Putin's Wars

by Marcel H. Van Herpen

  Notes

  1. Quoted in Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 330.

  2. “Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Met with Members of the Sixth Valdai Discussion Club,” Ria Novosti (September 19, 2009). http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20090914/156117965-print.html.

  3. These were the Christian-Democratic Union, the Liberal-Democratic Party of Germany, the National-Democratic Party of Germany, and the Democratic Peasants Party of Germany.

  4. Apart from the political parties, also representatives of communist mass organizations (youth and women’s organizations, the communist trade union FDGB, etc.) were also on the National Front’s list.

  5. As a member of a delegation of the Dutch Social-Democratic Party, I personally had the opportunity to visit, on June 14, 1981, a polling station at the Alexanderplatz in East-Berlin, during the elections of the Volkskammer, the parliament of the German Democratic Republic. I was able to observe how all voters were given the “National Front” ballot paper and deposited it straight into the ballot box. In a corner was a voting booth covered with white sheets, but nobody entered it. On my question to the director of the polling station why nobody went into the booth, he said that voters “were free to go in the booth, delete some names on the list or even invalidate it.” When I said that entering the booth, “might, perhaps, attract some unwelcome attention,” he went to a table and came back with a booklet. It was the constitution of the German Democratic Republic. He leafed through the booklet, then read aloud a paragraph that said that elections in the GDR were “free and secret.” Next day the party paper Neues Deutschland published the results under the heading “Great Victory for the National Front.” In total 99.86 percent of the electorate had voted for the National Front. East German citizens told me the next day that entering the voting booth and deleting names would diminish your chances of getting an apartment, a promotion, or a permit for traveling abroad. Not one of my interlocutors had, himself or herself, ventured into the booth.

  6. Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 69–70.

  7. United Russia was formed in April 2001 from a merger between the Unity Party of Russia and the Fatherland-All Russia Party, led by the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov.

  8. Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.

  9. “Gorbachev alarm at Soviet echoes,” BBC (March 6, 2009). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7927920.stm.

  10. “A Just Russia” was originally a merger of three parties: Rodina (Fatherland Party), Pensionery (Pensioners’ Party), and Zhizn (Russian Party of Life, led by Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Federation Council, the Russian Upper House). The Rodina party, led by Dmitry Rogozin, was the most important of the three: it got 9 percent of the votes in the legislative elections of 2003. Rodina was barred from the elections for the Moscow City Duma in 2005 for inciting racial hatred after it had broadcasted ads with the slogan “clear our city of trash,” showing a group of Caucasian people littering a park with watermelon rinds. Its xenophobic tradition seems to have been taken over by its successor, A Just Russia, which was accused by SOVA-Center, a Russian NGO, of having three anti-Semites on its list of candidates for the State Duma. One of them, Yury Lopusov, a leader of the youth movement Pobeda, quoted Hitler’s Mein Kampf in an interview published on the party’s website. (Cf. “‘Spravedlivaya Rossiya’ beret antisemitov, rogozintsev i lubiteley ‘Mein Kampf,’’” (A Just Russia is welcoming anti-Semites, Rogozin adepts and admirers of ‘Mein Kampf’), SOVA-Center (September 24, 2007). http://xeno.sova-center.ru/45A29F2/9DF6F26. In 2006 Dmitry Rogozin resigned as party leader of Rodina. His appointment in January 2008 to the important post of ambassador to NATO was a sign of his excellent relationship with Putin.

  11. The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality in a country (0 = total equality and 1 = total inequality) was on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union 0.29. In 2006 it had risen to 0.41—which was above the average of the EU.

  12. The Moscow Times (October 30, 2006).

  13. Stuart D. Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession,” CRS Report for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2008), 2. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34392.pdf.

  14. Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession.”

  15. Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.

  16. Primakov, Le monde sans la Russie? À quoi conduit la myopie politique? 111. Primakov also criticized the fact that in the Federation Council “one could even find individuals with a criminal past or present.”

