Washington Post - 12.16.2003

The Washington Post 

How Nationalist Party Became a Powerhouse

Putin Had Blessed Effort to Weaken Communists 

By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, Washington Post Foreign Service

MOSCOW -- Dmitri Rogozin remembers the day vividly because it was his mother's birthday. It was also the birthday of a new political movement in Russia.

On that warm Sunday in July, the ambitious young nationalist lawmaker drove to the secluded presidential dacha on the outskirts of the capital. He had a proposal for President Vladimir Putin: a new political party, to be formed with an up-and-coming economist who had broken with the Communists.

The meeting came just 11 days after Putin's government had launched a legal campaign against Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the party Rogozin had in mind would lead the charge against business tycoons in the fall parliamentary elections. Putin received Rogozin and gave his blessing, knowing the party would draw votes from the president's most important opponents, the Communists. "I got carte blanche," Rogozin recalled in an interview.

With Putin's stamp of approval came all the power of Kremlin patronage -- heavy promotion of the new proxy party on state-run television, critical political advice, ample funding. On Dec. 7, the nascent Motherland bloc formed by Rogozin and Communist defector Sergei Glazyev stunned Russia with a third-place showing in parliamentary elections, helping Putin's party, United Russia, crush the Communists and push two Western-oriented democratic parties out of parliament altogether.

With an ultranationalist party run by the flamboyant Vladimir Zhirinovsky, nationalists won 21 percent of the vote and reemerged as a powerful force in Russian politics. Their success surprised even the Kremlin, which according to insiders had come to fear what it had unleashed and in the week before the election tried to tamp down support for the new party's candidates by pulling them off state television. 

Manipulating Political Life 

Motherland's rivals call the party "national-socialists," invoking the specter of Russian fascism. "These people are Hitler in the 1920s," said Leonid Gozman, a top strategist for a defeated democratic party. Rogozin and Glazyev rejected the extremist label, calling themselves patriots who are out to restore Russian greatness.

Either way, the story of Motherland's emergence from nowhere is not just about the return of nationalism or the disillusionment of Russian voters with the democracy of the 1990s, which they associate with chaos and decline. It also opens a window into how Putin's Kremlin manipulates Russia's political life and how it decided to gamble by tapping into a strain of Russian chauvinism that it must now try to keep under control.

"The party succeeded brilliantly by uniting Russian imperialism with state control of the economy," said Vladimir Pribylovsky, a scholar of Russian nationalism. "It succeeded because the Kremlin wanted it to succeed."

The new party's leaders said they want to restore the Russian empire broken up with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They want to impose state control over natural resources that constitute the country's greatest wealth, seize tens of billions of dollars in "super-profits" now going to private energy companies, ban the sale of agricultural land, establish Russian Orthodoxy as the state religion and destroy the power of the business leaders known as oligarchs. Their slogan: "Russians Must Take Back Russia for Themselves."

All of this is presented in a polite, made-for-TV style by smooth, modern politicians who have eschewed the ranting, clownish performances of ultranationalist Zhirinovsky and the leaden anachronisms of the old Communists.

'A Name With an Image' 

The name was catchy and its aim clear. The new party would be called Tovarich (Comrade), reflecting its goal of taking votes away from the Communists.

At least that was the idea pitched by Marat Gelman, an influential political consultant and deputy director of state-owned ORT television, who was enlisted to create the party for Glazyev and Rogozin last summer.

Rogozin is a veteran nationalist member of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, and former chairman of the international affairs committee. He said he was invited to take a top post in Putin's United Russia party, but his appointment was blocked by a rival. Glazyev, another member of parliament, broke from the Communists this year with a possible presidential bid in mind. 

The two men met in 1993 when both joined hard-liners holed up at the Russian White House, then the seat of parliament and the scene of an armed showdown with President Boris Yeltsin's tanks.

When the two got together last summer, Glazyev, 42, brought a platform of soak-the-rich economics and a bright reputation among the Communist rank and file. He liked the idea of the Comrade party but said he thought a broader appeal was necessary. "We needed a name with an image. 'Motherland' is a solid message. We needed the positive meaning of patriotism," he said in an interview.

So that name was chosen at a midnight meeting on the eve of the party's Sept. 14 founding congress, according to a participant.

Rogozin, 39, "was nominated by the Kremlin to be Sergei Glazyev's commissar, his controller," said Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected analyst.

Other politicians were signed up, including Gen. Valentin Varennikov, one of the organizers of the failed 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and Viktor Geraschenko, former head of the Central Bank. Andrei Saviliev, Rogozin's sometime speechwriter, represented the extreme nationalists.

"It was a very well-planned electoral campaign, which created an acceptable alternative for voters who were leaving the Communists," said Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin consultant. "That was the idea of the spin doctors who were behind it. The Kremlin didn't object because it was clear some alternative to the Communists was needed."

