Since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, Russian politics has regained a Soviet-style inevitability. Putin has no serious challenger in the presidential ballot on 14th March. Even the perennial election stooges, the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and the ultra-nationalist court jester Vladimir Zhirinovsky, have decided to sit this one out.
The television networks are state-owned and muzzled, former intelligence and military officers are filling senior posts in all the regions, and the courts do the Kremlin’s bidding – as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil billionaire, knows well. After last December’s parliamentary election, the Duma is fully controlled by United Russia, a party with no ideology save for supporting the president. Also present but too small to have influence are the Communists, a shrinking and stagnant pool of Soviet reactionaries; Zhirinovsky’s hideously misnamed Liberal Democratic party; and Motherland, a vaguely nationalist shell party created by the Kremlin three months before the election with the aim – which it fulfilled admirably – of seducing Communist voters. Russia’s two liberal centre-right parties, the SPS (more market-oriented) and Yabloko (more social democratic), fell short of the 5 per cent vote needed to form parliamentary parties. With debate removed from the floor of the Duma, Soviet-style Kremlinology is the chief political sport again.
But this is not totalitarianism. Putin is wildly popular, while the opposition’s political scores are declining by the day. Artyom and Sergei, my two closest Russian friends, are gay and prosperous. They should have been automatic supporters of SPS or Yabloko, but not only did they think those parties had nothing to offer them, they didn’t even bother to vote. Last year, two American researchers, Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber, commissioned a survey and found that 30 per cent of Russians agree with the statement "Democracy is always preferable," but 34 per cent with "Authoritarian government is sometimes preferable." The other 36 per cent said they either didn’t care or didn’t know. A similar survey all across Africa a couple of years previously had found that on average 69 per cent of people agreed with the first statement and only 18 per cent with the second. A strong hand from above, it seems, suits the Russians.
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