  17. Cf. Anatoly G. Vishnevsky, Russkiy ili Prusskiy? Razmyshleniya perekhodnogo vremeni (Moscow: Izdatelskiy dom GU VShE, 2005), 325: “The history of the emergence of the LDPR is surrounded by rumours according to which this party would be a creation of the KGB.” Cf. also Dimitri K. Simes and Paul J. Saunders, “The Kremlin Begs to Differ,” The National Interest no. 104 (November/December 2009), 42.

  18. Owen Matthews, “Moscow’s Phoney Liberal,” Newsweek (February 26, 2010).

  19. The party program can be found at http://www.patriot-rus.ru/#partyProgramm.

  20. “Attacks of the Clones,” The Economist (March 19, 2011).

  21. Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia, 282.

  22. Cf. Roland Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy,” Russia Profile (October 13, 2009). According to Oliphant, “VTsIOM’s General Director Valery Fyodorov tried to anticipate the discrepancy in a press release, citing the experimental use of SMS technology and saying that such differences are ‘normal,’ because ‘the goal of the exit poll is not to check the work of electoral commissions, but to capture the general trends of the vote and report them to the public as soon as possible.’” “That may be so,” wrote Oliphant, “but a 20 percent margin of error is well beyond the generally accepted standard, as some commentators have already pointed out.” In the exit polls the Communist Party got 17.7 percent, Yabloko got 13.6 percent, and A Just Russia 8.4 percent. The two last parties were above the 7 percent hurdle and should, normally, have been represented in the city council. Cf. also “Oppozitsiya budet protestovat protiv itogov vyborov v Mosgordumu,” Newsru.com (October 16, 2009).

  23. Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy.”

  24. Mikhai Tulsky, “Falsifikatsii: narusheniya i vbrosy v tsifrach i faktakh,” Novoe Vremya no. 37 (October 19, 2009).

  25. “Mikhail Gorbachev: Na glazakh u vsekh vybory prevratili v nasmeshku nad ludmi,” Novaya Gazeta no. 116 (October 19, 2009).

  26. “Regional Elections Go According to the Kremlin’s Script,” RFE/RL Newsline (October 12, 2009). http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1849659.html.

  27. According to Gazeta these elections were no cleaner compared with those of October 2009. Pressure was exerted on state-sector workers. There was also manipulation of absentee voting and early voting. (Cf. Kynev, Aleksandr. “Preodolevaya Vertikal,” Gazeta (March 15, 2010).)

  28. Julia Ioffe, “A Happy Defeat for the Kremlin,” Foreign Policy (March 16, 2010).

  29. Robert Coalson, “Victory in Defeat,” RFE/RL (March 15, 2010).

  30. There is a Russian joke that the only political alternation the country has known is between bald and not bald leaders. This is, indeed, striking, if one considers the following succession: tsar Nicholas II–Lenin (bald)–Stalin–Khrushchev (bald)–Brezhnev–Andropov (bald)–Chernenko–Gorbachev (bald)–Yeltsin–Putin (bald)–Medvedev–Putin (bald). As a matter of fact, this kind of alternation worked well over the last century.

  31. It was the result of a Kremlin-inspired merger of three parties: the liberal Union of Right Forces, Civilian Power, and the Democratic Party of Russia.

  32. Yekatarina Vinokurova, “Yo-Partiya: Mikhail Prokhorov gotov vozglavit ‘Pravoe Delo,’” Gazeta.ru (May 16, 2011).

  33. Maria-Luisa Tirmaste and Natalya Bashlykova, “Mikhailu Prokh
orovu pora zanyatsya svoim delom,” Kommersant (September 16, 2011).

  34. Pavel K. Baev, “Moscow Dithers over New Scandal and Forgets the Old Tragedy,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 8, no. 171 (September 19, 2011).

  35. Cf. “Rogozin’s New Rodina Registered,” Moscow Times (August 22, 2011).

  36. Cf. Robert Coalson, “United Russia, Putin Prepare For National Elections,” RFE/RL (May 12, 2011).

  37. “Ignatov: Narodnoy front: modernizatsiya ‘Yedinoy Rossii,’” Yedinaya Rossiya ofitsialnyy sait partii (May 10, 2011).

