17. Putin, “Novyy integratsionnyy proekt dlya Evrazii: budushchee, kotoroe rozhdaetsya segodnya.”
18. Andreas Umland, “The Stillborn Project of a Eurasian Union: Why Post-Soviet Integration Has Little Prospects,” Valdai Discussion Club (December 7, 2011).
19. Umland, “The Stillborn Project of a Eurasian Union.”
20. Tatyana Valovaya, minister responsible for the main areas of integration and macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Commission, reacting to the remark that “the idea of unifying the countries of the CIS is often called the realization of the imperial ambitions of our country’s leadership,” said: “In this space some ‘unity’ has always existed.” She added: “The original six countries of the EEC were, in fact—precisely the empire of Charlemagne.” Valovaya saw no problem in comparing the empire of Charlemagne, which ended in 814—this is 1,200 years ago!—with the Russian Empire, which ended only twenty years ago. (Cf. “Integratsiya obedinyaet vsekh: ot kommunistov do ‘Edinoy Rossii’ i pravykh,” Izvestia (July 20, 2012).)
21. Putin’s argument is repeated by Yevgeny Vinokurov, who wrote that “one should not consider European and post-Soviet integration to be mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the regionalism of the CIS is a step along the way toward integration with the European Union.” (Y. Yu. Vinokurov, “Pragmaticheskoe evraziystvo,” Rossiya v Globalnoy Politike (April 30, 2013).)
22. Tropkina, Olga. “Yevgeny Primakov nazval usloviya dlya uspekha Evraziyskogo soyuza,” Izvestia (November 24, 2011).
23. Putin quoted by Maria Antonova, “State Lays Claim to Geography Society,” The St. Petersburg Times (November 20, 2009). The speech was held on November 18, 2009, when Putin became head of the Society’s Board of Trustees. Putin’s sudden interest in Russia’s oldest organization seemed less motivated by scientific than by geopolitical reasons. According to Antonova, “Tsar Nicholas I created the Russian Geographical Society in 1845 as part of the imperial drive for geographical expansion and exploration of the country’s natural resources.”
24. Gleb Bryanski, “Putin, Medvedev Praise Values of Soviet Union,” Reuters (November 17, 2011).
25. “Moscow Fleshes Out ‘Eurasian Union’ Plans,” EurActiv (November 17, 2011).
26. “Moscow Fleshes Out ‘Eurasian Union’ Plans.”
27. “Eurasian Union Proposal Key Aspect of Putin’s Expected Presidency,” EurasiaNet.org (October 7, 2011).
28. Tropkina, “Yevgeny Primakov nazval usloviya dlya uspekha Evraziyskogo soyuza.”
29. Prof. Sheng Shiliang, “Putin’s Eurasian Chess Match,” Valdai Discussion Club (October 31, 2011).
30. Katharina Hoffmann, “Eurasian Union: A New Name for an Old Integration Idea,” Russian Analytical Digest no. 112 (April 20, 2011).
31. Andrei Liakhovich, “The Reasons behind Putin’s Unprecedented Generosity Towards Lukashenka,” Belarus Digest (January 5, 2012).
32. Andrew Wilson wrote that Lukashenko “might find a new role with Putin by selling Belarus as an exemplar in Russia-supported integration schemes such as the Eurasian Union. Russia cannot allow Belarus as a member of the Eurasian Union to go bust because that would seriously undermine the whole idea of Russian-sponsored integration projects.” (Cf. “Andrew Wilson on His Belarus Book and Lukashenka’s Survival,” Belarus Digest (December 4, 2011).)
33. “Russia-Belarus Union State May Take Backseat if Eurasian Union Project Pans Out: Lukashenko,” RIA Novosti (November 18, 2011).
34. Halbach, “Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union: A New Integration Project for the CIS Region?”
35. Tropkina, “Yevgeny Primakov nazval usloviya dlya uspekha Evraziyskogo soyuza.”
36. Halbach, “Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union: A New Integration Project for the CIS Region?”
37. On the influence of Carl Schmitt’s geopolitical Grossraum theory on Medvedev’s proposal, see my paper “Medvedev’s Proposal for a Pan-European Security Pact: Its Six Hidden Objectives and How the West Should Respond.” http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_Medvedevs_Proposal_for_a_Pan-European_Security_Pact.pdf.
