Putin's Kleptocracy_Who Owns Russia?
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The Presidential Elections, March 26, 2000
Central to Putin’s emergence was image building. As the eminent Russian journalist Andrey Kolesnikov (one of the journalists responsible for Putin’s book First Person) commented in March 2000, “It is evidently not enough merely to show the acting chief of all Russians in the mass media. He must do something, pronounce almost rhymed words, sell his bright image on posters, and make himself agreeable to the Eurasian family of the peoples of Russia.” Teams of young specialists were assembled, the so-called Generation P (for Putin): Gref took up leadership of the Strategic Research Center; Pavlovskiy of the Effective Policy Foundation; Mikhayl Margelov came into the Russian Information Center; Medvedev took over Putin’s campaign staff; and Surkov stood over them all.24
In the period before the elections of March 2000, Putin positioned himself above the campaign, refusing to debate his opponents or participate in regular election events.25 In a lecture to university students in Irkutsk in February, he showed clear disdain for the normal system of laws and checks and balances that stabilize and maintain a democratic regime over time: “You have to create a society and forms of leadership which will not strangle the most important thing, which is democracy, because without democratic processes, the real development of a government and society is impossible. . . . But there should be a clear institution which would guarantee the rights and freedoms of citizens independently of their social situation. . . . This institution can only be the institution of the presidency” (italics added).26
In his“Open Letter to the Voters” at the end of February 2000, he even proudly claimed, “There are no special electoral events on my calendar.” In this letter Putin laid out the core of his platform: a unified national program to guide development and the strengthening of the executive branch of government so as to win the fight against crime and terrorism. He went on to state, ‘’Modern Russian society does not identify a strong and effective state with a totalitarian state. . . . We have come to value the benefits of democracy, a law-based state, and personal and political freedom. At the same time, people are alarmed by the obvious weakening of state power. The public looks forward to the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state to a degree which is necessary.”27 The use of the words restoration and guiding and regulating role of the state is a clear harking back to Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution.V Putin further argued, “In an ungoverned, i.e. weak state, the individual is neither protected nor free. The stronger the state, the freer is the individual [chem sil’nee gosudarstvo, tem svobodnee lichnost’—italics added]. . . . But democracy is the dictatorship of the law [zakona]. . . . I know there are many today who are afraid of order. However, order is nothing more than rules [pravila]. And let those who are currently engaged in peddling substitutes, trying to pass off the absence of order for genuine democracy—let them stop selling us fool’s gold and trying to scare us with the past. ‘Our land is rich, but it lacks order,’ they used to say in Russia. Nobody will ever say such things about us again.”28
In this letter Putin also talked extensively about the protection and promotion of property rights, about the need to increase tax collection so that social benefits could be paid on time, but also to promote wealth creation: “I am absolutely convinced that a strong state needs wealthy people. So a key goal of our economic policy should be to make honest work more rewarding than stealing.”29
How Putin Won the Presidential Election, March 26, 2000
Paving the Way for a Win
One of the purposes of getting Yel’tsin to resign on December 31, 1999, was so that the presidential elections that had been scheduled for June 2000 would have to be moved forward. The legal landscape dictated that the Putin camp’s objectives from the very beginning were to have a high turnout and to win more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round.VI The Kremlin sought a clear winner in the first round and hoped to avoid a runoff with Zyuganov, given the continued strength of social justice issues in general among the population. Observers were concerned that the Kremlin would do whatever was necessary, including emergency changes to the Constitution, to prevent an opposition candidate from coming to power. The opposition’s chances were significantly harmed by the move-up of Election Day, as it proved almost impossible to organize an effective counter to Putin in such a short period of time.