  38. Andrey Kolesnikov, “Tea with Putin-2,” Novaya Gazeta (May 12, 2011).

  39. Cf. Ilya Kharlamov, “Court Refuses to Register Russia’s PARNAS Party,” The Voice of Russia (June 23, 2011).

  40. Cf. Jadwiga Rogoza, “The Kremlin’s New Political Project,” Eastweek, Centre for Eastern Studies (March 20, 2013).

  41. “All-Russia People’s Front Organising Committees to Be Created in All Regions by May 20,” Itar Tass (May 6, 2013).

  42. “Putin izbran liderom Fronta,” Interfaks (June 12, 2013).

  43. “Surkov and Prokhorov Spin Election,” Moscow Times (December 7, 2011).

  44. Julia Smirnova,“Wie Russlands patriotische Kosaken Moskau erobern,” Die Welt (November 28, 2012).

  45. “Medvedev Invites Opposition to Speak,” RIA Novosti (March 27, 2013).

  46. Cf. Aleksandra Samarina and Ivan Rodin, “Partiyno-politicheskiy modern,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (April 7, 2010).

  47. Emilio Gentile, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? Histoire et interprétation (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 41.

  48. Renzo De Felice, Brève histoire du fascisme (Paris: Éditions Audibert, 2002), 46.

  49. De Felice, Brève histoire du fascisme, 46.

  50. Possibly different clans are behind the launch of different pro-Kremlin parties. According to Philip P. Pan, Dmitry Medvedev was behind the launch of Pravoe Delo (The Right Cause), on February 18, 2009. The core of this new party was formed by a former liberal opposition party, the Union of Right Forces, which had been convinced by Vladislav Surkov to transform itself in a pro-Kremlin party. Leonid Gozman, one of the leaders of The Right Cause, “said he considered the effort an attempt by Medvedev to build a base of support.” But he immediately added that “he saw no serious differences between Medvedev’s and Putin’s policies.” (Philip P. Pan, “Stepping Out From Putin’s Shadow,” The Washington Post (February 9, 2009).)

  51. Roy Medvedev seemed to anticipate this scenario in a biography of Dmitry Medvedev. “[T]he power question in Russia has been resolved,” he wrote, “and not only for the next four years. One can say with certainty that this question has also been resolved for the next twelve [years], and, maybe, even more.” (Cf. Roy Medvedev, Dmitry Medvedev: Prezident Rossiyskoy Federatsii (Moscow: Vremya, 2008), 5.) That President Dmitry Medvedev was ready to play a subservient role in his relationship with his future prime minister was evident in the words he spoke before being elected: “As the President said, I will work with the government, according to its wishes, like clockwork. I am a man . . . who worked with the President for 17 years” (ibid.). Medvedev was exactly the kind of president Prime Minister Putin needed.

  52. This scenario was predicted by Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s prime minister for almost four years until 2004, but has since fallen out with the leadership and now heads an opposition party. “I am convinced,” said Kasyanov in 2009, “that Putin will run in 2012 for two six-year terms.” “Putin’s bid,” he added, “[is] to become the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Stalin.” (Conor Humphries, “Russian Ex-PM Says Putin Will Rule to 2024,” Reuters (September 25, 2009).)

  Chapter 7

  Preaching the Ultranationalist Gospel

  The Transformation of “United Russia”

  The Putinist “dynamic of change” expressed itself not only in the manipulation of the “pluralist” party system by the presidential administration. It was also at work inside the parties. This dynamic was characterized by the emergence of an ultranationalist and chauvinist ideology in the ruling party United Russia, as well as in the tolerated “opposition” parties. This development was especially unexpected in the case of the CPRF, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which considered itself as the successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[1]

