Posted on 05/26/2004 8:31:38 AM PDT by happygrl
On December 7, 2003, Russians voted their two liberal-democratic parties out of parliament and handed a two-thirds majority in the lower house, the Duma, to the leading pro-presidential party. On March 14, Russians reelected President Vladimir Putin, giving him 71 percent of the vote. Nine days later, a 23-year-old Russian blogger posted a photo of a very homely young woman on his website, accompanied by the following appeal:
Vote for Alyona Pisklova! Alas, our candidate, Fuck the Election/Against All Candidates, failed in the presidential and the parliamentary election. But this time our candidate has to win! May the force be with us! We will overturn everyone's concept of beauty! Say NO to corporate politics! Vote [hyperlink] here. Distribute this campaign poster in your [Web logs], send it out by mail and [instant messenger], transfer it via closed satellite channels and by word of mouth, write text messages, use Morse Code to type out the website address. This is the final frontier.
Sixteen hours later, the very unattractive Alyona Pisklova had taken first place in an online Miss Universe contest conducted by the leading Russian Internet search engine. A blogging community devoted to the campaign had sprung up, as had an official pageant website, www.stopbarbie.org.ru. By the time the campaign was over, a couple of weeks later, more than 30,000 people had voted for Pisklova, hundreds of anti-Barbie t-shirts had been sold, and Pisklova had won a preliminary round of the beauty contest. "We managed to stage a small romantic revolution," said the organizer, who calls himself Degri.
The media couldn't get enough of the story. Six weeks after the campaign began, even The New York Times weighed in, with an editorial noting that Russians "have begun to sift more carefully through the Western invasions to pick out what they want, while discarding what they don't"--i.e., vapid beauty contests.
The conclusion was absurd. The people who ran the Pisklova campaign were the same young, affluent Russians who keep merchandise flying out of Moscow's overpriced Prada boutiques. Their protest was directed not at the West but, says Degri, at "the general political apathy, the lack of choice." The target, in other words, was Russia's plastic president. It showed that, in a country where the tools of institutional democracy have been hijacked, and where the population is said to abhor the concept of democracy, Russians are actually committed to political freedoms, and a new generation of voters is looking for a creative means of protest.
The idea that Russians prefer authoritarianism has gained new currency in the wake of the recent one-sided parliamentary and presidential elections. This thesis is most clearly developed in a recent Foreign Affairs essay by the eminent Russia historian Richard Pipes, who argues that Putinism is a function of Russians' eternal love for the iron fist. This theory has a way of short-circuiting any conversation about Russia. Why lament Russia's slide into authoritarianism if it's what Russians want? Why lobby the U.S. government to pressure Putin to give his people rights they would reject? And, most insidiously, why impose our Western ideas of democracy on a country that so clearly resists them? I myself have received at least a dozen letters from well-meaning tnr readers suggesting I stop harping on the dangers to democracy in Russia because Russians themselves don't care.
This line of reasoning ignores the fact that Russia produced three of the great anti-authoritarian uprisings of the twentieth century: the mass riots of 1905, the February 1917 overthrow of the czar, and the August 1991 resistance to a hard-line Communist coup. Worse, it ignores considerable contemporary poll data. In fact, a careful reading of the current mood in Russia suggests a different picture: that of a nation that has quickly absorbed key democratic values but whose democratic institutions are so weak that they may not withstand the backlash against democracy's early problems.
Russians chose democracy almost 13 years ago in a stark decision. When a group of apparatchiks seized power in August 1991, placing Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest, Russians had two alternatives. They could have accepted the coup, which promised to restore order to a country shaken by five years of glasnost and perestroika. Or they could have resisted and been ruled by Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of the Russian republic (then still part of the ussr), who promised to institute democracy and market reforms. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets to support Yeltsin. The Communist hard-liners were forced out of office in three days. Four months later, the Soviet Union was no more.
This was roughly when democracy's triumphant march ended and a difficult transition to a freer Russia began. The year Russians put their faith in Yeltsin and his reforms, 1991, was the hungriest year most Russians remember. A random visit to a food store at that time yielded a few clumps of dirt with tiny carrots inside and perhaps a three-liter glass jar of plum compote. Democracy seemed to promise food. Virtually as soon as the state lifted price controls on January 1, 1992, a flood of imported food items poured in, filling store shelves--but many Russians couldn't afford them. As the ruble plummeted, many people found themselves suddenly poor. Just a few months before, everyone who wasn't part of the party elite had enjoyed roughly the same standard of living. Now, some were getting rich overnight. This raised people's expectations, making the rapidly growing gap between rich and poor an even more bitter disappointment.
