The World: Russia’s Knockoff Democracy

MOSCOW

OFFSPRING A Russian view of Vladimir Putin and his heir, Dmitri Medvedev, as it appeared on the Web site of the caricaturist, Valentin Kalininskiy.

THE Russian people, Dostoyevsky once said, believe so fervently in an all-powerful czar that this ideal “is bound to influence the whole future course of our history.” And so it was that the heir to this tradition, President Vladimir V. Putin, went before the cameras last week to show that he had in fact broken with the old ways and was as progressive as any leader in the West.

The scene, though, left a different impression.

Heads of four political parties (supposedly independent, but all creatures of the Kremlin) sat before Mr. Putin and revealed to him their choice for president. Mr. Putin accepted the decision (though he himself had clearly made it). He praised the candidate (his longtime lieutenant) and suggested that the nomination reflected the views of a broad variety of Russians (none of whom had been given any say in the process).

Artifice plays a role in politics everywhere, yet Russia seems to have adopted a kind of imitation of democracy. It is as if a veneer of legitimacy has been put on a variation of the strongman rule present here for centuries — whether under Peter the Great, Lenin or Mr. Putin himself.

A parliamentary election was held this month in which many parties took part, but only Mr. Putin’s, United Russia, received glowing television news coverage and other government favors; it won in a landslide. Over in the executive branch, the Kremlin on Monday orchestrated the nomination for president of Mr. Putin’s aide, Dmitri A. Medvedev, who is all but assured of winning the March election.

The endorsement lets Mr. Putin say that he is abiding by term limits, just like an American president. Yet a day later, Mr. Medvedev announced that he wanted Mr. Putin to be his prime minister. While the rules are being followed, Mr. Putin seems, at least for now, to be retaining control.

Hovering over all these events is the question of why Mr. Putin and others in the Kremlin even bother with the democratic trappings. Given that Mr. Putin is highly popular, that the Russian public has long clung to a potent chieftain, why not just pack the Parliament, amend the Constitution and stay another term?

Mr. Putin appears in part motivated by a need to be seen on the world stage as a lawfully elected leader as genuine as his partners in the Group of Eight. There is an element of Russian pride in this sentiment. Having purportedly embraced democracy, the Kremlin cannot tolerate being told it does elections any less properly than the West. Nor does Mr. Putin care to be lumped with the presidents-for-life reigning in some other former Soviet republics.

“He still has this desire to look like a civilized Russian modernizer,” said Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The Russian political elite, including Mr. Putin, would like to be personally integrated into the Western structure, the Western community.”

(This impulse, by the way, is not new. Dostoyevsky, who praised the Russian people’s love for their czar, also bemoaned what he said was the Russian elite’s longing to be in the West’s good graces.)

Mr. Putin may also have concluded that he can spurn the spirit of the law only so much before governance turns into a free-for-all that might put him more at the whims of the Kremlin’s competing clans.

Some analysts speculate that Mr. Putin and his associates fear making overtly autocratic moves, lest the West retaliate in ways that could hurt Russia’s economic revival. This view is not entirely satisfying; American and European companies do plenty of business with Saudi Arabia, China and other authoritarian countries.

But there could be a more personal wrinkle: senior Kremlin officials may worry that they would be personally banned from traveling to the West and that their personal finances might be imperiled.

For their part, the Russian people have shown no great hunger for Western-style democracy. Polls indicate that if Mr. Putin stayed on for another term, he would be greeted with little dissent and something akin to relief or applause.

Still, it would be a mistake to say that Russians yearn for authoritarianism, or that the country is generally reverting to Soviet-style repression. While the Kremlin dominates television and has cracked down on the opposition, a diversity of voices flourishes in newspapers, where criticism of Mr. Putin is not uncommon, not to mention on the Internet.

It could be argued that Mr. Putin, in declining to become a full-blown, constitution-shredding autocrat, is demonstrating that he is more democratically oriented than most Russians. This contrast was noted even by one archfoe, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the billionaire who was arrested after publicly challenging the Kremlin.

In a 2004 letter from prison, where he is still being held, Mr. Khodorkovsky lamented: “Putin certainly is no liberal and no democrat, but nonetheless, he is more liberal and democratic than 70 percent of the population of our country.”

The turmoil after the fall of Communism seems to have deepened Russia’s tendency to be drawn to a strong leader, leaving it with a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Russians these days crave stability, consumer goods and travel — the things they were denied before.

Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, president of the Politika Foundation, a Moscow research institute, said political structures are still developing, the rule of law is shaky and people in power do not have accountability. As a result, the government’s shape and character are molded, to a large extent, by the leaders’ instincts about what the people expect and will bear.

“Every country has a genetic code,” Mr. Nikonov said. “In many societies, the patterns of government last for centuries, or last for a millennium, and I think that Russia is the same. There is quite a strong tradition of undivided government. There is only one thing that Russians do not like in their leaders. That is weakness.”

“The institutions are still not here, they are immature,” Mr. Nikonov said. “Still, for a 15-year-old democracy, Russia is doing well. In Germany, they elected Hitler exactly on the 15th year of democracy.”

Mr. Putin himself, while regularly praising what he says are the strides Russia has made in recent years, occasionally seems to be pleading for patience, as if he were acknowledging that the democracy Russia has put in place is not the real thing.

“This road is not simple,” he said in September. “It takes time and the right groundwork and conditions. We need to ensure that our economic transformations bring about the growth of the middle class, which is to a large extent the standard bearer of this ideology. This is something that takes time and cannot be achieved overnight.”

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