  The Ultranationalism and Revisionism of the Communist Party

  Immediately after its foundation, in February 1993, the party—while still clinging to the old communist symbols and keeping “leftist” demands in its program—took a chauvinist-nationalist course that was not much different from the Liberal-Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In both cases the party labels were misleading. Like the Liberal-Democratic Party, which was not liberal and not democratic, the Communist Party was not communist. Outward-looking Communist internationalism had been replaced by inward-looking Russian chauvinism. Stephen D. Shenfield wrote that many observers declared that the “ideology dominant within what still goes under the name of the communist movement is no longer communist, but fascist or close to fascist. The most unequivocal of these observers go so far as to claim that ‘the CPRF is in effect a fascist party, both at the top and at the provincial grassroots’ . . . or that ‘the CPRF has for a long time been following the ideas not of communism and socialism, but of national-socialism.’”[2] This opinion was confirmed by Dmitri Furman, an analyst of the Gorbachev Foundation, who wrote: “In the ideology of the largest party, the CPRF, fascistoid features are so salient that one has to be blind and deaf not to notice them.”[3] In a report of the Moscow-based SOVA Center, the cooperation between the CPRF and the extreme right (and now forbidden) Movement Against Illegal Immigration, DPNI, has been amply documented. Aleksandr Belov, the leader of the DPNI, and one of the agitators of an anti-Caucasian pogrom in the Karelian town of Kondopoga in the summer 2006, was invited as a speaker by the CPRF.[4] On the list of the CPRF for the municipal elections in Moscow in 2008 were at least thirteen candidates who were members of extreme right organizations.[5]

  Gennady Zyuganov, the general secretary of the CPRF, no longer seems to be interested in the world revolution or in the realization of Marxism-Leninism. Like Zhirinovsky, his sole interest has become the restoration of the former Soviet empire. Like the former Slavophiles he indulged in “Third Rome” fantasies. Moreover, could one imagine a general secretary of the former CPSU, opening his autobiography with the sentence: “I am Russian by blood and spirit and love my Native land”?[6] Certainly not. Zyuganov, however, had no problem with this exaltation of his “Russian-ness.” Nicole J. Jackson, referring to Zyuganov’s “extreme nationalist discourse,” wrote:

  Gennady Zyuganov promoted a form of national socialism which argued that the class struggle had been replaced by a clash of civilizations between Russia and the West which threatened Russia’s existence. This mix of ideas allowed Zyuganov to promote an alliance of communists and nationalists, “the red-brown alliance,” which demanded that Russia be allowed to pursue its own unique path of development based upon spiritual values—although the content was mostly unspecified.[7]

  In fact, Zyuganov was not the first to replace the class struggle inside a country by the struggle between countries. It was done before him by Enrico Corradini, the cofounder of the Italian nationalist association ANI, which would merge with Mussolini’s movement in 1923. According to Corradini “have” and “have-not” nations competed for economic advantage in perpetual war. “This new imperialist theory did not only legitimate fascist wars of conquest, but offered an alternative to Marxist class theories.”[8] At the same time the foreign policy objectives of the Communist Party were reduced to a mainly negative policy of systematically opposing the United States. The United States was considered to represent the main global power that could obstruct the reestablishment of the former empire. That the latter had become the ultimate goal became clear from the 1995 election platform of the party, which called on the peoples of the “illegally disintegrate
d Soviet Union to recreate a single unified state in good will.”[9] What is interesting here is the use of the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union.” Zhirinovsky described the demise of the Soviet Union in similar words in his book Last Push to the South. It is an expression full of sinister consequences. If you consider the Belavezha Accords of December 8, 1991, in which Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—the original three signatories of the Treaty of the Union of 1922—decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, to be illegal, this necessarily means that you consider all the subsequent treaties, signed by the Russian government with the new governments (e.g., on the delimitation of the frontiers), to be null and void. Despite the reassuring use of the words “in good will,” it is clear that if one follows the logic inherent in the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union,” the use of military means to reintegrate these territories would not be an act of aggression, as defined in the Charter of the United Nations, but a legal act of a central government to reintegrate rebellious provinces.