The clan with a plan to hold on to political power
"Financial Times",
December 17, 2007
They daubed their faces with the Russian tricolour, sang old Soviet songs and waved banners. They cheered as President Vladimir Putin, clad in sports jacket and black turtleneck, promised an ever brighter future for Russia. And they yowled when he warned that enemies inside and outside the country were plotting to undermine it.
There, at a 5,000-strong pro- Putin rally in Moscow's Luzhniki sports stadium last month, were to be found all the contradictions of Mr Putin's Russia: a national pride and self-confidence rediscovered after its 1990s economic decline, coupled with a paradoxical and near-paranoid suspicion of the west.
The rally was a centrepiece of one of the most tightly controlled Russian election campaigns since Soviet times - one that attracted international criticism and a boycott by Europe's leading election watchdog. The elections - which Mr Putin's party won comprehensively - marked not the end of the Putin era but a transition to a new phase in which Mr Putin will continue as a dominant figure, even if in a different role. His decision to head the ticket for the pro-Kremlin United Russia party turned the parliamentary polls into a referendum on his popularity.
Few figures in world politics provoke such divergent reactions as Mr Putin. His supporters include not just a majority of the population - even if his approval ratings are bolstered by a compliant media - but also many investors in the country.
They believe he has overseen a remarkable transformation from the late 1990s when Russia was nearly bankrupt, under the sway of an oligarchy of rapacious tycoons and in danger of breaking up.
The pro-Putin camp viewed the elections as providing a mandate for Mr Putin to complete Russia's economic modernisation and move it - gradually rather than in the bigbang approach attempted in the 1990s - towards a more open and democratic political model.
"He will be seen as the saviour of the Russian nation," says Vlad Sobell, economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research in London. "When he came to power, the Russian Federation was basically disintegrating politically and economically. This dual disintegration has been reversed." An opposing camp - including parts of Russia's liberal intelligentsia, civil society groups and many in western governments and think-tanks - sees Mr Putin as having rolled back democracy and turned Russia back towards its centuries- old authoritarianism. Russia's marginalised pro-democracy opposition says these elections will complete the restoration of one-party rule led by ruthless former KGB men, of whom the president is one.
Some who worked most closely with Mr Putin are now his biggest critics. Mikhail Kasyanov, prime minister for four years before being sacked in 2004, says the elections will legalise the "usurpation" of power by the Putin circle. Andrei Illarionov, who resigned as an economic adviser in 2005, has warned they will lead to "absolutism", saying: "The substance of this regime will be the concentration in one person's hands of unprecedented and absolute power." So did the authorities' heavy-handed approach in these elections confirm the arguments of Putin critics that open democracy in Russia - or any medium-term chance of building it - is dead? Certainly the campaign exposed the regime's ugly side. With Russia's economy having grown by more than 70 per cent in real terms since 1999, helped by more than $750bn (£366bn, S511bn) in revenues from energy sales, the government could, in theory, have stood on its record in free and fair elections.
Instead, opponents say the Kremlin took the "managed democracy" developed in previous elections to new levels. It did everything possible to stack things in United Russia's favour, through media manipulation and use of "administrative resources" - support from local authorities, police and courts.
Some opposition parties were banned from the polls; others complained of constant dirty tricks.
Small demonstrations by the opposition "Other Russia" coalition in Moscow and St Petersburg saw more than 200 protesters detained, in some cases violently. Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and an Other Russia leader, was jailed for five days for public order offences; Boris Nemtsov, a 1990s deputy prime minister named as presidential candidate by the liberal Union of Right Forces party, was also briefly detained.
"The domination of the state party is complete," says Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party. "It is very difficult to organise even some spots of resistance." Alongside the United Russia party and the pro-Putin youth group called Nashi ("Our Own"), the Kremlin has sponsored the creation of another mass movement, "For Putin", in an apparent attempt to broaden the president's support base. Opposition parties have unearthed documents suggesting that some who attended supposedly spontaneous For Putin rallies were ordered to do so.
Some outside the Russian opposition suggest, however, that the authorities' behaviour points not to a determination to create a new totalitarianism but to get through a period seen as fraught with risk, while safeguarding the gains of recent years. It also reflects doubts and insecurities about the strength and stability of the Putin political edifice that belie the appearances of his heavily choreographed rally of supporters.
"Rather than trying to create a one-party state, the regime is displaying insecurity and paranoia - and the west should try to understand this," says Mr Sobell. Dmitry Trenin, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre think-tank, says much of what is happening is a response to the west's actions. Mr Putin's rants about foreign attempts to stage a "coloured" revolution in Russia, he says, were misguided but deeply felt.
Seen from Moscow, the Orange revolution in Ukraine and the Rose revolution in Georgia were not spontaneous uprisings against unpopular regimes but US-ordered coups, bankrolled by exiled 1990s-era oligarchs such as the London-based Boris Berezovsky. They were concerned less with creating democracy than projecting western influence.
"There is absolutely no basis in Russia today for anything like an Orange revolution," says Mr Trenin.
"But in (the Kremlin's) thinking, that's not the issue. You can rent a revolution - rent a crowd and push it all the way towards a revolution.
If you don't fight against such attempts and nip them in the bud, they have a tendency to spread." Another factor fuelling Kremlin insecurity may be hidden internal feuding between different "clans" among Mr Putin's backers. One theory has it the president wanted to leave politics but felt obliged to stay on amid fears that if his presence as arbiter were removed, clan rivalries could descend into all-out war.
That theory emerged after the publication in October in a Moscow newspaper of an extraordinary open letter by Viktor Cherkesov, a Putin ally and fellow former KGB man who heads Russia's powerful anti-narcotics agency. He warned of a "war" between rival security service factions. His letter followed the arrest of several of his officials investigating a corruption case alleged to include members of the FSB, the KGB successor.
Mr Putin appeared to take the heat out of the situation through a reshuffle that rebalanced various agencies' powers. But what may be another sign of under-the-carpet political struggles came with the arrest of Sergei Storchak, a finance minister charged with conspiring to embezzle $43m of state funds.
While warning of the dangers of such infighting, Mr Cherkesov's letter gave a telling glimpse of how those who exercise real power see the country. Russia, he wrote, was plunging into an abyss in the late 1990s but grabbed hold of a "hook".
That hook was the chekisti, former security services men led by Mr Putin who formed a kind of "corporation" to save Russia. Mr Cherkesov then outlined three scenarios for Russia's development.
"First and best" was to move beyond the "corporation" and create a "normal civil society". Second was to "finish building the corporation" to ensure long-term stability - an authoritarian model. Third was to smash the corporation, as opponents demanded, which he said would thrust Russia back into chaos.
Yet can talk of building civil society be taken seriously from men with a KGB background? Mr Cherkesov is, at least, not the only one who does. Speaking to foreign experts before the campaign began, Mr Putin outlined his own vision.
"I think a lot about how life in Russia should develop after 2008 and in the longer term and I see no instrument capable of stabilising the country other than democracy and a multi-party system," he explained. "We cannot build Russia's future by tying its many millions of citizens to just one person or group of people." There may be pressures that the Kremlin will find hard to ignore.
One of Russia's richest businessmen, asking not be named, says business generally supports a managed transfer of power as a guarantee of stability. "But sooner or later the principles of civil society, with all its institutions, must be given real life in our country," he says.
It is still possible that the recent parliamentary elections and the coming presidential campaign will prove the low point in a temporary retreat from the freedoms Russians won in the 1990s, not a final descent into autocracy. But as even some of Mr Putin's supporters concede, if
Russia is to have a democratic future, it has more ground to make up than before.
By Neil Buckley
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