Putin's Wars
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Apart from this massive fraud committed during the elections, there was also the fraud committed before them. Parties outside the “official opposition,” such as, for instance, Drugaya Rossiya (the Other Russia—a coalition headed by former chess champion Garry Kasparov), could not participate. According to Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst with the Moscow-based Mercator research group, “they are on the periphery, marginalized. . . . They have no access to the media. They are not allowed to register as candidates or even as parties, as players in the electoral process. They exist outside the system that is called politics.”[26]
Putin’s goal, to create two pro-Kremlin parties and in this way to maintain a pluralistic political façade, began to run the risk of being drowned in the “electoral successes” of United Russia, which—helped by the careerism of the regional leaders, the manipulated media, excessive financial funding, and, last but not least, massive, nationwide, organized fraud—might become “the only show in town.” United Russia was in danger of becoming a victim of its own success, undermining the very democratic façade the leadership had been so carefully trying to construct over the years. That the Kremlin was really worried about the turn of events became clear after the regional elections, which took place on March 14, 2010. Despite widespread fraud,[27] this time United Russia did not repeat its success. It lost about 20 percentage points across the board. In Sverdlovsk the party got only 39 percent, and Irkutsk elected a Communist mayor with over 62 percent. One would have expected grim faces in the Kremlin, but the opposite was the case. “A happy defeat for the Kremlin,” wrote Julia Ioffe in Foreign Policy.[28] According to another Western observer it was a “Victory in defeat.”[29] The fact that the three “opposition parties” together had gotten more votes than United Russia seemed to be extremely good news for the Kremlin: the democratic façade had been saved without in any way jeopardizing United Russia’s power monopoly. Due to the fact that the biggest party gets extra seats in the regional legislatures, “loser” United Russia could quietly continue to rule the regions in tandem with the Kremlin-appointed governors.
Mikhail Prokhorov’s Revolt against
the Kremlin “Puppeteers”
The Kremlin’s efforts to build fake parties alongside United Russia, however, continued. The Kremlin needed a multiparty system, but only in the way the former German Democratic Republic needed it: as a democratic façade. It should by all means be prevented from developing into a real multiparty system and leading to what the Kremlin wanted to avoid at all cost: political alternation. However, creating even a fake two-party system could be risky for the Kremlin, because a big opposition party—even if it was originally set up as a fake opposition party—could eventually develop into a real opposition.[30] This theoretical possibility seemed almost to become a reality in the summer of 2011, when the Kremlin promoted the billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, president of the Onexim Group and third-richest man in Russia, to leader of the party Pravoe Delo (Right Cause). This party was founded in 2009,[31] but had no seats in the Duma. It was set up as a “liberal” party with the objective of capturing the votes of the liberal intelligentsia, the urban middle classes, and the business community. The Kremlin wanted the party to enter the Duma in the elections of December 2011 to make its managed “multiparty” system more credible to the most critical part of the electorate. Mikhail Vinogradov, director of the Petersburg Foundation “Petersburg Politics,” announced that Prokhorov, a talented business tycoon, was “a strong figure, not inclined to participate in imitation projects.”[32] His prediction came true. Prokhorov went to work energetically. He approached Yevgeny Roizman, who had made a name as an activist, leading a nationwide campaign against narcotics. The Kremlin administration was not pleased with this unexpected activism and advised Prokhorov to sack Roizman. Prokhorov refused. This show of independence could not be tolerated and on September 15, 2011, Prokhorov was forced out of the party. Prokhorov did not mince his words. In Kommersant he attacked Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration, head-on, calling him a “puppeteer” who “privatized the political system and disinforms the government of the country.”[33] Prokhorov asked for Surkov to be sacked—a rather provocative demand, because Surkov the “puppeteer” was not acting alone, but had the full backing of his two masters and “puppeteers-in-chief” Putin and Medvedev who, in reality, were pulling the strings. An analyst commented that Prokhorov, “by refusing to bend to the petty wishes from the Kremlin . . . has qualified as an ‘enemy of the state,’ and his fortune instead of shielding him from persecution, makes it more tempting for the greedy siloviki to go after the loot . . . . Prokhorov is guilty of revealing how rotten Putinism has grown.”[34]
The Prokhorov affair brought the Kremlin’s manipulation fully into the open, ridiculing its system of “managed democracy.” However, it was not to put an end to the Kremlin’s machinations. In May 2011, at the same time that Prokhorov was selected to become a party leader, Vladislav Surkov and his associates were already preparing another plan: the formation of an “All-Russia People’s Front” (Obshcherossiyskiy Narodnyy Front), in which United Russia would participate together with other parties and organizations. Putin officially presented the plan on May 6, 2011, at a conference of United Russia in Volgograd. One of the parties invited to participate in this Front was the successor organization of Rodina, an ultranationalist and xenophobic party. Its former leader, Dmitry Rogozin, who had become Russian permanent representative to NATO, was called back to Russia to organize its relaunch under the name Rodina-Congress of Russian Communities.[35] For small parties it was attractive to participate in the Front because, not hindered by the extremely high 7 percent threshold, they would get a guaranteed number of seats in the Duma. For United Russia this formula was interesting because, while keeping its absolute majority, it could plan in advance the “diversity” in the new parliament. Also representatives of Kremlin-friendly trade unions, agricultural associations, veterans’ organizations, and even car-owners organizations were mentioned as possible candidates for joining the Front.[36] On the website of “United Russia” the Front was welcomed as a “modernization” of the party, which would create a new, broad coalition around the party—some kind of “silent majority” representing different ideological positions: “left-wing people, right-wing liberals, [and] moderate nationalists.”[37] Up to 25 percent of the positions on the Front list would be reserved for these outsiders. It is certainly no coincidence that this new “All-Russia People’s Front” was a faithful copy of the “National Front” of the former German Democratic Republic. In the GDR it was the only list in the elections for the Volkskammer, the East German parliament.