The economists who devised Russia's reforms badly mishandled people's expectations. These young men, from academic backgrounds, were pompous, condescending, and unwilling to take responsibility for the effects of their policies; their actions tarred the word "democracy" for many Russians. Russia's first reformer prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, gave incomprehensible speeches on economic theory and refused to respond to criticism. When life grew intolerable for the most vulnerable Russians, the reformers did nothing to aid them, refusing even to ensure that state employees received paychecks. Instead, the reformers made unrealistic promises--like in 1992, when Anatoly Chubais, the mastermind of Russian privatization, essentially promised every Russian two luxury cars within a few years. At the same time, a new class of con men made similarly crazy claims about payoffs from proliferating pyramid schemes. The cars promised by Chubais never materialized, and the money pyramids collapsed. The pyramid-builders got rich, as did the reformers and their friends. An ordinary Russian could be forgiven for not seeing differences among the many men who fooled him in the early '90s.
The political transition was not much smoother: The new government cheated, threatened, and, at one point, shelled the opposition. But democratic institutions did emerge. By the end of 1993, Russia had a new constitution, a popularly elected two-chamber parliament, and ambitious plans for judicial reform. A new political elite was taking shape as fast as the new wealthy economic one. The elite was as imperfect as the reforms that begot it: Its members often had ties to the old Communists, the new crime bosses, or both. Still, its very existence underscored the significance of the new democratic institutions. "The contemporary Russian parliament, unlike the Soviet one, is not ritual in nature," says Moscow sociologist and pollster Alexei Levinson. "No one ever bothered buying seats in the old Supreme Soviet or killing its members."
Gradually, lobbying mechanisms took shape and expanded beyond guns and wads of cash. A new class of professionals began to appear: lawyers, consultants, and human rights activists who make their livings serving as bridges between interest groups and the state. A vibrant media seemed to appear almost overnight.
But, just when Russia's precarious political and economic situation finally seemed to stabilize in 1997-1998, the government defaulted on its debt, throwing the currency into another tailspin and impoverishing many citizens overnight--again. By August 1998, even those who had held fast through the rocky early '90s felt duped. Faith in formal business relationships took a huge blow as banks froze deposits and employers withheld salaries. The fact that the average Russian's standard of living had actually improved since 1991 now seemed irrelevant. This time, the new Russian middle class, including many in the media, was affected financially and emotionally, spelling trouble for the government. The opposition-dominated parliament refused to confirm President Yeltsin's candidate for prime minister. A desperate Yeltsin finally calmed the situation by appointing Yevgeny Primakov, a dusted-off member of the old Soviet bureaucracy, as prime minister. Everything about the man, from his economic views to his slurred speech and enormous eyebrows, harkened back to the Brezhnev era. Russia's Restoration had begun.
Over the following year, some leaders of the Russian political elite devised a stabilization plan. It involved consolidating power--an altogether reasonable proposition in a teetering country. It also involved replacing the ailing Yeltsin with a handpicked successor, Putin. Finally, it involved the old Soviet technique of disavowing and discrediting the preceding regime, as Nikita Khrushchev had done with Josef Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev had done with Khrushchev, and Gorbachev had done with the geezers that preceded him. The problem was that, this time, the regime to be undermined was not so much Yeltsin's government, but democracy itself, the promise of which Yeltsin had once symbolized. A plan for smearing democracy was hatched. "The word democracy itself fell victim to a p.r. attack," says Svetlana Boym, a Slavic languages and literatures professor at Harvard University who has studied public relations in Russia. She says a group of intellectuals working for the Putin campaign labored to spread new derogatory terms, such as dermokratiya ("crapocracy") and demshiza ("demoschizoids," referring to the foot soldiers of the early '90s pro-democracy movement). "So, not only was the concept of democracy discredited in the late 1990s," she maintains, "but it was discredited by design."
Indeed, in 1999, some polls showed that more than half of Russians said that multiparty elections do more harm than good. These are the polls on which Pipes relies to make his point that Russians don't want democratic rule.
Russians seemed to be longing for a return to authoritarian rule, and they got it. Since becoming president four and a half years ago, Putin has reversed many of the democratic gains. He has cracked down on the media; used a constitutional loophole to turn the upper house of parliament into an appointed body; moved to limit the power of Russia's 89 locally elected governors; and effectively seized control of the courts. And yet, in his second inaugural speech on May 7, Putin talked of the need for multiparty elections and declared, "Only free people in a free country can be successful." Though Putin managed to avoid the discredited term "democracy," he essentially devoted his speech to affirming democratic values. Was he doing it to appease the West? That's unlikely: Western powers, especially the United States, have been very tolerant of Putin's policies and would have been satisfied with a self-congratulatory speech on the economy. Was it an Orwellian exercise in reversing the meaning of words? Almost certainly, but the question remains: Why did Putin choose to appropriate these particular concepts? Because, strangely enough, the basic concepts of democracy are integral to Putin's support.
