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12.03.08
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Dull Is Beautiful?
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By Dmitry Babich
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As the world laments a rollback of democracy in Russia, Russians themselves seem to be more divided than ever before on how to react to the criticism from abroad, including the general discomfort with the recent victory of Dmitry Medvedev.
“A few years ago I often heard from Russians that Russia was a democracy and the West should stop criticizing Russia for not acknowledging it,” said a correspondent of a German daily in Moscow who wished to remain anonymous. “Now I hear them saying that democracy is actually old-fashioned and ineffective and the West should stop scolding Russia for not having it. The message is the same: stop your criticism.”
A recent televised conference of Russian and American experts on presidential elections in Russia and the United States revealed the same kind of dualism on the Russian side. While panelists acknowledged a dull election with no real alternative to Dmitry Medvedev, most of the Russian participants became very angry when talking about American criticism of Russian elections in general and this one in particular.
“I don’t understand why our authorities have such a strong inferiority complex. Even if Medvedev had not had such a strong support from Putin, he would still win his 65 percent,” said Anatoly Gromyko, the founder of the Institute of the United States and Canada at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a veteran of American studies in Russia and the son of the late Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. “At the same time I am sure that the presidential election in Russia will have a stabilizing effect on international relations. President Putin’s foreign policy line set out in his speech in Munich last year will be continued.”
Even Sergei Markov, the Kremlin-friendly head of the Moscow-based think tank Center for Political Studies and a recently elected member of United Russia’s faction in the state Duma, agreed that Russia did not have an effective political system yet. “We are drifting away from the communist dictatorship and from the anarchy of the 1990s,” Markov said. “[In this election] there was not enough competition, pluralism in the mass media was lacking. However, the important thing was that for the first time in Russian history the new leader was elected on time and according to the law.”
American participants in the video conference, broadcast at the RIA Novosti news agency, followed Markov’s advice and abandoned the holier-than-thou tone. They argued for applying Russian, and not American, standards to Russian elections.
Padma Desai, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University and a veteran American scholar of Russia, recalled her first trip to Russia in 1964 and suggested taking a more balanced view of Russia’s progress.
“In 1964, Russia was an Orwellian world. People could not decide almost anything in their lives, let alone saying something bad about the system. Now people at least decide which school they want their children to go to. It may not seem much from outside, but for Russians it may be much more important than being able to influence the election of a president,” Desai said.
Vladimir Ryzhkov, the leader of the opposition Republican party of Russia, said that under president Putin’s rule all the institutions of Russia’s democracy were badly damaged. In this situation, Russian democracy is actually unable to function, as the country lacks, for example, an institutionalized system of objective election observation.
“The attendance of the voters during the presidential election could be 55 percent instead of the announced 70, there is simply no one to check,” Ryzhkov said. “This leads to the alienation of society from the authorities. Having the so-called stabilization fund of $85 billion and a poor population is just one more indication of the terrible gap between the rich and the poor, the rulers and the people.”
Participants of the conference agreed that the American election was more democratic and could have a greater effect on the world’s destiny, although Anatoly Gromyko and Sergei Markov did not miss an opportunity to raise questions about America’s human rights abuses in Iraq and the rising suicide rates among American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Kremlin’s ideologues seem to be in the process of a transition from denying the totalitarian character of Russia’s regime to praising this regime for being undemocratic and thus economically effective – the real “new West,” as the chairman of Russia’s Council of Foreign and Defense Policy Sergei Karaganov put it. |
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