Despite its rhetoric, the party was funded by wealthy businessmen, several of whom ended up on the party slate and will now have seats in parliament. "For many businessmen, it's a commercial project," Pavlovsky said.

An Oligarch's Arrest 

Several sources said one funder was billionaire Oleg Deripaska, owner of Russian Aluminum. "Russian Aluminum finances them only because the Kremlin asks them," said Markov. A source close to Deripaska, however, said he stopped financing Motherland at the campaign's end because he disapproved of its oligarch-bashing. Glazyev called Deripaska's participation "a myth created by our enemies."

Other financiers, according to sources, included Alexander Babakov, a major player in the Ukrainian energy industry, and Alexander Lebedev, a billionaire banker. Babakov denied any hypocrisy in funding a party founded on the principle of going after the rich. "I'm not an oligarch in the sense that word's being used by politicians," he said.

It was on Oct. 25 that Motherland got its big break. That was when Khodorkovsky, chief owner of the Yukos oil company, assembled from the old state-owned industry, was arrested at gunpoint after months of multiple investigations. Rogozin and Glazyev went on the attack. Not only was the arrest justified, they declared, but other suspect privatization deals from the 1990s should also be investigated.

"It's important to have a public opponent, and it's important that it was scary," said Gelman, the television executive and Motherland consultant. He declined to discuss his role but said he felt that airtime the party received on his station helped defeat the Communists. 

But only in the final days of the campaign did Motherland's success receive much attention from its opponents. As the democrats faltered, former deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais, architect of the often-corrupt privatization of state assets of the 1990s, decided to counterattack by branding the new party the Russian equivalent of Nazis.

In mid-November, Rogozin said, he received a call from Gozman, Chubais's lieutenant. "Dmitri, we have invented a weapon against you," Rogozin recalled him saying. "From now on, you are going to be a 'national-socialist.'"

The democrats also alleged corruption. On television, during one of the last debates of the campaign, Gozman rose from the audience to accuse Rogozin of demanding a $5 million bribe from the Chubais camp in 1999. Rogozin did not rebut him directly. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Gozman," he said, as if to suggest he did not know him.

In the days before the election, the Kremlin began worrying that its project might have been too successful. At the beginning of the campaign, according to a Motherland strategist, a senior Kremlin official had decreed that the party should not receive more than 5 percent of the vote, the threshold for getting into the Duma. With the Kremlin fearing that the party was exceeding that level, after Nov. 24 neither Rogozin nor Glazyev got free airtime on the state-controlled news.

"The administration was letting us be shown on TV as long as they thought we were stealing votes from the Communists," Rogozin said. "As soon as they realized that we are becoming an independent political force, they got scared."

Now, both of Motherland's leaders are eyeing bigger prizes. Insiders said they believe Glazyev wants to be Putin's next prime minister, while Rogozin covets the Foreign Ministry.

"We proved to the public that we have very serious goals, that we do not just speak populist slogans," Glazyev said.

Nostalgia for the Empire 

Their rhetoric appeals to millions of Russians, such as Anatoly Laptev, a small-business owner.

"I'll let you in on a secret," Laptev said, lowering his voice as if it were not quite a polite thing to say. "I'm a nationalist."

He is also a self-described monarchist, nostalgic for the Soviet empire and the vanished Soviet social safety net, a fervent Orthodox believer looking for a strong father figure as leader and a patriot who said he would have gladly picked up a Kalashnikov assault rifle to defend his country even under Yeltsin, a president he despised. "Why," he asked, "should the Russian people always have to be sorry to defend themselves?"

Motherland is a party made to order for Laptev, 51. "I was waiting for them for a long time," he said. For years, he secretly cheered Rogozin and Glazyev, and when they teamed up, he recalled thinking, at last here "were people who could be believed." 

Laptev and his family are reduced to selling cheap, Chinese-made toys in the corner of a store on the far southern outskirts of Moscow. He was bewildered when the Soviet Union folded "like a house of cards" in 1991 and angered by the poverty and decline that followed. But he was no longer a Communist, having handed in his party card in the late 1980s. He knew that the Soviet Union was a decaying power desperately in need of change, he said.

He described the 1990s as a disaster for Russia, "like World War II. People died and suffered like in a war; it was very hard." The very word "democracy" was discredited. "It's a great deception," he said. 

Boosted by such people, Motherland emerged from a crowd of 23 parties to take third place in the parliamentary elections, with 9 percent of the vote. In Russia's biggest and traditionally most democratic-leaning cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Motherland came in an unexpected second. The message worked particularly well with middle-aged professionals and retirees. According to an exit poll, nearly 22 percent of those over 45 voted for Motherland.

"In the 1990s, they told us that there is communism and there is democracy, and nothing else in between," Laptev said. "That is not right. It is not a choice between black and white. . . . Motherland is another way."