A variety of opinion polls show that democratic values rank very high on Russians' lists of priorities. In August of 2003, the Public Opinion Foundation, a Moscow think tank, asked Russians to choose five of the most important values from a list of 24. "Human rights," chosen by 34 percent, ranked in the top five along with "family," "security," "financial security," and "peace." Such concepts as "order" and "stability" did not make it into the top five. In October 2002, the same organization polled Russians on their attitudes toward elections. Only 14 percent said they considered elections superfluous, while 73 percent said they were absolutely necessary. A majority of Russians say that Russia should strive to join the European Union. One of the three leading reasons respondents gave is that EU membership would compel Russia to strengthen its democracy. Russians have watched their Eastern European neighbors join the EU, and they are keenly aware of the demand that new members comply with standards of democratic governance.
The percentage of Russians who think "it would be better if things had just stayed as they were before perestroika" fell from 55 to 46 percent over the past two years, while those who strongly disagree with this statement grew from 38 to 44 percent. These numbers, as well as the growing support for elections, suggest that some of what looked like anti-democratic sentiment in the late '90s was a function of the respondents' personal desperation following Russia's financial crash. As the economy stabilizes, a significant number of Russians seem to be reclaiming the democratic ideals of the early '90s--a remarkable phenomenon considering that the state, and the media it controls, are essentially promoting the opposite message.
Russians' support for democratic values remains strong even as the actual word "democracy" elicits an allergic reaction (though it is weakening with time). "I can still design a poll in which I get nine times as many anti-democracy statements as pro-democracy ones," says Levinson. "The bitterness suffered after the first three or four years of Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's reforms has stretched to affect an entire generation. But the statement boils down to, 'We have been duped in the name of democracy, even though democracy is probably the right thing.'"
The only specific area in which Russians express a consistently anti-democratic view is the media. Poll after poll shows that more than half of Russians favor censorship. But sociologists offer an explanation: When people talk about censorship, they don't really mean censorship. "Invariably, if you ask people whether the media should be free, they say yes," explains Levinson. "And, if you ask them if access to information should be unimpeded, they also say yes. But, then, if you ask whether there shouldn't be a government body that will track violence and sex on television, they also say yes. So what they actually mean is a sort of vice squad for the media."
If Russians like democracy so much, why don't they vote for pro-democracy politicians? One obvious reason is the way the Kremlin has rigged election campaigns, denying pro-democracy parties access to the broadcast media. But another, according to Levinson, is that pro-democracy parties have little to offer a public that has already bought into democratic values. Neither of Russia's pro-democracy parties have much of a platform, aside from affirming democracy itself. In fact, the people who, judging from the polls, consistently vote against Putin and pro-Putin parties are the die-hard Communists. The secret, it seems, is Putin's balancing act: As long as he manages to pay lip service to democratic values while keeping the actual democrats from forming an opposition force, he will continue to enjoy the support of Russia's increasingly pro-democracy public--even as he eviscerates Russia's democratic gains. This is not because Russians are crazy or hypocritical; it is because the state is far stronger than any institutions of civil society. And the imbalance is only increasing, in part because the state is steadily undermining civil society.
Future Russian elections seem set to resemble the online beauty contest: A choice between plastic, counterfeit beauties and not voting at all. Unfortunately, the likelihood that some 23-year-old will rouse the masses by launching a movement against Putin seems low. Even while Putin--and the rest of the country--is talking about freedom and democracy, a familiar fear of the state is setting in. You can see it in the way people respond with terror to Kremlin directives. You can also see it in the opinion polls, where over 70 percent of people claim to approve of Putin, but only 20 to 50 percent approve of his actions in any one area. You see it in the rate of refusals to participate in the opinion polls, which has risen by about 20 percent in four years.
But this fear is just part of a larger danger facing all Russian democratic institutions. The last four years have shown just how weak these are: The president has been able to transform the entire parliament, annihilate the independent broadcasters, and consolidate virtually all federal power in his own hands. If it weren't for Russians' basic acceptance of elections and other core democratic values, the damage probably would have been far greater. More damage is still likely. And, if foreign observers respond to the ongoing destruction of Russia's democratic institutions by reassuring themselves that Russians didn't want democracy in the first place, they will be betraying the Russian people's valiant, if unsuccessful, years-long struggle finally to live in a democracy.
Masha Gessen is a Moscow-based journalist who is currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard University.
On the other hand Yeltsin military attack on the Parliament to facilitate the transfer of national wealth into hands of few crooks and international corporations was anti-democratic. But corporate mass media want us to believe otherwise.
America doesn't want democracy, either, which is why we don't have one. Nor need one go to Russia to find pro-authoritarians. Heck, you don't have step outside the Justice Department. And guess who they report to?
Interesting situation there in Russia. Putin has said he will not run again, if that's so, he just has a few years to build strong parties that can compete. He doesn't strike me as a man who wants to leave behind a legacy of destruction. He could go down in history as either the George Washington of Russia, or just another Rasputin.
Rather the first. Yeltsyn already took the second role.
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