Putin's Kleptocracy_Who Owns Russia?

by Karen Dawisha

  This conclusion was examined by several political scientists who specialize in electoral fraud. Their own conclusions support those of journalists on the scene. Mikhayl Myagkov, as previously stated, had looked at the role of regional governors favorable to Putin in manufacturing “dead souls” and then getting them to “cast their ballots” for Putin. With colleagues from the California Institute of Technology, he examined the 2000 Russian presidential election and found the same result, namely that regional governors were able to use a number of methods, including roll padding and ballot stuffing, “to direct the votes of their electorates in a nearly wholesale fashion.”54, IX These authors conclude that a general trend in electoral fraud emerged in 1999–2000 in which pro-Putin regional governors, particularly in rural and ethnic regions, were mobilized (by a combination of intimidation and incentives) to deliver the votes. By 2008 this pattern had “moved into the cities” as well so that the entire country’s electoral system was riven with fraud.55

  The third piece of evidence is the extensive reports of intimidation by the vertical chain of command, in which the Kremlin put the squeeze on regional governors, and they obliged units below them all the way down to university rectors, military officers, and farm managers to turn out the vote for Putin. Village elders in particular, it was reported, often simply would not allow villagers to vote for other candidates, and they themselves cast villagers’ votes for Putin over the objections of the voters. The Moscow Times charged, “In all of the above-named regions and also in Kursk, Mordovia, Kaliningrad and Nizhny Novgorod—nine regions where Putin won a total of 6.96 million votes—regional governors resorted to a vertical chain of bullying: Everyone from collective farm workers to college professors was forced to vote for Putin. Some critics have gone so far as to argue that on the eve of the 21st century, such bullying excluded villagers as a class from the democratic process.”56

  But sometimes local officials were so happy to comply with orders from above that they did not need to be intimidated; instead they happily described how they had “managed” the vote. Steven Fish reports in his own study of electoral fraud in 2000 that Vladimir Shevchuk, head of the Tatarstan Elections-2000 Press Center, described to journalists how local officials had created a “caterpillar” to get the required votes: “There are people standing near the elections precincts and when they see a voter coming up, they offer him or her 50 rubles or a 100 rubles so that he or she takes a pre-filled-in ballot to drop in the box, and then returns with a blank ballot. Then [the fraudsters] fill in the new clean ballot and offer it to the next voter.” As Fish notes, Tatarstan Governor Mintimer Shaimiev’s personal spokesman, Irek Murtazin, confirmed the existence of the caterpillar with a chuckle and without embarrassment.57 Aggregate studies of the variation among the eighty-nine regions in terms of the leaders’ willingness to deliver the votes showed that on a 10-point scale of regional violation of electoral laws in federal elections in 2000, twelve regions scored favorably at 1 or 2, and eight scored 8 or below, indicating significant violations: Tatarstan, Kalmykiya, Mordovia, Bashkortostan, and the North Caucasus republics of Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and Kabardino-Balkariya.58 As Nikolay Petrov from the Carnegie Foundation’s Moscow Center found, while in most countries high turnout would be positively correlated with high levels of democratic competition, in Russia higher turnout occurs most often in those regions where there is a continuation of Soviet-era practices of controlling the votes of state farm and enterprise workers and “can be attributed to a higher level of administrative mobilization of participation in elections and a relatively lower level of freedom and institutionalized democracy.”59 In these eight regions, with their total population of almost 14 million people, Putin won 68 percent of the vote, or more than 15 percent above his total percentage of the national vote. The huge variation in support for Putin across regions showed a positive correlation between the support for Putin and voter turnout—the higher the support, the higher the turnout—further suggesting administrative “encouragement” of voting for the new leadership. This study also supports the basic conclusion of Mikhail Myagkov and Peter Ordeshook that regional bosses in 1999 and 2000, more so than in 1996, when Yel’tsin was reelected, moved votes from one candidate or party to another “as they sought to ally with the person they believed would eventually become president.”60 The point is that they moved the votes, not the voters.

  The effect of this “abuse of administrative resources” on the vote tally is impossible to quantify exactly. But those who studied it and who spoke to the Moscow Times said bullying shifted several million votes from other candidates to Putin. Nearly all observers argued that it was far more influential than the crude falsifications discussed above. As the Moscow Times reported:

  In small villages where it is possible for someone to poll his neighbors and determine how they all voted, dishonesty turns up easily. Some villages have written open letters to the president and to other higher authorities to protest their votes being “stolen,” and the Moscow Times has obtained such letters. In some cases, voters have testified to having the pens and ballots snatched out of their hands at the voting booth and filled in for them. In others, they have been bullied into voting for Putin with threats from local leaders that they will lose their jobs, or be denied state welfare support. . . . Those reluctant to vote “correctly” report being threatened with losing their jobs, being evicted or being denied their right to state support such as pensions. “Of course we were pressured from the top, and we pressured our people to vote for Putin,” said one collective farm chief in an interview in Kazan, on condition of anonymity. “But it is forbidden to talk about it.”61