38. This part of the Kremlin’s hidden agenda is also emphasized by Marlène Laruelle, who wrote: “Putin’s Eurasian Union project is aimed mainly at Central Asia, less at the South Caucasus, with the ultimate aim and supreme reward being the potential reintegration of Ukraine into the Russian bosom” (emphasis mine). (Cf. Marlène Laruelle, “When the ‘Near Abroad’ Looks at Russia: the Eurasian Union Project as Seen from the Southern Republics,” 9.)
39. “Posol RF: Moldaviya i Tamozhennyy soyuz: vozvrat v proshloe ili proryv v budushchee?” Regnum (February 7, 2012).
40. Vladimir Socor, “Putin Suggests Transnistria Self-Determination, Rogozin Displays Transnistria Flag,” Eurasian Daily Monitor 9, no. 149 (August 16, 2012).
41. Socor, “Putin Suggests Transnistria Self-Determination.”
42. George Niculescu, “The Myths and Realities of Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union,” The European Geopolitical Forum (January 8, 2013).
Part II
The “Internal War”
Consolidation of Power
Chapter 6
Russia as a “Pluralist” One-Party State
When Yeltsin told Putin in the summer of 1999 that he had chosen him to be his successor and Putin had to prepare for the presidential elections of 2000, Putin was upset. “I don’t like election campaigns,” he said. “I really don’t. I don’t know how to run them, and I don’t like them.”[1] This exclamation would, in fact, become the profession of faith of Putin’s regime, because the realization of Putin’s imperial project was dependent on two conditions. The first of these was the unhampered continuation of his regime in order to be able to realize his long-term projects. The second condition was the necessity of upholding a formal democratic façade to facilitate the acceptance of his regime in the West, thus avoiding the West mobilizing against the emergence of a new “Russian danger.” This meant that he would strictly adhere to the letter (though not the spirit) of the constitution. He would maintain the external characteristics of a democratic regime, such as elections and a free press, but at the same time he would do anything to avoid an alternation of power from taking place, which is the litmus proof of democratic governance. The repression of opposition forces in Russia, therefore, was considered a necessary condition for the continuation of his regime. Winning this “internal war” was for Putin a precondition for winning his first war: the reconstruction of the empire. How Putin conducted this “internal war” we will analyze in this section.
A One-Party State with Four Parties?
Each time visitors from the West questioned the reality of Russian political pluralism, Putin reacted with visible irritation. During the Valdai conference in September 2009, for instance, a Western participant asked: “To what extent do you think the Western model for political and economic development would suit Russia? Or do you think Russia needs to adopt some other model, which would better suit local historical, geographical and geopolitical realities?” Putin answered—not amused—in a brusque tone: “Russia’s fundamental political and economic system is fully in line with international standards. If we are discussing the political system, I am referring to free election(s) and (an) effective multi-party system.”[2] Apparently, the Russian leadership did not consider reestablishing a one-party system to be a sensible strategy. The historical precedents—not only in fascist countries, but also the experience with the communist party in the former Soviet Union—had too negative an image.
East German Communist “Pluralism”:
A Model for Putin?
The former communist regime legitimized the existing one-party system by referring to the emergence of a “classless society” in which the old capitalist class cleavages would no longer exist. Interestingly, even in the former communist bloc there were still some countries, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic, which did not follow the Soviet example, but ma
intained (quasi-)pluralist systems. In East Germany, for instance, alongside the SED, the official communist party, there existed four other political “parties.”[3] However, these parties were not allowed to compete with each other or with the communist party, nor to participate in elections as independent bodies. Candidates from all parties appeared on a prefabricated list of the so-called “National Front”[4] under the aegis of the communist party, and in the (obligatory) elections the only act expected from voters was to throw this list in the ballot box.[5] Putin lived and worked as a KGB agent in Dresden in the German Democratic Republic between 1985 and 1991. Asked about his activities there, he answered that he “looked for information about political parties, the tendencies inside these parties, their leaders. I examined today’s leaders and the possible leaders of tomorrow and the promotion of people to certain posts in the parties and the government.”[6] Putin might have been impressed by the astuteness of East Germany’s pseudo-pluralism.