Moreover the results of the Duma elections had served their purpose of signaling the need for elites to get behind the Kremlin’s candidate. The spirited contestation that had been a feature of the December Duma election season subsided, with many officials and parties coming out in favor of Putin. International observers commented on the bandwagoning that had occurred prior to the election: “The embryonic state of party politics in Russia exacerbates a tendency to fall back on traditional practices whereby demonstrations of loyalty to the ‘party of power’ are deemed necessary to political and administrative survival.”31
In addition to the war in Chechnya, the campaign was dominated by debate over the reasons for the popularly held view that the country was neither stable nor cohesive. The opposition—both left and right—generally blamed the president (both Yel’tsin and Putin), and the forces around Putin blamed the emergence of greedy oligarchs and corrupt regional elites who were pulling the country apart for their own gain. When the 1993 Constitution was passed, regional leaders were appointed to the Federation Council, but over time Yel’tsin had made elections mandatory for governors as well. Now calls again were heard to return to the appointment of governors and members of the Federation Council as a way of reasserting central control and ending what Putin himself called the “threat of legal separatism,” in which Moscow’s authority had become “neglected, slack and lacking discipline.”32 In an open letter to Putin published in Nezavisimaya gazeta, the governors of Novgorod, Belgorod, and Kurgan oblasts espoused increasing the president’s term from four to seven years. Under the circumstances, where regional elites were already beginning to operate as if a tribute system was taking shape, Putin’s victory became inevitable, as international organizations noted.33
Putin’s campaign enjoyed the usual privileges of having full Kremlin backing, referred to as “administrative resources.” These evidently included the ability to lean on the Kremlin’s allies inside and outside the country for campaign contributions. One such case came to light when a top official in the Ukrainian KGBVII started to record the conversations of Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma in 2000—unbeknown to him. These tapes covered many subjects, including Putin’s involvement in illegal operations, such as SPAG, and his “request” to Kuchma for a significant campaign donation. These tapes were carried out of the country and published abroad, including by Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian Service. They were authenticated by the U.S. government, given the charge by Washington that the tapes showed Kuchma had authorized the selling of a radar system to Iraq while at the same time receiving millions in aid.35 Among the hundreds of hours that were recorded are conversations Kuchma had with the head of the State Tax Commission (and future prime minister) Mykola Azarov about Putin’s calls to raise campaign cash. In the conversation Kuchma tells Azarov, “Putin telephoned, the fuck, during the election campaign: ‘Leonid Danylovych [Kuchma], well, at least give us a bit of money.’ ” The tapes showed that Kuchma scrambled to find the money in the state coffers. Analysis of the tapes by Ukrainian scholar J. V. Koshiw concluded that Kuchma asked Ihor Bakai, the head of Naftogaz Ukraine, to take a total of $56 million in cash from two Ukrainian state banks, the Bank of Ukraine and Ukraine’s Import-Export Bank, and transfer it to Putin.36 His analysis of the tapes concluded, “Following his victory in March 2000, Putin graciously returned not only the donation but five times that sum—$250 million. According to Kuchma, Putin had taken the money from the state company Gazprom and recommended that it be given to ITERAVIII to cover Ukraine’s gas debts to Gazprom. While this was a nice gesture it wasn’t legal even under Russian law. But the donation didn’t p
ay Ukraine’s gas debts. Instead, it went into Bakai’s pocket, according to a discussion Kuchma had with Azarov.”38 So it appears Ukraine’s president illegally took money from his state to fund Putin’s campaign, Putin refunded the money by taking from Russian state coffers, and the money went into private Ukrainian hands—a perfect early example of collective kleptocracy.
As in the Duma elections, the finances of LDPR candidate Vladimir Zhirinovskiy were closely scrutinized; the CEC and then the Supreme Court denied him access to the ballot on the grounds that he had not registered an apartment that was owned by his son, as stipulated by law. Zhirinovskiy won the appeal on a technicality and was put back on the ballot, at more or less the same time it was revealed that Putin also failed to disclose his family’s ownership of a property, alleged to be on a six-hundred-square-meter plot in the Gdovskiy district of Pskov, 150 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, registered in the name of Lyudmila Putina. The amount paid was not verified because the person responsible for land registration had been taken to the hospital.39 But Putin claimed that his house was “incomplete,” and under the law only finished properties have to be registered. There was no mention of the Ozero dacha, nor of the bank account establishing the Ozero Cooperative, presumably because it was held by a cooperative association. He was not taken to court, unlike Zhirinovskiy,40 whose successful appeal was protested by the procurator general, leading to speculation in the Russian press, and in the international observer report, that the Kremlin was trying to eliminate Zhirinovskiy as a candidate in order to help Putin garner more than 50 percent in the first round.41
Loopholes in the law were obviously exploited and interpreted to favor Putin, and initially to punish Zhirinovskiy. But as the Russian political commentator Andrey Ryabov noted in Kommersant on March 1, when it became known that Putin too had an undeclared house, the Supreme Court threw out the CEC’s disbarment of Zhirinovskiy: “The CEC and the Supreme Court, who are very close, decided that it would be better for all participants to stop the scandal.”42 This situation led the international observer mission to comment, “In any election environment such ambiguities leave the door open for politically motivated decision-making and selective application of the law.”43 At the end of the day, there were eleven candidates left out of an original field of thirty-three.
Illegally Using the Administrative Resources of the State
Little by little regional governors lined up behind Putin’s candidacy. Even Luzhkov, who had been a candidate, withdrew to support him. Despite this, the Kremlin signaled governors that their failure to support Putin would likely have very disastrous results. For example, the report on the elections by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe noted that shortly before the election, the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Investigation Committee demanded all documents relating to housing construction in Moscow in 1999, an area where there had been numerous reports of corruption involving Luzhkov and his wife, Yelena Baturina.44 If Kremlin officials were going to go after Luzhkov, they could go after anyone who showed independence.
Many dozens of top Kremlin officials took leaves of absence to work on the Putin campaign, bringing their administrative resources along with them. A notable example was the number of senior people from the country’s Railways Ministry (the key transportation ministry in a country without a highway system), who helped Putin’s campaign across Russia’s eleven time zones. The International Election Observation Mission expressed concern about “the involvement of regional administration personnel in campaign activities. In some regions, campaign material for one candidate—Putin—was distributed to Territorial Election Commissions at the same time as election materials such as ballots and protocols. Senior staff of state and regional executives, including deputies to Governors, on leave of absence from their official positions served in large numbers as volunteers in the acting President’s campaign organization. . . . In addition, such practice raises concern about potential abuses where subordinate State employees may feel compelled to ‘volunteer.’ ”45 Opposition elites similarly noted that Unity was promising positions in the future administration to campaign workers, and international observers found extensive evidence of the use of election commissions for the distribution of Putin election materials, in direct violation of Russian federal law banning the production and distribution of election materials by state officials.
