Features » April 16, 2008
Putin Is Gone! Long Rule Putin! (cont’d)
“The present [Putin] administration has been a regime of emergency measures,” says Sergei Lukashevsky, an expert with the Demos Center, a network of Russian human rights groups. During those years, he says, “fear of terrorism was a major factor forming the political system.”
Dramatic expansion of the space for private life, political stability, plus a bit of oil-fuelled prosperity, explains the apparent sheep-like obedience of Russians, say many experts.
“The population has made kind of a bargain with authority, in which we promise to give the stamp of approval to all their political decisions, and the leaders pledge to keep the stability going,” says Strokan, a political columnist with the business-oriented Kommersant newspaper. “Stability means a piece of bread and personal freedom, but for Russians that’s enough for now.”
As democratic as possible
It’s typical of the Putin Kremlin that it has stopped trying to respond to its critics at home and abroad, and started investing petrodollars into changing the narrative.
In 2006, the Kremlin signed a contract with the U.S. public relations firm Ketchum, to advise on ways of improving Russia’s image. Big Russian businesses are funding the new Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, which opened offices in the United States early this year. Its chairman, Anatolay Kucherena, told the Moscow newsmagazine Profil, “Our problem is to defend our people against assessments that are really attacks, to find out why poisoned arrows are being aimed at Russia.”
Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s old propaganda agency, Novosti, has been revamped completely and now puts out a daily multilingual newswire, sponsors a multitude of publications and beams a 24-hour English-language TV news channel, Russia Today, around the world by satellite.
A Soviet-era propagandist would be astounded by the lavish fundingthese organizations enjoy, as well as by the sophisticated, smooth style they employ, which includes airinga wide range of differing views. (Disclosure: I am a frequent commentator on Russia Today.)
At the core of all this public relations activity is the claim that, like those well-stocked shop windows and consumer-driven newsstands, Russian democracy should be accepted as full-blooded Western-style liberalism with a few local peculiarities. After all, it has multi-candidate elections, and the most popular guy wins.
“We do not call it ‘managed democracy.’ For us, that term is a propaganda defamation,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Moscow-based Effective Policy Foundation and longtime political adviser to the Kremlin, who is widely regarded as one of the system’s primary architects. “The system created under Putin is as democratic as it can possibly be, given the real state of our society,” he says.
A not-so-different view comes from venerable Marxist historian Roy Medvedev (no relation to the new president), who says, “There are not yet enough bricks to build a democratic society, such as a big middle class, independent media and independent businesses. I would rather call Russia an enlightened authoritarian society that has begun to develop.”
For activists like Kagarlitsky, who now heads the independent Institute for Study of Globalization and Social Movements in Moscow, that debate is no longer interesting. He says big political change will come to Russia from the top — as it always does — perhaps through a future power struggle between Putin and Medvedev.
In the meantime, he says that there is an upsurge of activity in grassroots movements, where people are organizing to defend their living standards, build trade unions or trying to stop local official abuses.
“You in the media don’t notice it because it’s not about dramatic and direct confrontation with power,” says Kagarlitsky, “but it may be a good thing that it’s not politicized, because establishment politicians would try to interfere with it. Let it stay below the radar screen.”
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Appeared in the May 2008 Issue
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