Seduced By Putin’s Smile

You may call it a shoo-in or charade but it doesn’t matter much either way. The result has been a foregone conclusion from the moment Vladimir Putin anointed his acolyte, Dmitry Medvedev, as his chosen successor.

It would have been simpler all round if, at the appointed hour on March 2, the Russian people were simply asked to honk their car horns for the Chosen One. The resultant cacophony would make him president by acclamation. It would not only be simpler but also more honest. This does not mean that next Sunday’s election is meaningless. On the contrary, it tells us a great deal about the state of the Russian nation, all of it extremely disconcerting.

When I began what has been a journey of some 10,000 miles across Russia from Murmansk to Vladivostok, my lodestar was Winston Churchill’s aphorism about the Soviet Union being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Having met hundreds of Russians of all types, I now think that there is no riddle, precious little mystery and almost nothing that is enigmatic about Putin’s Russia.

It has been an exhilarating and revelatory experience during which I have met some wonderful people and been on the receiving end of the warmest hospitality, but I have returned more aware than ever before that the Russian people are not like “us”. In a fundamental way they neither belong to the West nor share western values. While family life and social order are just as precious to them as to us, their concepts of justice and freedom have a quite different set of meanings from those to which we are accustomed. Their tormented history and the political culture this has nurtured set them sharply apart from, and frequently at odds with, mainstream western thought.

At a gathering of glitterati in St Peters-burg, where I had imagined myself to be among the city’s cosmopolitan elite, an exquisitely tailored young woman (who winters in India because it is too cold and the days are too short in her native city) told me: “Democracy for Russia would be death.”

Another added: “Anyway we have our freedom. Nobody cares about anything here. That is our freedom. Everyone can choose.”

“So you can be free under a dictatorship?” I asked. “Of course. We have a dictatorship already and we are free.” And, after a fashion, they are free: they have the money to travel wherever they want and, at least in private, they can say what they like without fearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night. But, as they don’t care about concepts like transparency or accountability, they represent no threat of any kind to the Kremlin.

It is people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky (the oligarch who did not know his place and is now in Siberia on trumped-up fraud charges), Anna Politkov-skaya (the reporter murdered for uncovering the barbarity of Russia’s war in Chech-nya) and Garry Kasparov (the leader of the Other Russia party, harassed and arrested for exercising his constitutional right to peaceful protest) – and many lesser-known luminaries – who have discovered what a “sovereign democracy” does to you if the sovereign or his henchmen disapprove.

I first went to Russia more than a quarter of a century ago to make two big ITV series about the cold war rivalry between the superpowers. But this was my first visit since 1989 when I had interviewed President Gorbachev for the BBC.

I was startled by the huge changes that have taken place. But I was also dismayed to discover the extent to which, in Putin’s Russia, the essential principles of democracy have been systematically dismantled with hardly a murmur of protest. Putin’s genius has been to manipulate the fears and anxieties of a deeply insecure nation to the point where this election is merely another chance for the voters to tell their president that, in their eyes, he can still do no wrong.

The truth is that he could have ordained that his chauffeur should be elected president and the voters would have flocked to secure that outcome, knowing that, in his self-appointed role as prime minister, Putin will still be running the country. It has been a very subtle and very effective coup d’état.

RUSSIA’S malaise goes far deeper than the corruption of the electoral process; it has eaten into the very soul of the nation. The politicians who sit in the state Duma represent competing parties that don’t compete; that never challenge the Kremlin on any issue of substance. They form a sham parliament, a supine shell of a debating chamber. In the largest country in the world, anyone who holds any position of power or influence in national, regional or local government depends on the patronage of the Kremlin. Nor is there anything left of what briefly passed for a “fourth estate” in Russia. All the major television networks and almost every national newspaper of note are directly or indirectly controlled by the Kremlin. With 21 journalists murdered across the country (which puts Russia third in these gruesome stakes after Iraq and Colom-bia), editors and reporters are – not unnaturally – cowed into submission and gagged by self-censorship.

The right to peaceful public assembly has been severely curtailed (except for those rallying in Putin’s support). NGOs that refuse to be cheerleaders for the Kremlin – the British Council is Continued frrom page 1 merely the most prominent of many examples – are routinely harassed and, in some cases, closed down.

