Washington Post - 01.30.2008

Washington Post

A Potemkin Election

Russia's presidential campaign takes on a distinctly Soviet flavor

EDITORIAL

Dmitri Medvedev, who has been designated by Vladimir Putin to win Russia's presidential election March 2, polled at 80 percent in a recent survey, compared with 1 percent for the only opposition candidate then in the running, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. But like the former Soviet regime it increasingly resembles, Mr. Putin's Kremlin is leaving nothing to chance. On Sunday, Mr. Kasyanov was excluded from the presidential ballot, on the pretext that thousands of the 2 million signatures he had gathered in support of his registration were fraudulent.

The next day Moscow announced ground rules for international election observers that virtually ensured that credible organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will not take part -- or will not be able to judge the fairness of the election if they do. For good measure, Mr. Medvedev announced yesterday that he will not participate in any election debates, thereby ensuring that no Russian will see him between now and March in a context not entirely controlled and scripted by the regime.

The most interesting aspect of this heavy-handed strategy is that it is entirely unnecessary. Thanks to the Kremlin's control of television, its relentless propaganda and Russia's oil-fueled economic boom, a large majority of Russians are more than happy to vote for Mr. Medvedev, or anyone else Mr. Putin might point to. Mr. Putin could have allowed Mr. Kasyanov, former chess champion Garry Kasparov and other opposition figures to run, allowed in thousands of international observers, ordered Mr. Medvedev to participate in televised debates -- and still his candidate would have won handily. In that case he could have claimed to have held a democratic election, and many in Europe and around the world would have agreed.

Yet Mr. Putin insists on staging a Potemkin vote that no serious observer outside of Russia can regard as credible -- an exercise that resembles the ostentatiously fake elections that Soviet satellite regimes used to hold in places such as East Germany, where Mr. Putin served as a KGB agent. Like those governments, Mr. Putin evidently prefers to incur the scorn of Western democrats than allow someone such as Mr. Kasyanov to speak freely even for a few minutes on Russian state television -- something Mr. Kasyanov would have been allowed to do had his candidacy been registered. Mr. Putin would rather have the OSCE boycott the election than hold a free and fair vote whose exact outcome could not be planned in advance.

Mr. Putin's embrace of the Soviet political model reveals his growing contempt for Western opinion and his lack of interest in maintaining cooperative relations with the European Union and the United States. It also shows that Russia's political system, as Mr. Kasyanov put it, "as in the U.S.S.R. will not respond to change either from inside, or from outside." No wonder that Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader, felt moved to speak out. "Something wrong is going on with our elections," he told the Interfax agency. But it's not only elections: In fact, the system that Mr. Gorbachev took apart is being meticulously reconstructed.