Andrey Kolesnikov made another comparison in the Novaya Gazeta. “Putin’s Popular Front,” he wrote, “is Mussolini’s corporation: everything from Shmakov’s unions [Mikhail Shmakov was the chairman of FITUR, the Russian trade union federation which unites 49 trade unions and counts 25 million members, MHVH] to the women’s organisations, all under one roof. . . . In implementing the idea of a popular front, I see the principle enunciated by Il Duce in 1925: ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’”[38] Putin’s Front, however, still left some place for other parties, thereby rescuing Russia’s “pluralism.” Real opposition parties, such as the Peoples’ Freedom Party (Parnas) of Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, and Mikhail Kasyanov, were eliminated beforehand from this “pluralist” system. On June 22, 2011, the Justice Ministry refused to register the party.[39] The Duma elections of December 2011 came too early for the All-Russia People’s Front to play a role. But after the election ”victory” of United Russia, which was characterized by massive fraud and the growing estrangement of the urban electorate from this party, the Kremlin began to purge the party of its most corrupt elements. At the same time it began to build the All-Russia People’s Front as a political formation to capture the votes of the conservative and anti-Western segment of
the Russian electorate in the next election. In order to give the—mostly provincial—representatives of this “silent majority” a chance to enter parliament, Vladimir Putin, on March 1, 2013, submitted a draft law providing for a restoration of a mixed electoral system in which one half of the MPs are to be elected in single-mandate constituencies.[40] By May 20, 2013, organizing committees of the All-Russia People’s Front were created in all Russian regions. It was telling that Moscow and St. Petersburg would be the last regions where the Front opened offices.[41] The founding congress of the Front, renamed into “People’s Front for Russia,” took place on June 12, 2013, the official “Russia Day” holiday. At the end the chairman of the congress said that he still had “a very stupid question.” He asked: “Who do we choose as leader of our movement?” In the room they started to chant: “Putin, Putin.” “Shall we vote? There are no other candidates? Vladimir Vladimirovich, I congratulate you with all my heart.”[42]
However, the new “People’s Front for Russia” was not the only safety valve, invented by the Kremlin, to save the system. When, at the Duma elections of December 4, 2011, the disaffected liberal intelligentsia of Moscow and Saint Petersburg turned away en masse from United Russia and neither did they vote for the fake “Right Cause” party (which, after Prokhorov left, only got 0.6 percent of the vote), Vladislav Surkov proposed in an interview a new fake party for “angry urban communities.”[43] In reality, however, the next Kremlin creation was not the promised party for “angry urban communities,” but a party for a quite different audience: the conservative Cossacks and their sympathizers. On November 24, 2012, the Cossack Party of the Russian Federation was founded. There are about 7 million Cossacks in Russia, mostly living in frontier regions. It is a nationalist electorate, deeply Orthodox, and dedicated to Putin, who, in 2005, was given the title of Cossack colonel—a title previously held by the tsars. According to the president of the party, Sergey Bondarev, a former United Russia MP and deputy governor of the Rostov region, “the party is not only for Cossacks, but for all citizens of Russia. We are not left-wing and not right-wing, we are straight ahead.”[44] The abbreviation of the new party, CaPRF, was almost the same as CPRF, the abbreviation of the Communist Party, which led to protests from the Communists, who accused the Kremlin of wanting to siphon off voters from their party.
