inherited. 

RUSSIAN FEDERATION WEEKLY SITREP

by Patrick Armstrong

Election bet. I’ve put mine down: Medvedev will run, Putin will not, there may be a second Team candidate (ie one from United Russia and one from Just Russia).

Putin Q&A. Another session worth reading. He was in Magnitogorsk to open a new cold rolling complex  but, as usual, answered all the questions thrown at him with his customary frankness and mastery of detail. As I have noticed on several occasions lately, he seems to be in a reflective mood and is ready to speak about what he believes he accomplished (stability again: “Who is going to invest in a country that is always shaking like a leaf?”). Several times lately he has been looking back in detail but forward in generalities. Is this a (tiny, I agree) indication that he is contemplating retirement?

Legal activity.  Quite a lot since my last Sitrep. Contractor arrested for swindling the Navy (and, by the way, a rather easily detected swindle). Four people in the North Caucasus arrested as they were preparing a bomb attack on Moscow. Yet another RosAtom executive arrested on charges of embezzlement. Another traffic cop arrested in another “blue light” affair. Three police sentenced for abuse of office. Criminal investigation into a St Petersburg shipyard.  Charges laid in the Bulgaria sinking. Investigation into a “blue light” death re-opened. Extreme nationalist sentenced. Two charged in a laser blinding case (there have been a spate of these lately). A man arrested for a multiple murder. And, in the Magnitskiy case, charges have been laid and the investigation re-opened. That’s what I’ve noticed in three weeks – I wouldn’t say that nothing is being done about corruption and malfeasance.

MEDVEDEV’s TURNS TO LIBERALIZING THE POLITICAL SYSTEM

COMMENTARY

by Gordon Hahn

The liberalization being carried out by Russia’s ruling tandem and most closely associated with President Dmitrii Medvdev in Russian foreign and domestic political and economic policy continues.  Judicial, legal, police, penitentiary, anti-corruption and economic reforms continue to be pressed and gradually ratcheted up as well.  To be sure, there are limits to the reforms already undertaken, but just because some things remain the same does not mean nothing has changed.  Indeed, Medvedev is now taking on Russia’s ossified political system in the most serious way since his arrival to the presidency.

Medvedev’s previous practice of carrying out marginal political reforms is a thing of the past; he has crossed the threshold of more significant reforms.  Earlier, several marginal reforms made it easier for opposition parties to compete compared with the more tilted playing field crated during the president of Premier Vladimir Putin.  In April President Medvedev signed into law measures allowing political parties to field candidates in regional and municipal elections even if those parties have no offices of branches in those regions (Natalya Krainova, “Kremlin Eases Vote Rules for Opposition,” Moscow Times, 8 April 2011). 

MEDVEDEV MAKES MORE PROGRESS ON JUDICIAL REFORM

COMMENTARY

By Gordon M. Hahn

The Russian court’s guilty verdict in the embezzlement case against Mikhail Khodorkovskii and Platon Lebedev has received the undivided attention of the U.S. mainstream media and is held up as the rule when it comes to Russia’s albeit less than independent or impartial judicial system.  But the media’s singular focus on this case is a smokescreen that allows them to suppress news about the long-term, potentially democratizing thaw that emerged under President Dmitrii Medvedev, as we predicted 38 months ago. 

The trial and conviction of Khodorkovskii and Lebedev is unfortunately a long-standing process that predates the new liberalization process, and therefore it cannot constitute evidence that nothing has changed.  It is the continuation of an old policy; one, moreover, that also may change, should Medvedev decide to grant one or both of them amnesty.  The prosecution of Khodorkovskii, therefore, is neither dispositive of, nor even pertinent to the question as to whether there has been any progress in liberalizing Russia’s judicial system.  What is relevant to, and dispositive of this question would be signs of greater degrees of judicial independence, more decisions that find in favor of average citizens filing against the state or the authorities, and decisions that expand the scope of citizens’ rights and reduce that of the state’s arbitrariness and the authorities’ impunity.  In the past, we have detailed some of Medvedev’s earlier steps in reforming the judicial system (Gordon M. Hahn, “Medvedev’s Judicial Reforms – Don’t Pre-Judge,” Russia – Other Points of View, 18 May 2009).

A TALE OF THE BEGGER AND THE BILLIONAIRE

REPRINTS

www.sublimeoblivion.com

by Anatoly Karlin

Imagine the following scenario.

In the US, a black homeless man “robs” a bank. He only takes a single $100 bill out of the wad of cash offered, because he was hungry and had to pay to stay at a detox center. Regardless, he had the good graces to return the money the day after. Net financial loss to the bank? $0. Years he was sent down to the slammer for: 15.

In another country, a billionaire fleeces the state by using offshore companies to sell his company’s oil production (and sees nothing wrong with it). Politicians and businessmen who oppose him get this nasty habit of turning up dead. Net financial loss to that country’s treasury, and ultimately taxpayers? Many billions of dollars. Years he was sent down to the slammer for: 14.

Now imagine that one of these cases becomes the focal point of universal condemnation of that country’s brutal, lawless, and authoritarian human rights regime – from Amnesty International and PACE, the US State Department and the German Bundestag, and regular scathing editorials from the biggest media titans. The country’s own liberals work overtime to campaign for the case to be overturned.

Which case would you guess I’m talking about? Surely it would be Roy Brown, the indigent beggar right? No way, sucker.