Of the four parties that on December 2, 2007, were elected in the State Duma, United Russia got 64.30 percent of the vote, A Just Russia got 6.80 percent, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation got 11.57 percent, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia got 8.14 percent. If we take into account that A Just Russia was an artificial construction, set up by United Russia to attract additional votes, the governing bloc collected as much as 71.1 percent of the votes (and 78.44 percent of the seats). This sweeping majority exceeded even the percentage the ANC got in the South African elections on April 22, 2009 (the ANC got 65.9 percent). The well-oiled and generously financed United Russia party machine was explicitly set up to support Putin, although Putin himself was not a party member. This did not prevent Putin accepting, on April 15, 2008, the position of chairman.
Not only did United Russia have a comfortable majority at that time, but, additionally, the two “opposition” parties, Zhirinovsky’s crypto-fascist Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party, had long since abandoned playing a serious opposition role. These parties, instead, fully supported the government. The resulting system, therefore, in practice came close to a one-party state. Richard Sakwa had remarked that already Unity, United Russia’s predecessor[7] was “neither a modern political party nor a mass movement but was instead a political association made to order by power elites to advance their interests. [It] . . . could become the core of a new type of hegemonic party system in which patronage and preference would be disbursed by a neo-nomenclatura class of state officials loyal to Putin. Unity could become the core of a patronage system of the type that in July 2000 was voted out of office in Mexico after seventy-one years.”[8] Unity’s successor, United Russia, indeed, succeeded in establishing itself as the inheritor of the old monolithic CPSU. Former president Gorbachev called it “the worst version of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”[9] This was a rather harsh accusation from the mouth of the last president of the Soviet Union, who made his career inside the defunct CPSU and knew better than anyone else how rotten the old system was. But Gorbachev made a mistake: United Russia was not a remake of the old CPSU. Because, quite simply, communism in Russia was definitively dead. The new pluralistic façade might hide the same monolithic political structure, but it was situated in a rather different environment: not the former environment of a communist, centrally planned economy, but the new environment of a state capitalist economy. This made a big difference and was one of the reasons not to look back to Soviet times for historical analogies.
The Use of Fake Political Parties
On October 28, 2006, a new party was introduced into the Russian party landscape. Its name was Spravedlivaya Rossiya, or A Just Russia[10] —at first sight a promising name, because many Russians deplored the loss of the former socialist model of the defunct Soviet Union and craved a more just and fair society.[11] What was A Just Russia? A new opposition party? A party that would challenge the near monopoly of United Russia? One should forget this illusion. According to the Moscow Times, “Russia . . . [has] become possibly the first country in history with a two-party system in which both parties share the same overriding principle, that the executive is always right.”[12] In a report for the American Congress, Stuart D. Goldman wrote: “The platforms of United Russia and A Just Russia consisted of little more than the slogan, ‘For Putin.’”[13] He added that the “second pro-Kremlin party, A Just Russia—[is] widely believed to have been created by Kremlin ‘political technologists’ . . . to draw leftist votes away from the Communists.”[14] Goldman was right. The instigator of the new party was Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy head of the presidential administration and a prominent Kremlin ideologue. Surkov was the inventor of the new political concepts of the Putin era, such as the “power vertical” and “sovereign democracy” (which had nothing to do with democracy, but meant merely that no foreign power had the right to define what democracy is). Anna Politkovskaya characterized Surkov as follows: “The deputy head of Putin’s office is a certain Vladislav Surkov, the acknowledged doyen of PR in Russia. He spins webs consisting of pure deceit, lies in place of reality, words instead of deeds.”[15]
