The London Times - 03.15.2004

The Times via  David Johnson's List

Beneath the skin, it's the same old Russian bear

Don't be fooled ­ Putin's victory has nothing to do with democracy

By Anne Applebaum 

Russia has re-elected President Putin to a second term. All of the trappings of democracy seemed to be in place. During the campaign, President Putin arranged to be photographed looking tough with Russian sailors. His opponents talked about the economy. On polling day voting was orderly, aside from the odd bomb in the Caucasus. Supposedly apathetic voters turned out in relatively high numbers, perhaps spurred on by the offers of cheap groceries and free concert tickets to anyone who cast a ballot.

Scratch the surface, and the story looks different. It is true that opposition candidates made speeches during the campaign. It is also true that they were rarely televised: all of Russia’s major television stations are owned, one way or another, by Mr Putin’s friends. And even if they had been televised, none of the President’s opponents ever stood much of a chance, since few people in Russia have heard of them. Which is hardly surprising, since anyone who has looked like becoming a serious rival has been jailed or exiled.

What is really missing in Russia, though, is not just a political opposition but the machinery needed to create one: a free media, politically independent businessmen willing to provide the finance, savvy people willing to work for the President’s defeat without fear of reprisal and politically educated voters. Not all these elements are equally abundant in every mature democracy ­ including America ­ but there are enough of them to make elections mostly a fair contest.

Obviously, elections alone do not make democracy. Yet for far too long, the leaders of the West managed to forget this rather obvious truth when dealing with Russia. Mr Putin, clean-cut and unsmiling, a radical contrast to Boris Yeltsin, his boisterous predecessor, had the presence of mind to show President Bush his personal crucifix at their first meeting. Mr Bush said afterwards that he had looked his Russian counterpart in the eye, “was able to get a sense of his soul”, and found him “trustworthy”.

Tony Blair once described the Russian President as “someone who wants to do the right thing for himself and his country” ­ whatever that might be.

Both men have now been embarrassed by their Russian former best friend, just as Bill Clinton was once embarrassed by Boris Yeltsin. When he was last in Moscow, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, published an article which was a diplomatic but nonetheless clear condemnation of Mr Putin’s creeping authoritarianism. Further, the Administration has recently accused Russia of directly assisting Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps as a result, Mr Blair has recently seemed less eager to attend the St Petersburg opera. Presumably he has found the gradual evolution of Russia into a country that discourages dissent and holds single-candidate elections, Soviet style, too much for him ­ however much he might secretly dream of that sort of thing in Britain.

But does it matter what happens in Russia’s elections? It has become fashionable in Washington to declare that it does not. A prominent article in Foreign Affairs, the American foreign policy journal of record, has just declared that Russia is, after all, nothing more than a normal, middle-income country. While the authors concede that Russia’s democracy is a disappointment and that its economy, totally dependent on oil, remains precarious, they name lots of other countries in a similar position.

Russia has suffered a financial collapse, but so has Argentina. Russia’s economy is dominated by a handful of tycoons, but so is Brazil’s. Russian journalists are harassed or jailed or persecuted by the tax police, but so are journalists in Turkey and South Korea.

All of which is true, up to a point. But it ignores Russia’s history, its former and future imperial ambitions and its geography. Argentina is not fighting a terminal, bloody war in Chechnya; Turkey does not have a vast nuclear arsenal; and Brazil does not have a long history of dominating its neighbours through political proxies, economic blackmail and threats of military force.

Most of all, if Chile is, as Henry Kissinger allegedly once put it, a “dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica”, Russia is a leaky, outdated, but nevertheless lethal missile silo, right on the border of the European Union. Russia may no longer be an international power, but it is still a European power, with genuine economic influence, through its oil and gas, over the nations of Central, Eastern and Western Europe.

While the echoes of the past in yesterday’s election don’t necessarily mean that Stalinism is returning, they should ring a few alarm bells. We clearly cannot go on treating Russia as either a candidate member of the West, a bit rough around the edges but earnestly working towards full status, or as an “ordinary” Third World country, with a few nukes and an oil industry attached.

Nearly 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia remains both unique and opaque. If we want to understand what kind of a country it is becoming, we would do well to keep scratching beneath the surface.

The author is on the editorial board of The Washington Post. Her most recent book is Gulag.