Media Access
According to the 1999 electoral law, each candidate in the presidential election had to be offered eighty minutes of free nationwide television and radio airtime, half of which had to be used for debates. Candidates could also buy airtime on both private and state-run networks. Because the Duma elections in December had produced so many personal attacks on candidates, the Ministry of Internal Affairs intervened to warn candidates that this would not be allowed in the presidential campaign and that attacks on the Presidential Administration in particular would not be allowed. Putin’s own campaign team went further, threatening “an asymmetrical response to acts of provocation” if the media attacked their candidate or damaged his character.46 Consequently the media atmosphere surrounding these elections was much calmer, until about two days before the election, when the poll numbers of Grigoriy Yavlinskiy, the liberal party Yabloko’s leader, started to rise and the Berezovskiy-controlled state TV channel ORT launched a slanderous personal attack on him.47
Although Putin declined to participate in televised debates or subject himself to interviews, his image dominated the airwaves, even his presence at a soccer match the night before polling. This led observers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to conclude that the media “failed to a large extent to provide impartial information about the election campaign and candidates.”48
Balloting
The balloting on Election Day proceeded without significant complaints of violations in the main cities, but there were widespread and documented irregularities in Dagestan, Saratov, Tatarstan, Ingushetia, Bashkortostan, Kursk, Kabardino-Balkariya, Mordovia, Chechnya, Nizhniy Novgorod, and Kaliningrad, according to the results of an extensive investigation conducted by a group of journalists and reported in the Moscow Times.49 As for the situation in Chechnya, where Duma elections had been suspended, returns in the presidential election showed Putin winning an extremely unlikely 50.63 percent—almost 200,000 votes. The Moscow Times pointed out that this return was from “a population made up of families whose homes and lives have been destroyed by the war and rank-and-file soldiers dropped into the middle of a bloody and terrifying guerrilla war. In other words, refugee camps and conscripts supposedly voted en masse in favor of Putin. Even otherwise timid international observers were not amused by this. They have refused to recognize results from Chechnya, which was under martial law on Election Day, and there were no observers there. With the exception of the federal government and the Central Elections Commission, almost no one sees the vote in Chechnya as legitimate.”50
Did Fraud Ensure Putin’s 2000 Electoral Victory?
There were a number of significant irregularities that cast doubt on whether Putin had won by a majority in the first round. The Central Electoral Commission announced that he won 52.94 percent of the vote, a margin of victory of 2.2 million votes. While some local counting discrepancies are present in every election, there were a number of actions that required extensive forethought and that have never been sufficiently explained.
The first piece of evidence concerns the inexplicable rise in the number of registered voters. The CEC reported that there were 108,073,956 registered voters for the December 1999 Duma elections—of which 66,667,682, or 61.69 percent, actually voted. Three months later, on March 26, the CEC claimed that there were now 109,372,046 registered voters—of which 75,070,776, or 68.64 percent, participated. In other words, an additional 1.3 million voters appeared on the rolls. This occurred in a three-month period when Russian demographic statistics showed a net loss of 182,000. The head of the State Statistics Committe
e’s department for national population rejected all the CEC explanations: “[The Central Elections Commission] is taking liberties with the truth when they explain such a figure with a boost in the 18-year-old population and immigration.”51
The second piece of evidence is the pattern of ballot stuffing and election fraud that occurred on the day. This increased number of “available voters” still had to cast their ballots. And these imaginary voters turned up in those regions whose governors had pledged their support to Putin and where charges of irregularities were most numerous: Dagestan, Saratov, Tatarstan, Ingushetia, and elsewhere. The pattern was typified in Tatarstan by its capital Kazan’s 372nd voting precinct, where three election observers and a precinct elections commission member claimed that “names of voters were printed twice in the registration forms in a very large quantity, while the same names were listed by different [passport] numbers.” The complaint quotes Zukhra Anisimova, the head of the precinct elections commission, saying that the double-barreled lists were provided to her by the local government. To accommodate these voters, extra completed ballots were prepared and stuffed into the ballot boxes. When an inside source alerted the Communist Party in Kazan that hundreds of thousands of ballots had been illegally printed, the Party lodged a complaint. The FSB arrived the next day, asking not about the additional ballots but for the name of the source.52 All over Russia, in districts loyal to the Kremlin, phantom voters “registered” and “voted” for Putin.53 The journalists who investigated this issue at the time came to the conclusion that as many as 1.3 million votes of Putin’s 2.2 million margin of victory were “acquired” by a premeditated, and Kremlin-directed, plan to pad the voter rolls.