Surkov’s “master idea” behind the creation of A Just Russia was to establish a two-party system as existed in the United States, but with one important difference: neither party would embody political alternatives, nor would they lead to an alternation of governing elites. Instead, they would guarantee political continuity by supporting the Putin regime. The hidden aim was that A Just Russia, as the new “left wing” party, would draw votes away from the Communist party. However, even circles close to the Kremlin were not convinced. One of them was former prime minister Primakov, who wrote “proposals can be heard to create in Russia a two-party system. The center left party A Just Russia could aspire to the role of lead second party. But the realization of this project, the idea behind it being attributed to the Kremlin, presents great difficulties. When United Russia was created, the administrative potential was used to the maximum. Many regional and local leaders felt obliged to become members of this party. Might they this time take at least a neutral position, or even support A Just Russia at the Duma elections? And that while V. V. Putin has become leader of United Russia?”[16] Primakov’s skepticism was justified. In the December 2007 Duma elections the strategy did not work out as was planned. Although A Just Russia was secured a place in parliament, the Communist Party resisted better than expected. However, we have to take into account that the Communist Party, although an “opposition party,” did not play a serious opposition role. The party “knows its place” in the existing system and does not transgress its (narrow) limits, as it is dependent on the government for registration, fund-raising, and access to the state controlled TV channels. The same is true for Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party, of which it is said that “according to insider accounts [it] was established by the Soviet KGB to serve as a nationalist pseudo-opposition.”[17]
The Duma that was elected in 2007 exhibited another important defect: this was the absence of liberal parties, such as Yabloko and the Union of the Right Forces. The Kremlin wanted this anomaly to be “repaired” in the run-up to the Duma elections of December 2011. By the beginning of 2010 rumors were already emerging about a new initiative. In February 2010 Owen Matthews, the Moscow correspondent of Newsweek, wrote about “a new liberal pseudo-opposition party the Kremlin is rumored to be cooking up.”[18] However, in the regional elections of March 13, 2011, suddenly another party popped up. It was the Patrioty Rossii (Patriots of Russia). Founded in 2005 by Gennady Semigin, a former member of the Communist Party, it had until then led a mainly dormant existence. The party, using the slogan “Patriotism is superior to Politics,” managed to win nearly 8 percent of the vote in Dagestan. Its program was left-wing, nationalist, and anti-Western.[19] In a comment The Economist wrote: “Analysts say the party is another Kremlin product, tested now with a view to being deployed in the parliamentary election in December [2011]. . . . Its real purpose, it seems, is to act as
a spoiler for the Communist Party and another party, Just Russia, which itself was originally created as a double for United Russia but has since become a genuine challenger. Engineering clone and fake opposition parties is one of the Kremlin’s favourite political ‘technologies.’”[20] All this confirmed what Anna Politkovskaya had written in 2004: “There is a great fashion at the present for bogus political movements created by a directive of the Kremlin. We don’t want the West suspecting that we have a one-party system, that we lack pluralism and are relapsing into authoritarianism.”[21]
Unequalled Election Fraud
A fake pluralist system cannot be maintained without massive election fraud. This fraud, however, must not transgress certain limits if it is to keep the pluralist system “credible.” On October 11, 2009, when local elections were held in seventy-five regions for seven thousand eligible posts, something unexpected happened. The strategy of the Kremlin’s “political technologists” of creating a fake two-party system seemed to be surpassed by a new reality: the total hegemony of United Russia, which obtained almost 80 percent of the votes. The other parties were completely marginalized in the local councils. The background to this new political fact was the greatest election fraud ever committed in post-Communist Russia. In the Moscow City Duma, for instance, United Russia got thirty-two out of thirty-five seats. However, exit polls by VTsIOM, the state-owned pollster, had predicted that support for United Russia in Moscow was only 45.5 percent. Strangely enough, the party got 66 percent of the vote.[22] According to observers “the campaign was called one of the dirtiest ever in Russia. . . . Almost everywhere parties complained of the abuse of absentee ballots and the rather old fashioned abuse of ‘carousel’ voting, in which buses ferry volunteers from one polling station to the next to vote several times.”[23] However, according to Novoe Vremya (New Times)—a weekly magazine critical of the Kremlin—the use of absentee ballots and the carousel system were only detskiye metody (children’s methods) of election fraud. They could change the results by only 5 to 7 percent. However, United Russia’s results were in many cases “improved” by up to 40 percent. The method used for this, wrote the weekly, was quite simple: it consisted in removing “troublesome observers” at the moment that the ballot boxes were opened and in presenting the “end results” directly.[24] Ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev on this occasion abandoned his usually prudent and discrete attitude vis-à-vis the leadership in the Kremlin. In an interview in Novaya Gazeta, of which he is one of the owners, he said that “in the eyes of everybody, the elections have turned into a mockery of the people.”[25]
Putin's Wars Page 14