Putin tightens iron fist on Russia's elite classes
By MARK MacKINNON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
It was the day before Russia's parliamentary election campaign began that masked gunmen burst into the Moscow office of George Soros's Open Society Institute and carried away documents and computers belonging to the democracy-building organization.
The incident last week, coming on the heels of the imprisonment of billionaire tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, raised yet another outcry in the West about the political direction the country is taking.
Foreign Russia-watchers saw the raid as an attack on Mr. Soros, who had poured more than $1-billion (U.S.) into building civil society in Russia during the past decade, and as yet more proof that the country is drifting back toward authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin.
At home, the raid on the Open Society Institute is described by the obedient press as a straightforward real-estate dispute.
Mr. Soros's foundation, it's been frequently reported, was evicted for refusing to pay the higher rent set by the property's landlord.
The recurring role played by masked gunmen in settling such matters in recent weeks, combined with the four-year-old war in Chechnya and a pre-election effort by Mr. Putin to muzzle the country's news media, have caused definite concern among the country's intelligentsia and business elite.
The growing concern comes in the run-up to state Duma elections on Dec. 7. But amidst all the hysteria about the alleged collapse of democracy in Russia, an important fact is often overlooked: a large majority of Russians support what's going on.
Imprisoning Mr. Khodorkovsky, a businessman known for both his philanthropic work and his opposition to the current Kremlin, spurred London's The Economist magazine to dub Mr. Putin "Vlad the Impaler." It convinced Senator John McCain, a senior U.S. Republican, that he should call for a re-evaluation of the West's relationship with Russia. But it has played remarkably well in Russia.
As the parliamentary election campaign begins, Mr. Putin's popularity in Russia remains unassailable, and both his personal approval rating and support for the pro-Putin United Russia party have gone up since the Khodorkovsky affair began.
Most ordinary Russians harbour a deep dislike for Mr. Khodorkovsky and the other so-called "oligarchs," the handful of men who became super rich by snapping up state assets during a sell-off in the early 1990s.
They believe he's guilty of tax evasion and fraud and dismiss concerns that the case is politically motivated to eliminate one of Mr. Putin's few opponents.
"I don't know anything about this case except that Khodorkovsky is a criminal and that's why he's in prison now," said Alexander Ivanov, a 19-year-old foreign languages student, as he sipped cappuccino in a jam-packed downtown café. His coffee-drinking companion, 18-year-old student Andrei Mitrokhin, nodded his head in agreement. "A criminal should be in prison. That's what our President says and we support our President."
According to recent opinion polls, almost three-quarters of Russians back Mr. Putin, many of them almost unquestioningly. In a country where the Stalin era is often recalled as a time when Russia was mighty, being seen as a strongman is a plus.
"Russia needs a strong leader," said Alexander, a 33-year-old selling painted matrioshka dolls with the President's face on them in downtown Moscow. "It's such a big country, with so many different ethnic groups, that it's very difficult to unite. It requires toughness."
While the elite is hoping that Mr. Khodorkovsky's time in prison will turn him into a martyr around which liberal forces can coalesce in time for the parliamentary election, the truth is there's not much to coalesce. As the campaign moves into full swing, the liberal vote is so badly fractured between two parties — Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces (known by its Russian acronym, SPS) — that there are fears that neither may cross the 5-per-cent barrier needed to be represented in parliament, perhaps leaving the next Duma split between pro-Putin groups and harder-line parties.
Given the struggles of Yabloko and SPS, the two parties he gave the most financial support to, Mr. Khodorkovsky's much-ballyhooed presidential ambitions — cited by his supporters as one of the reasons he was thrown in jail — seem little more than a liberal flight of fantasy.
"Yabloko and SPS are duelling for perhaps 12 per cent of the electorate, not more," said Alexander Konovalov, director of the Institute for Strategic Assessments, an independent think tank in Moscow. "The majority of the Russian electorate does not consider criticism from the West a bad thing. ..... To them, the President looks like a brave warrior who is fighting corruption and who is not afraid to arrest even the richest man in the country to defend the people."
After United Russia, whose support hovers between 25 and 30 per cent, depending on who conducts the poll, the two most popular parties are the throwback Communist Party, which is expected to collect about 20 per cent of the vote, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, which is hovering around 7- or 8-per-cent support.
With the Communist Party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, already having twice contested the presidency and lost, even many of those who will vote for his party on Dec. 7 say they will vote for Mr. Putin in next year's presidential election. Few expect Mr. Putin will have any difficulty winning a second term, and if the ex-KGB officer takes the country a step back toward Soviet-style authoritarianism, so much the better, many say.
"We are not afraid of the old times, because then we had free hospitals, free schools, free summer camps for children. We lived well, better than this," said Tatiana Sablina, a 40-year-old selling her nephew's artwork on the Arbat, Moscow's historic pedestrian mall.
In a good week, Ms. Sablina can make perhaps $50 selling watercolour paintings and handcrafted wooden cats, an amount that she says is barely enough to live on. She harbours a deep resentment for those who can afford to shop at the trendy shops that surround her art stall. Many of them, she believes, got rich by stealing from the state.
She said she welcomes the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky, and would be quite happy to see Mr. Putin throw other oligarchs in jail as well.
"Step-by-step, I hope, we are coming to a situation where there's law and order in the country." |