  A fourth piece of evidence is the switching of votes cast for other candidates to Putin after votes were counted, as indicated in the sample drawn up and published by the Moscow Times. Typically it appears that the votes were counted at individual precincts, passed up to the territorial or district level, and “corrected” there. As Table 2 demonstrates, in specific precincts in which all data were examined, the number of votes for Putin in the original precinct results was changed after the numbers were passed up to the territorial level. This kind of crude vote-rigging was the subject of a Duma investigation, the results of which were published in Rossiyskaya gazeta on April 27, 2000, which estimated that by this method alone, 700,000 votes were stolen. Added to the 1.3 million votes obtained by padding the electoral rolls, these two methods account for around 2 million of the 2.2 million needed to secure Putin’s victory in the first round. And withholding the right of rural voters to a free vote was estimated to be even more influential than these two methods combined in swinging the vote to Putin.

  Table 2. Evidence of Fabrication of Ballots

  Polling precinct number as recorded in a copy of the protocol

  Original precinct votes for Putin

  Votes for Putin reported by the territorial commission

  The difference in Putin’s favor, as a number and as a percentage

  In Bashkortostan:

  2,297

  725

  951

  226 / 31.2%

  1,026

  777

  909

  132 / 17.0

  411

  672

  794

  122 / 18.1

  In Dagestan:

  876

  1,070

  3,535

  2,465 / 230.4%

  903

  480

  1,830

  1,350 / 281.3

  896

  1,110

  2312

  1,202 / 108.3

  899

  728

  1,870

  1,142 / 156.7

  In Saratov:

  1,617

  666

  1,086

  420 / 63.1%

  1,797

  667

  995

  328 / 49.2

  1,591

  822

/>   1,012

  190 / 23.1

  Note: Moscow Times used copies of protocols and the official reports from territorial commissions.

  Source: Table drawn from Yevgeniya Borisova, “And the Winner is?” Moscow Times, September 9, 2000, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/and-the-winner-is/258951.html.

  The fifth piece of evidence relates to the transmission of results from the local, regional, and territorial commissions via the electronic reporting software State Automated System Vybory to the CEC in Moscow. Historically in Russia most people vote on their way to work in the morning, leaving the evening to watch prime-time television. The reporting of the turnout, however, which was a major Kremlin concern, proceeded in a highly dubious way. Despite the fact that the CEC reported at 6 P.M. that only 46.3 percent of the population had voted in the previous ten hours (not enough to satisfy the legal requirements for a legitimate election), in the next hour the number inexplicably jumped to 54 percent, as a result of which PACE observers concluded, “In view of that, the delegation considered that close observation of the electronic transmission of election results should be made in the future.”62 A typical example was reported in Dagestan, where an Interfax reporter voted thirty minutes before polls closed and observed that the registration form listing voters was only half full: “I just laughed upon hearing the next day that close to 100 percent of the people participated. They must have added people, but I have no facts to prove it.” According to CEC data, 59.23 percent of Dagestan’s registered voters had cast their ballots by 6 P.M. But two hours later turnout soared to 83.6 percent.63 These observations were repeated by Marina Arbatskaya, whose work supported the subsequent quantitative finding of University of Michigan political scientists Walter Mebane and Kirill Kalinin that “the distribution of turnout throughout the day . . . can be attributed to the active interference of administrative elites with the electoral process.”64

  The sixth and final indication of fraud is the summary destruction of troublesome evidence. In Dagestan a militia officer, Abdulla Magomedov, guarding ballots in the aftermath of the election filed a complaint that election officials had taken away bags of votes for Zyuganov, the Communists’ candidate, and burned them in front of his eyes in the street.65 The Moscow Times team verified this report and saw scraps of the charred but clearly marked Zyuganov ballots still lying in the street.

  In the six months after the elections, the Moscow Times investigative team, led by Yevgeniya Borisova, “met dozens of ordinary people like Magomedov. Federal elections authorities, foreign observers and the criminal justice system have all been dismissive of fraud allegations like his—admitting that fraud existed and lamenting it, but insisting it was insignificant (and apparently, punishing no one for it). But fraud was far from insignificant. Given how close the vote was—Putin won with just 52.94 percent, or by a slim margin of 2.2 million votes—fraud and abuse of state power appear to have been decisive” (italics added).66 A Duma committee headed by the Communist deputy Aleksandr Saliy found that about 440 lawsuits were filed in courts across the nation charging fraud of one kind or another in the March 26 vote, and that various election commissions had received untold thousands of formal complaints. In August 2000, while these cases and complaints were still being settled, the CEC removed election data from its website, further complicating investigations into irregularities.67

  All this led the Moscow Times to report, “The inescapable conclusion is that Putin would not have won outright on March 26 without cheating.”68 In a written reply to the Moscow Times, CEC chief Aleksandr Veshnyakov said that “investigations conducted by elections commissions of the Russian regions, by procurators, police organs and the Interior Ministry” had explored the allegations of fraud—and “did not find any documentary or other confirmation.”69

  Opposition leaders turned to the international observers for redress. But, as in every election, observers issued an interim report and, weeks later, a fuller report. In the Russian case, despite all the irregularities, immediately after the elections international observers determined that the voting had proceeded in a competent way on Election Day and that those irregularities that were found did not affect the overall result. On that basis, PACE declared that the election was free and that “the results should be understood as the free will of the Russian people, although the campaign cannot be considered to have been as fair as we would have liked to see it happen.”70 Only in the longer and fuller report, issued on May 19, were serious issues raised, without, however, in any way saying that Putin’s election was illegitimate.

