UNEQUALLED ELECTION FRAUD
A fake pluralist system cannot be maintained without massive election fraud. This fraud, however, must not transgress certain limits if it is to keep the pluralist system “credible.” On October 11, 2009, when local elections were held in seventy-five regions for seven thousand eligible posts, something unexpected happened. The strategy of the Kremlin’s “political technologists” of creating a fake two-party system seemed to be surpassed by a new reality: the total hegemony of United Russia, which obtained almost 80 percent of the votes. The other parties were completely marginalized in the local councils. The background to this new political fact was the greatest election fraud ever committed in post-Communist Russia. In the Moscow City Duma, for instance, United Russia got thirty-two out of thirty-five seats. However, exit polls by VTsIOM, the state-owned pollster, had predicted that support for United Russia in Moscow was only 45.5 percent. Strangely enough, the party got 66 percent of the vote.[22] According to observers “the campaign was called one of the dirtiest ever in Russia…. Almost everywhere parties complained of the abuse of absentee ballots and the rather old fashioned abuse of ‘carousel’ voting, in which buses ferry volunteers from one polling station to the next to vote several times.”[23] However, according to Novoe Vremya (New Times)—a weekly magazine critical of the Kremlin—the use of absentee ballots and the carousel system were only detskiye metody (children’s methods) of election fraud. They could change the results by only 5 to 7 percent. However, United Russia’s results were in many cases “improved” by up to 40 percent. The method used for this, wrote the weekly, was quite simple: it consisted in removing “troublesome observers” at the moment that the ballot boxes were opened and in presenting the “end results” directly.[24] Ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev on this occasion abandoned his usually prudent and discrete attitude vis-à-vis the leadership in the Kremlin. In an interview in Novaya Gazeta, of which he is one of the owners, he said that “in the eyes of everybody, the elections have turned into a mockery of the people.”[25]
Apart from this massive fraud committed during the elections, there was also the fraud committed before them. Parties outside the “official opposition,” such as, for instance, Drugaya Rossiya (the Other Russia—a coalition headed by former chess champion Garry Kasparov), could not participate. According to Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst with the Moscow-based Mercator research group, “they are on the periphery, marginalized…. They have no access to the media. They are not allowed to register as candidates or even as parties, as players in the electoral process. They exist outside the system that is called politics.”[26]
Putin’s goal, to create two pro-Kremlin parties and in this way to maintain a pluralistic political façade, began to run the risk of being drowned in the “electoral successes” of United Russia, which—helped by the careerism of the regional leaders, the manipulated media, excessive financial funding, and, last but not least, massive, nationwide, organized fraud—might become “the only show in town.” United Russia was in danger of becoming a victim of its own success, undermining the very democratic façade the leadership had been so carefully trying to construct over the years. That the Kremlin was really worried about the turn of events became clear after the regional elections, which took place on March 14, 2010. Despite widespread fraud,[27] this time United Russia did not repeat its success. It lost about 20 percentage points across the board. In Sverdlovsk the party got only 39 percent, and Irkutsk elected a Communist mayor with over 62 percent. One would have expected grim faces in the Kremlin, but the opposite was the case. “A happy defeat for the Kremlin,” wrote Julia Ioffe in Foreign Policy.[28] According to another Western observer it was a “Victory in defeat.”[29] The fact that the three “opposition parties” together had gotten more votes than United Russia seemed to be extremely good news for the Kremlin: the democratic façade had been saved without in any way jeopardizing United Russia’s power monopoly. Due to the fact that the biggest party gets extra seats in the regional legislatures, “loser” United Russia could quietly continue to rule the regions in tandem with the Kremlin-appointed governors.
MIKHAIL PROKHOROV’S REVOLT AGAINST THE KREMLIN “PUPPETEERS”
The Kremlin’s efforts to build fake parties alongside United Russia, however, continued. The Kremlin needed a multiparty system, but only in the way the former German Democratic Republic needed it: as a democratic façade. It should by all means be prevented from developing into a real multiparty system and leading to what the Kremlin wanted to avoid at all cost: political alternation. However, creating even a fake two-party system could be risky for the Kremlin, because a big opposition party—even if it was originally set up as a fake opposition party—could eventually develop into a real opposition.[30] This theoretical possibility seemed almost to become a reality in the summer of 2011, when the Kremlin promoted the billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, president of the Onexim Group and third-richest man in Russia, to leader of the party Pravoe Delo (Right Cause). This party was founded in 2009,[31] but had no seats in the Duma. It was set up as a “liberal” party with the objective of capturing the votes of the liberal intelligentsia, the urban middle classes, and the business community. The Kremlin wanted the party to enter the Duma in the elections of December 2011 to make its managed “multiparty” system more credible to the most critical part of the electorate. Mikhail Vinogradov, director of the Petersburg Foundation “Petersburg Politics,” announced that Prokhorov, a talented business tycoon, was “a strong figure, not inclined to participate in imitation projects.”[32] His prediction came true. Prokhorov went to work energetically. He approached Yevgeny Roizman, who had made a name as an activist, leading a nationwide campaign against narcotics. The Kremlin administration was not pleased with this unexpected activism and advised Prokhorov to sack Roizman. Prokhorov refused. This show of independence could not be tolerated and on September 15, 2011, Prokhorov was forced out of the party. Prokhorov did not mince his words. In Kommersant he attacked Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration, head-on, calling him a “puppeteer” who “privatized the political system and disinforms the government of the country.”[33] Prokhorov asked for Surkov to be sacked—a rather provocative demand, because Surkov the “puppeteer” was not acting alone, but had the full backing of his two masters and “puppeteers-in-chief” Putin and Medvedev who, in reality, were pulling the strings. An analyst commented that Prokhorov, “by refusing to bend to the petty wishes from the Kremlin… has qualified as an ‘enemy of the state,’ and his fortune instead of shielding him from persecution, makes it more tempting for the greedy siloviki to go after the loot…. Prokhorov is guilty of revealing how rotten Putinism has grown.”[34]
22
Cf. Roland Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy,”
24
Mikhai Tulsky, “Falsifikatsii: narusheniya i vbrosy v tsifrach i faktakh,”
25
“Mikhail Gorbachev: Na glazakh u vsekh vybory prevratili v nasmeshku nad ludmi,”
26
“Regional Elections Go According to the Kremlin’s Script,”
27
According to
30
There is a Russian joke that the only political alternation the country has known is between bald and not bald leaders. This is, indeed, striking, if one considers the following succession: tsar Nicholas II–Lenin (bald)–Stalin–Khrushchev (bald)–Brezhnev–Andropov (bald)–Chernenko–Gorbachev (bald)–Yeltsin–Putin (bald)–Medvedev–Putin (bald). As a matter of fact,
31
It was the result of a Kremlin-inspired merger of three parties: the liberal Union of Right Forces, Civilian Power, and the Democratic Party of Russia.
32
Yekatarina Vinokurova, “Yo-Partiya: Mikhail Prokhorov gotov vozglavit ‘Pravoe Delo,’”
33
Maria-Luisa Tirmaste and Natalya Bashlykova, “Mikhailu Prokhorovu pora zanyatsya svoim delom,”
34
Pavel K. Baev, “Moscow Dithers over New Scandal and Forgets the Old Tragedy,”