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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (33280)	3/7/2004 10:26:20 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793927

Tough Guy Running Scared By Jim Hoagland washingtonpost.com President Vladimir Putin faces no meaningful opposition for a second term except himself and the Russian constitution. And that might be enough to derail him, Putin seems to fear. The former KGB agent's secretive style of governing has brought Kremlinology back to life in Washington and Moscow. Sifting a mysterious Cabinet reshuffle by Putin just days before the March 14 presidential ballot, some top Kremlin-watchers here and independent Russian analysts in Moscow conclude that Putin is running scared -- of his own shadow. Putin's heavy-handed campaign is alienating some voters and putting many others to sleep. If turnout falls below 50 percent, the Constitution requires that the result be tossed out and a new vote held. Candidates on the March 14 ballot would be ineligible the next time around. No one doubts that the clever ex-spy appointed in 2000 by Boris Yeltsin to succeed (and protect) him will outpoll the six upstarts who have found their way onto the ballot. Putin's steady, skillful shrinking of Russia's democratic space for politics and free media has kept more serious opponents from mounting a challenge. The moves toward de-democratization have -- alas -- not made Putin unpopular. His selective jailing and hounding of the first generation of capitalist Russia's robber barons, who happen to be predominantly Jewish, goes over well. His tough if futile rhetoric on the dirty, grinding war in Chechnya also extracts support from an angry and alienated population that Putin ostentatiously orders around, but actually rules less and less as effective state control withers. "Putin has systematically abolished all checks and balances, but the authoritarianism is still mild," Anders Aslund, director of the Carnegie Endowment's Russia program in Washington, said after a recent Moscow visit. Others report that Muscovites fear that pervasive wiretapping is returning to the capital. Business contacts in particular suggest walks in the park or scribble notes when sensitive topics are broached. It is the elite, rather than the general public, that is targeted this time. And money, rather than dissent, draws the spies. This trend is one symptom of Putin's nearly exclusive reliance now on the siloviki, a small group of security advisers dominated by ex-KGB agents who are eager to take on, and perhaps take over, the cash-heavy businesses founded in the Yeltsin era. Until now Putin balanced this closed, inexperienced group against a Kremlin staff stocked with former Yeltsin associates. Their contacts with Russian business leaders and foreign governments seem to have become liabilities in a Kremlin that shows little interest in the views of the White House, the Elysee Palace or 10 Downing Street, and they are being squeezed out. Putin's abrupt dismissal of Mikhail Kasyanov as prime minister and his naming last Monday of Mikhail Fradkov, a political nonentity, as Kasyanov's successor, fits that pattern. It would be similar in one respect to George W. Bush's firing Dick Cheney in mid-October and naming Rockwell Schnabel to be his vice president and running mate. You may not immediately know that Schnabel represents the United States at the European Union in Brussels, where Fradkov has been Russia's representative for the past year. The similarity ends right there. Schnabel is an effective ambassador and a successful former businessman. Fradkov is -- you guessed it -- a graduate of Soviet diplomatic and trade institutions that provided cover for intelligence agents. Fradkov's failure to stem corruption in Russia's tax police in his last job caused Putin to park him in Brussels, where, EU officials said last week, he established a record notable for its mediocrity. The firing of Kasyanov became inevitable when he questioned Putin's jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Yukos oil company and a potential Putin political rival. In a presidential election in which Putin may need to get enough voters to the polls at the last minute -- or at least get enough ballots into the boxes -- to make the outcome constitutionally legitimate, there is no place for unreliables like Kasyanov. Fradkov's clearest advantages are that he is not a credible successor or potential counterweight to Putin. His appointment is so mysterious on any other grounds that the more suspiciously inclined Kremlinologists think Putin is deviously trying to revive a dispirited campaign by importing a mystery man. The answer is probably simpler: The depopulation of Russia continues. Its integration into the world economy is being blocked by harsh European Union demands to quadruple domestic energy prices. The government is corrupt and distrusted. Maybe it's no mystery at all that Putin wound up with the moral equivalent of the Invisible Man as his No. 2. Who else would take the job? jimhoagland@washpost.com © 2004 The Washington Post Company