To make matters even worse, the courts offer virtually no protection to the citizen. No one is safe from arbitrary arrest on trumped-up charges that are heard by pliant courts only too eager to do the bidding of the Kremlin and its allies. As a result, the judiciary is universally regarded with a mixture of fear and contempt.

The separation of powers by which civil society defines itself simply does not exist. That is the constitutional essence of what Putin likes to call “sovereign democracy” in 21st-century Russia.

Some of the president’s fiercest critics assert that Russia is lurching back into totalitarianism. But the Soviet Union had a socialist ideology (of sorts) and the dead hand of the Communist party was all-power-ful. By contrast, postSoviet Russia lacks any ideology except a commitment to a crude notion of capitalism in which the winners take all and the huge gap between rich and poor is of no consequence. Nor is power flowing back to political commissars in a neo-communist praesidium but rests ever more assuredly with the clique of oligarchs and former KGB officers with whom the president has surrounded himself.

On my way through Russia I was increasingly tempted to use the word “fascist” to describe the essence of Putinism. I held back partly because the term is much overused as gratuitous abuse and partly because I knew how offensive it would sound to those whose parents and grandpar-ents had died in their millions to save the world from fascism in what Russians call “the great patriotic war”.

Many political scientists have wrestled with the concept of fascism, trying to clarify its distinguishing features. Authoritarianism is, of course, a defining characteristic; so, too, the elevation of nationalism to the status of a paramount virtue; the manipulation of the electoral system to preserve the outward forms of democracy while strangling its meaning; an intolerance of serious opposition and, crucially, the emergence of a strong leader supported by a powerful vanguard drawn from the business elite or the leaders of “corporate capitalism” or, in Eisen-hower’s phrase, “the military-indus-trial complex”. Putinism has all those characteristics and more.

Following the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago when the values of a free society were sorely tested by the excesses of Mayor Daley and his storm-trooping police force, Gore Vidal coined the term “crypto-fascist”. The further I went through Russia and the longer I stayed, the more I found myself wrestling with the sickening thought that Vidal’s phrase properly defined the character of the state that Putin has constructed about himself. More dispiriting still was my discovery that, for all their great virtues, the Russian people are not sleepwalking into this brave new world but positively embracing it.

So far from having democracy stolen from them, they consciously seek to give it away. At a most basic level “democracy” means simply “Yeltsin” or – more palpably – insecurity, inflation, unemployment and social disorder. Again and again I was told, from across the social spectrum and by people of all ages, “Russia doesn’t need democracy, we need strength.”

In vain I would counter with liberal platitudes about the protection of human rights and individual freedom. But the anarchic licence of the Yeltsin decade was the only taste of democracy the Russians have ever experienced and, with an intensity I had not imagined, it had disgusted them. Today, many Russians are openly nostalgic for the “cradle to grave” certainties of the Soviet Union, where order and stability reigned supreme. The administrator of the war museum devoted to the battle of Stalingrad (now Volgo-grad), who is far from being a lone voice in that city, went further.

“Stalin did marvellous things for this country . . . Of course there were mistakes . . . but every leader has made mistakes. I would like to see our country as it was when Stalin ruled over it: economically strong, beautiful, with people who are happy and who have a future.”

In cities, towns and villages across this vast country, on boats and in trains and taxis over a period of about 18 weeks, I had scores of conversations; but I can think of only a handful in which I heard a genuinely dissident voice. To an astonishing degree, Putinism has not only captured the political high ground but also the very soul of the nation. In achieving this end, the president has been able to play two trump cards, for neither of which can he claim credit. The first is oil and the second is American foreign policy.

Compared with the grim decade of the 1990s (when the economy contracted for seven successive years), Russia’s growth rate since Putin came to power has been spectacular at around 7% a year. Real disposable incomes have been rising at more than 10% a year. Unemployment has been halved, foreign debt has been eliminated and the treasury groans under the weight of its hard currency reserves.

