Managing the Vote

Putin's killing off of Russian democracy is worse than a crime—it's a mistake. The president has missed a historic opportunity to create a truly stable Russia. Instead of using Russia's rising prosperity to encourage a functional civil society, a responsible media and truly public-spirited political parties, Putin has done the opposite. He has cracked down on critical media outlets and he jailed Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, after he dared to challenge Putin's political power by funding political parties. He also reduced parliament's powers to little more than those of its Communist-era rubber-stamp predecessor. As Putin's recently appointed prime minister, Viktor Zubkov, observed, "the Duma is no place for discussions."

One former top Kremlin official, who spent years in Putin's inner circle, told me last week that the suspension of democracy was all temporary. In time, he said, Russians would be empowered by their newfound freedoms—to travel, to watch and read what they like, to make money and spend it—to demand more rights from their rulers. For the time being, though, "stability is everything—we cannot make any progress without stability, so we are willing to sacrifice democracy for its sake."

Yet behind the high-minded talk of having to "manage" democracy for the sake of stability lies a very different, and baser, motivation: Putin and his cronies have eliminated democracy to keep themselves in power, and in business, indefinitely. Vast financial empires are controlled by the individuals in Putin's inner circle. In the Yeltsin days top businessmen known as oligarchs used their connections to the Kremlin to get rich. Now the new generation of Putin-era oligarchs are themselves Kremlin bureaucrats, who have used the power of the state to bring private business under their control. Elections, and the uncertainty they bring, threaten those lucrative businesses. Similarly, a free press is a threat to corrupt bureaucracies everywhere, so it must be stamped out.

Clearly, the Kremlin's managed elections aren't designed to be an instrument whereby the voters can actually remove the incumbent government. Nor are voters actually offered a choice of credible alternatives for whom they wish to rule them. Rather, the system Putin has created is powerfully reminiscent of the old East Germany, where the Russian leader spent the formative years of his career spying on colleagues at the Soviet consulate-general in Dresden—and where communist-approved political "parties" would fight fake elections that posed no danger to the status quo.

One day, maybe not soon, commodity prices will fall. In destroying the mechanisms of Russian democracy, instead of nurturing them, Putin has sown dragon's teeth for the future. One-party systems are inherently unstable; so are economies dependent on a narrow basket of commodities for their stability. Moreover, Putin has played on ugly nationalism to boost his already sky-high popularity. He has created creepy, loyalist youth groups to act as shock troops against the enemy of the moment—whether it's Kasparov or troublesome neighbors like the Estonians or the Georgians—whose xenophobic credos could metamorphose into something far darker and more dangerous if Russia's economy starts to crash. Putin killed democracy and has created in its place a secretive oligarchy, one that will doubtless split and squabble as soon as the economic pie starts to shrink—with disastrous consequences for the country's stability.

© 2007