New York Times - 1.6.2002

 

The New York Times

Russia's Leaders Are Different.  It's the People Who Are the Same

By Alison Smale

OSCOW - For someone who has known Russia for 20 years, but who lived in the West in the 1990's, perhaps the most striking thing about Vladimir V. Putin's Moscow is how familiar it feels.

When I lived here in the 1980's, it was scarcely surprising that everybody danced to the tune played from the Kremlin. It was the time of deepest Communist stagnation, and falling in line was the surest way to survive. Whatever the latest pronouncement of the latest elderly leader — Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri V. Andropov or Konstantin U. Chernenko — their vocabulary and phrases were sure to be parroted for weeks on end in the official media. When it came time to vote, the requisite red flags and posters went up in my neighborhood, and the residents trotted into the appointed polling place, voted for the prescribed candidates, and hoped for some reward like a rare shipment of mandarin oranges.

Those days are gone and they will not return. Yet after the heady wonder of glasnost, or openness, that Mikhail S. Gorbachev brought in the late 80's, and the chaotic, corrupt, yet exhilarating turn to capitalism and free expression that followed under Boris N. Yeltsin, the aura that surrounds Mr. Putin seems strangely lifeless.

The old and the new exist side by side. By night, Moscow's buildings are bathed in light as never before, though dozens of towns are once again without heat and power this winter. Chic young women strut the streets of the capital, but they are not much nearer to feminist independence than their dowdier, plumper grandmothers.

The Kremlin, however, is as impenetrable as it ever was. Russia's leader, like the czars of old, has always set the tone for the country. Now it is Mr. Putin, and what he radiates is the managerial air of the capable, intelligent former K.G.B. official and Young Communist that he is. For all that he speaks fluent German, and has turned the country westward, his universe is unmistakably Soviet. Opposition is weak, and the war in Chechnya has receded both in the news and in ordinary conversations. Russians seem to have concluded that they are not really in charge of what the government does. So if their leader promises to take care of their lives, they will get on with living them and pay politics little heed.

That does not mean, however, that they are not warily on the watch. Conditioned by a harsh and unpredictable history, Russians appear disillusioned and cynical. Surveys conducted by the New Siberian University in Siberia since 1992 found at the end of 2001 that only 6 percent of respondents had any faith in political parties, only 10 to 12 percent believe the media, and just 18 percent trust the Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoyed the trust of 60 percent of respondents just 5 years ago.

Several commentators marked the end of 2001 by noting the anemic state of political life, citing as evidence a Dec. 24 phone-in with the always unflappable Mr. Putin, and a recent Kremlin meeting he held with invited civic and human rights groups. Television still usually shows the president and his official guest of the day facing each other in wooden poses and with no sound coming from their mouths — only an announcer's voice- over. Can this be the same Vladimir Putin who stood and bantered — albeit with visible discomfort — at the side of a folksy George W. Bush, fielding questions from Texas teenagers?

No Russian has a simple answer. While Mr. Bush claims to have seen into Mr. Putin's soul, Russians make many things of their president. His popularity rating, if the opinion polls are to be believed (and that is always a question here), is at around 80 percent. But that may mean little more than that he has brought stability after 15 years of turbulence. "We need a rest," said Larissa Anno, a friend from my years of living here who used to teach English and now has turned her linguistic skills to advantage in business. Mr. Putin spoke to this sentiment in his televised message to the populace at New Year's, promising Russians that he would work to make 2002 still "more predictable."

The newspapers, meanwhile, are markedly less full of verve than in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin days, and they are capable of fawning praise for that kind of goal. In 2001, oozed the labor daily Trud the other day, "Russia objectively lived the best year in its modern history." Its analyst, Vitaly Golovachev, went on to explain that "hopelessness, apathy, pessimism used to weaken the Russian society like corrosion eroding metal," but the situation took a turn for the better under Mr. Putin, once he had "defined the contours of a clear- cut policy" to strengthen the state and improve "the well-being and dignity of Russian citizens."

In fact, Russia's economy benefited from a couple of years of high prices for oil and gas, which Russia exports, and from the ruble crash of 1998, which made Russian firms more competitive on the domestic market. These developments have helped to increase the aura of well-being, at least in Moscow, where New Year's food and presents flew off the shelves at gleaming 24-hour supermarkets. In the capital, there is a growing educated middle class that has found its way in the new Russia, earning and spending the fruits of honest livelihoods, and making it nearly impossible to book a flight abroad over the three-week Christmas-New Year's-Orthodox Christmas holiday period.

But even those around Mr. Putin hesitate to trust in a bright new future. His economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, recently said that hopes of breaking corruption had so far proven illusory, and that the government could take almost no credit for the recent economic growth. Meanwhile, critical voices from abroad, as well as from inside Russia, point to the shutdown of the old independent NTV, the attempt to do the same with TV6 (which won at least a temporary stay of execution from a court last week), the sentencing last month of a journalist for treason and above all Mr. Putin's own background in the K.G.B. as proof that he wants to control a Soviet-style state and crush civil society. That seems unlikely in the extreme; still, Mr. Putin's rule is full of paradoxes. How to account, say, for that court reprieve for TV6, or for Mr. Putin's sudden embrace of the West after Sept. 11?

There is nothing inside him, no culture, convictions or principles," said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, a fiercely independent woman who was once a Soviet dissident and now is among the president's most outspoken critics. "The Chekists," she said, using a Lenin-era term for the secret police, "are comedians. They will play any role, don any mask. They are what any particular time demands of them." Mr. Putin, she argued, is an intelligent observer of world affairs, and recognized that international terrorism might not stop at the United States; therefore, it was to his benefit to turn to the West, particularly at a time when falling oil prices might threaten the veneer of prosperity his presidency has so far brought.

INSTEAD of smiling upon such a guest and feeding him steak on a Texas ranch, she said, the West should keep careful watch. Instead of agreeing with Mr. Putin that the war in Chechnya is a war on Islamic extremism, she said, the West "cannot keep quiet about it on a state level. Such silence already reduces Western democracy."

What is needed, her comments seemed to suggest, is for the West and the Russian populace to both take on the role of the old bride-to-be of Russian folk custom, who was handed a tangled ball of thread on the eve of her wedding. If she untangled it, she would be an excellent wife for her complicated, problematic partner. It seemed an apt metaphor for the problematic marriage that both the West and Russia have made with Mr. Putin. The problem is that after a period of curiosity under Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin, many Russians, and many in the West, appear to have decided at least for now that the tangle is too vexing to unsnarl, and so they have cast the ball of thread aside, and are devoting themselves to simpler pleasures.

Indeed, as I walked down the snow-laden street where I lived in the 1980's, I found it tempting to agree. The TV may be vulgar, the corruption widespread, the people alternatively servile or cruel. But there is almost nothing to compare with the sheer joy of sledding down a hill next to the restored onion domes of the Novospassky Monastery, watching the men who sit for hours fishing a hole in the ice, and listening to the gleeful shrieks of women exulting in the rosy cheeks of their coddled and muffled children, soon to be borne home, fed and put to that most blissful of Russian conditions, sleep.