After the Duma elections of December 2012, when the oppositionist blogger Aleksey Navalny denounced United Russia as the partiya zhulikov i vorov (party of swindlers and thieves), Putin is relying more and more on building the People’s Front, while letting Medvedev take on the job of purging and “modernizing” United Russia. One of Medvedev’s “modernizing measures” was a proposal to give opponents of United Russia the opportunity to express their views at the “Civil University,” a new educational project for party members, launched by him on March 27, 2013. “If these are people who criticize the party for some mistakes, tricks, lack of activism, for some issues or others, I believe that would only benefit us,” Medvedev said.[45]
This does not mean, however, that Putin was willing to give Medvedev a completely free hand to modernize United Russia. When Putin prepared to use United Russia as a machine for the presidential elections of 2012, Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Effective Politics Foundation and a close ally of Putin,[46] said that United Russia needed “to develop a new level of management,” some kind of superstructure above the existing leadership. This new group would be a sort of personal cabinet of Putin’s. One might be tempted to compare this proposed new structure with the old Politburo of the CPSU, but that comparison would not be totally valid. The Politburo was a collegial organ of shared power that was formally controlled by the Central Committee. The superstructure, suggested by Pavlovsky, is not an organ of shared power, nor is it an organ that is formally controlled by the party. It would be the personal camarilla of Putin, who, although he resigned as chairman of the party in May 2012 and never was a member of the party, would stand above the party and avail himself of the party structures. The proposed personal cabinet would be an instrument in his hand to direct the party machine and use it for his own aims. Putin’s special position in the party, proposed by Pavlovsky, would come close to the Führerprinzip.
Gleb Pavlovsky belongs—with Vladislav Surkov—to the most influential “political technologists” behind Russia’s new “electoral democracy,” in which many techniques are used to achieve the preordained results: falsifying elections, erecting legal barriers, harassing opposition parties, monopolizing the media, absorbing other parties, and creating fake parties. These techniques are not new. Many are used by other autocratic regimes that want to maintain a more or less democratic façade. However, the way in which the Kremlin tried to manipulate existing parties by creating new parties, showed, indeed, an interesting resemblance to the “political technologies” used by Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. According to Emilio Gentile, in post–World War I Italy, “the conquest of the power monopoly was achieved in different phases that coincided with the expansion of fascist supremacy in the country. In the first phase, Mussolini set up a coalition policy with the parties that were ready to collaborate; at the same time he did everything to disintegrate them.”[47] Renzo De Felice described Mussolini’s attempts “to ‘empty’ the traditional parties” by offering their leaders attractive positions in his government or in the state bureaucracy.[48] In the elections of April 6, 1924, Mussolini went so far as to present two lists, a broad “ministerial list” that also contained the names of non-fascist candidates, and a “list bis” of the fascist party. These two lists combined gave him an absolute majority of 66.3 percent.[49] This result is certainly impressive, but it is still 4.8 percent less than the combined votes (71.1 percent) of United Russia and its “list bis,” A Just Russia, in the December 2007 Duma elections.[50]
Another Pseudo-Pluralism: The Diarchy at the Top
Another interesting resemblance between Putin’s and Mussolini’s systems was the diarchy at the top. Mussolini was prime minister and Duce, but until the armistice in 1943 Italy was a monarchy and Mussolini had to deal with King Victor Emmanuel III, the Italian head of state. In Mussolini’s case this diarchy was not of his own making. It was forced on him by the specificity of the Italian situation. After the election of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president in March 2008 and Putin’s appointment to prime minister, there was created, in Russia also, a diarchy, called the tandem. But unlike the Italian situation, where the diarchy was an unintended consequence of a historical situation, the diarchy in Russia was the result of a deliberate choice. In the beginning there was a lot of speculation about the reason for this construction. Some Western observers obstinately wanted to believe—even as late as the fall of 2011—that this diarchy did have some real substance. It did not. The reason for Putin installing the tandem was to guarantee Putin’s iron grip on power for at least another decade. The second reason was to hide this manipulated usurpation of state power behind a smokescreen of formal legality. The Russian constitution did not permit a president to run for a third term. Putin easily could have changed the constitution, but he chose to step down and leave his place to his young cabinet chief Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev was the ideal choice for Putin. He had no political experience, no apparent power ambitions, nor an independent power base in society, and he was, moreover, totally devoted to his boss. Playing the game of “the constitutional president,” who “scrupulously applied the existing legal rules,” Putin planned to become a “legal” ruler who would remain in office longer than any of his foreign colleagues.[51] Putin served as a prime minister under Yeltsin for almost five months, was subsequently president for more than eight years, remained prime minister for another four years, which already makes altogether twelve and a half years. During Medvedev’s presidency the presidential term for the next president was extended from four to six years. After his reelection on March 4, 2012, Putin had, therefore, theoretically the possibility of remaining at the apex of the Russian power system until 2
024, which would make for a reign of almost a quarter of a century. This would bring the total time span of his reign close to that of an average Russian tsar (Alexander II, for instance reigned from 1855 to 1881 and Nicholas II from 1894 to 1917). It even comes close to the almost thirty years’ reign of Putin’s admired geopolitical genius, Joseph Stalin.[52]