ANALYSIS:LYUBOV KOMAR is not all that happy with today's Russia but she supports Vladimir Putin and she is not alone.
Lyubov’s son Dmitriy was posthumously and paradoxically awarded the title “Hero of the Soviet Union” 20 years ago for an act that helped bring the Soviet Union to an end. He defended the Russian White House against the hardliners who launched a coup d’etat against Mikhail Gorbachev and was killed while attempting to put a tank out of action in Moscow on August 20th 1991.
Lyubov may not like the new Russia but her misgivings are not political. They are simply typical of older people everywhere.
Young people, she complains, don’t give up their places on the trolleybus to senior citizens anymore. They just think of themselves and of the consumer goods they can buy. In supporting Putin she is simply a part of the large majority of Russians. After the chaos of the Yeltsin years Putin brought stability and it was stability that ordinary Russians like Lyubov yearned for.
In Putin’s early years the most familiar answer I got when I asked Russians why they liked Putin was a telling: “He doesn’t drink.” He also brought strict control of sections of the media, notably the national TV stations from which the large majority of Russians get their social and political information.
This control, allied to the stability enjoyed by Russia’s citizens, places him in an unassailable position in the run-up to the elections. It should be remembered, however, that despite restrictions the average Russian has a great deal more personal freedom than in the Soviet era and enjoys a considerably higher standard of living. The fact that there is no effective opposition helps Putin too.
From time to time opponents of the Putin hegemony gain publicity at home and abroad. Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, is one example but his alliance with the neo-fascist Eduard Limonov has ensured that moderate Russians have shied away from support. Limonov, once a best-selling author, is the founder of the National Bolshevik Party whose flag is a near replica of Nazi Germany’s. The white circle at its centre bears the hammer-and-sickle instead of the swastika.
The pro-western Yabloko Party was once a challenger but the personal arrogance of its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, and a change in the electoral law by which a party now needs 7 per cent of the vote to gain parliamentary representation has effectively sidelined it.
This leaves the Communists under the charismatically-challenged Gennady Zyuganov as the only alternative to the Putin hegemony. In simple terms most Russians take one look at them and opt for Putin.
Despite state control of television, freedom of expression is not as limited as many slanted reports from Moscow might convey. Konstantin Truetsev, president of the Living Ring, a liberal organisation open to those who defended democratic principles in 1991, put the situation in a nutshell: “Compared to the Soviet Union the possibility of getting information is much greater. There is much more freedom of expression now and although it has been reduced on TV it is there on the internet and in newspapers.”
It is on the internet, in newspapers such as Novaya Gazeta and radio stations such as Ekho Moskvy, that the most critical reaction to the long-expected announcement that Vladimir Putin would run for the presidency next March, can be found. Interestingly the most stinging criticisms are aimed not at Putin but at the current president Dmitriy Medvedev, who has stepped aside after a single term.
In an editorial the widely read Gazeta.Ru led the way, writing: “That Medvedev didn’t turn down a continuing part in political life but turned down authority altogether . . . speaks to the fact that he never had either authority or his own vision. There was just dependence, and this dependence, these illusions were the hope of those who believed in liberal reforms, modernisation, humanisation, the battle against corruption and elite privileges, freedom of speech and the political opening up of the country.”
Pointedly the editorial added that the Russia of today had become a place in which the youth dreamed either of emigration or working for Gazprom.
The reliable Russia Profile magazine has noted an upsurge of political opposition in the country’s vibrant blogosphere, with the most frequently used phrase being: “I’m getting out of here.” Putin’s answer to all this, his party’s youth wing Nashi (ourselves) is unlikely to be as effective among young Russians as is the country’s growing social media, which increasingly takes a political slant.
Effectively with almost six months left before the election, Medvedev has become not only a lame duck president but has lost all credibility having been exposed as merely an actor in a cynical “good cop-bad cop” charade which fed hopes of liberal reform.
So is Russia in for a further two terms, a further 12 years, of rule by Vladimir Putin? Most observers believe so, but the situation may be more complicated than that. If as Harold Wilson once said, a week is a long time in politics, Putin’s six-year term beginning next March could turn out to be a political eternity with falling oil prices hurting his chances of another term.
Having been president for eight years (2000-2008) and with a possible, but not guaranteed, 12 additional years to come Putin has been compared in the west to Stalin and Brezhnev, who were long-term rulers of the Soviet Union. There may, however, be a hangover from cold war thinking in these comparisons as well as a conflation of the new Russia with the old Soviet Union. Putin, after all, is prime minister of Russia and is a Russian. Stalin was a Georgian and Brezhnev was a Ukrainian until he gave himself Russian nationality when in power.
Neither Stalin nor Brezhnev was elected by the people of the Soviet Union but Putin genuinely had the electoral support of the Russian people even if that support was maximised by his control of state TV. He went on record quite recently as saying he will not interfere with the internet and this at a time when that medium is gaining rapidly on TV.
Almost all politicians everywhere, with Medvedev as a unique exception, want to stay in power as long as they can. If Putin does win another 12 years he will have been president for 20 years. That is a remarkable period of time for any political leader but people in Ireland should remember that it is one year less than that enjoyed by Éamon de Valera, first as president of the Executive Council and later as taoiseach.
Séamus Martin is former Moscow correspondent and foreign editor of
The Irish Times