  Results

  Putin’s ability to garner 52.94 percent of the votes and to turn out the vote so that almost 69 percent of all registered voters went to the polls was an impressive display of the fast-emerging power of what the Russians called “political technologies.”X He was also, it must be emphasized, a viable and charismatic candidate who all conceded would have won against Zyuganov, whether in the first or the second round. The fact that the Communist leader Zyuganov officially came in a distant second at 29 percent, with a return that was less than his 1996 showing, showed the steady decline in the popularity of the Communist message, as well as the success of Kremlin-orchestrated political and media attacks against him. It is clearly the case as well that Unity’s strong showing in the 1999 Duma elections against the Communists—results that may have been the consequence of significant electoral fraud—disadvantaged Zyuganov’s presidential chances.

  Immediately after the elections, Moscow became a swirl of reports about the coming turn to authoritarianism. Nezavisimaya gazeta published a report on March 30, 2000, that claimed legislation was actively being prepared that would eliminate local autonomy, making the regions dependent upon “the flourishes of Putin’s pen.” And regional leaders, including Moscow’s mayor Luzhkov, smelling an inevitable loss of autonomy, fought to maintain free regional elections even as they jockeyed to rebrand themselves as the governor “most loyal” to both Putin and a reassertion of Kremlin control.71 But nothing prepared anyone for the leaked document that appeared in May, only days before Putin’s inauguration—much too late to stop the process that was now under way.

  A Leaked Document Reveals Kremlin’s Authoritarian Plans

  If Putin’s occasional paeans to democracy fooled anyone into thinking that his aim in running was to establish a system in which elites would rotate every four years, public revelation of his team’s plans and strategies gave the lie to such naïveté. In the run-up to his May 2000 inauguration as president, Putin gave a lengthy interview to three journalists, which became his autobiography, First Person. In it he discusses the reasons he wanted to become president and the attractions for him of this lofty position. Looking at his Millennium message, discussed earlier, one can see the broader outlines of his public political purpose. But in First Person, perhaps unwittingly, he also reveals his personal reasons for seeking the presidency: only by becoming president can he “escape control,” particularly the kind of strict control he had to endure as a line officer in the KGB. “I remember coming into the KGB building where I worked and feeling as if they were plugging me into an electrical outlet. . . . You couldn’t even go out to a restaurant! . . . In the Kremlin, I have a different position. Nobody controls me here. I control everybody else” (italics added).72 The means he was willing to use to achieve this purpose became very clear both in the actions undertaken during the first one hundred days after his inauguration and in the blueprint for the establishment of authoritarian rule that was leaked at this time.

  Just before his inauguration in May 2000, this lengthy document, Reform of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, was leaked to the newspaper Kommersant. It seems that the leak came directly from the Kremlin’s Presidential Administration, and it was the subject of three days of articles on May 3–5.73 According to these articles, the document was accessible in its entirety through a link on the newspaper’s website. However, it was later
impossible to access the document through the archive section of Kommersant’s website, although it continued to exist on the Internet.74, XI While no one claimed that it had been approved by Putin, it was purported to be the very same strategic plan that Putin had been exhorting his team to write. The fact that subsequent policies pursued by Putin in the days immediately after his inauguration so closely followed this document speaks to its authenticity. The document’s structure is outlined on the very first page. It is divided into “books” on the various departments within the Presidential Administration and their new functions.XII

  Published in excerpts over three days by Kommersant, and subsequently scrubbed from their site, the plan states that the president, “if he really wants to ensure social order and stability in the country during his rule, then the self-governing political system is not needed, instead he will need a political structure (authority) within his Administration, which will not only be able to forecast and create ‘necessary’ political situations in Russia, but really be able to manage social and political processes in the Russian Federation and in the countries of the near abroad.”75 Referring to the role of the FSB, the “intellectual, personnel, and professional potential, which the FSB has at its disposal, should be employed by the Political Directorate, which in its turn, will allow to achieve very quick, competent, and productive results, which are needed to ‘jumpstart’ the Directorate’s work, and for the realization of long-term programs.”76 This is critical because society “at this time” rejects the use of any means to oppress the opposition. Therefore the Presidential Administration should use the public (“open and official”) part of its work as a “shield” to “demonstrate” the positive side of the work of the office. At the same time the office should not only engage in “open” or “official” work but should also focus on “closed” and “basic” work so as to “tangibly and concretely influence all political processes that are occurring in society” (emphasis in original).77