Putin has cleverly seeded the thought that the turnaround can be attributed to his autocratic helms-manship. In fact it has been almost exclusively the result of the energy windfall from the spiralling world price for oil and gas, over which he has had no control. There is every reason to suppose that the energy bonanza could have been used to much greater and more lasting effect if Russia had been far more open, transparent, accountable and subject to the rule of law.

As it is, hardly any commercial transaction of any kind can be completed without the lavish greasing of official palms. Again and again I was told that there is no other way to do business in Russia. In the words of a genial British businessman, Clive Rumens (who doubles as Her Britannic Majesty’s honorary consul in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk): “Of course I will pay to speed up the system . . . My clients don’t understand if they have to wait.”

The going rate is said to be between 5% and 10% of the total value of the deal, a nationwide total that has been independently estimated to cost business a mammoth $30 billion a year. At the other end of the scale, you can bribe your way out of an on-the-spot speeding fine and buy a driving licence with a backhander rather than take a test.

In the virtual absence of those organisations and institutions that define and promote civil society, there is little sense of social responsibility. Russians are left rudderless, their collective moral compass spinning wildly in the service of individual survival. Cynicism prevails.

But Russians are united in their love of the motherland. And, courtesy of the hand dealt him by the United States, Putin has played the “patriotic” card to devastating effect.

The defining issue is not so much Iraq or Guantan-amo Bay or those “hanging chads” in Florida – frequently thrown back at me when I tried to make the case for democracy – but President Bush’s unilateral decision to tear up the 1972 ABM treaty and to install antimissile missiles deep in eastern Europe within a few hundred kilometres of the Russian border, ostensibly to confront a future threat from Iran.

This has alarmed and horrified Russians of every generation and outlook, who chorus, “The missiles will be pointed at us. America wants to encircle us. There is no other reason.” The plan has aggravated a national inferiority complex already bruised by the casual arrogance with which America has rebuffed the fallen giant since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A cartoon video produced last year by the Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi (literally “Ours”) shows how closely paranoia and xenophobia lie beneath the surface of Russian nationalism – and how easy these are to exploit. The cartoon, which is designed to encourage young Russians to do their patriotic duty as military conscripts, depicts America as an octopus threatening to squeeze the life out of the motherland. A voice-over says urgently: “The US is a big fat guy who has eaten too much and can’t stop gobbling up more and more . . . And a significant part of the food that America wants is in Russia . . . They have a choice: either to eat less and less and in the end to stop growing and die or to come and get the food. They will come and get it . . .”

At this point US missiles emerge from the Baltic states, Ukraine and Georgia while US marines parachute into the Russian far east as the commentator intones: “There is only one thing that will stop America going to war with us: if our army is at the very least no weaker than theirs . . . otherwise under the slightest pretext they’ll swallow us up.”

The same point is frequently made by the Kremlin itself. But to interpret this as a return to the cold war is to muddle the point: there is no ideological stand-off, no strategic rivalry between the former superpowers, no realistic prospect of a military confrontation in Europe and no arms race in which Russia would have any chance of victory.

Indeed, a cold war would seriously undermine Russia’s resurgence as an “energy superpower”. But, whether or not Putin believes his own rhetoric about the encircling US threat, Wash-ington’s assertiveness has been a political windfall that made it even easier for him to assert that his “sovereign democracy” offers the only route to national salvation. It is a deeply dispiriting prospect.

SERGEI KOVALEV, a distinguished biophysicist, was charged in 1974 with “antiSoviet agitation and propaganda”. He served 10 years in prison and exile. In the 1980s he helped to fan the flames of freedom as Andrei Sakharov’s confidant. He later chaired Boris Yeltsin’s human rights commission but resigned over the slow pace of reform. Now an old man, he ought to be a hero of the state. Instead he is a pariah, a voice crying in the wilderness.

As we wandered through the labour camp where he had been held in solitary confinement, he was in despair: “The state today is much more powerful than it was in the time of the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was better under Stalin because at least everyone knew that it was a sham. I am now convinced that our government will never be changed through the electoral system. Today Russia is like a Liars’ Kingdom. We are ruled by liars.” That thought has not left me since.

© Jonathan Dimbleby 2008

Russia: A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People by Jonathan Dimbleby will be published by BBC Books on May 15 to accompany the BBC2 series, Russia – A Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?