This does not mean, however, that Putin was willing to give Medvedev a completely free hand to modernize United Russia. When Putin prepared to use United Russia as a machine for the presidential elections of 2012, Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Effective Politics Foundation and a close ally of Putin,[46] said that United Russia needed “to develop a new level of management,” some kind of superstructure above the existing leadership. This new group would be a sort of personal cabinet of Putin’s. One might be tempted to compare this proposed new structure with the old Politburo of the CPSU, but that comparison would not be totally valid. The Politburo was a collegial organ of shared power that was formally controlled by the Central Committee. The superstructure, suggested by Pavlovsky, is not an organ of shared power, nor is it an organ that is formally controlled by the party. It would be the personal camarilla of Putin, who, although he resigned as chairman of the party in May 2012 and never was a member of the party, would stand above the party and avail himself of the party structures. The proposed personal cabinet would be an instrument in his hand to direct the party machine and use it for his own aims. Putin’s special position in the party, proposed by Pavlovsky, would come close to the Führerprinzip.
Gleb Pavlovsky belongs—with Vladislav Surkov—to the most influential “political technologists” behind Russia’s new “electoral democracy,” in which many techniques are used to achieve the preordained results: falsifying elections, erecting legal barriers, harassing opposition parties, monopolizing the media, absorbing other parties, and creating fake parties. These techniques are not new. Many are used by other autocratic regimes that want to maintain a more or less democratic façade. However, the way in which the Kremlin tried to manipulate existing parties by creating new parties, showed, indeed, an interesting resemblance to the “political technologies” used by Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. According to Emilio Gentile, in post–World War I Italy, “the conquest of the power monopoly was achieved in different phases that coincided with the expansion of fascist supremacy in the country. In the first phase, Mussolini set up a coalition policy with the parties that were ready to collaborate; at the same time he did everything to disintegrate them.”[47] Renzo De Felice described Mussolini’s attempts “to ‘empty’ the traditional parties” by offering their leaders attractive positions in his government or in the state bureaucracy.[48] In the elections of April 6, 1924, Mussolini went so far as to present two lists, a broad “ministerial list” that also contained the names of non-fascist candidates, and a “list bis” of the fascist party. These two lists combined gave him an absolute majority of 66.3 percent.[49] This result is certainly impressive, but it is still 4.8 percent less than the combined votes (71.1 percent) of United Russia and its “list bis,” A Just Russia, in the December 2007 Duma elections.[50]
ANOTHER PSEUDO-PLURALISM: THE DIARCHY AT THE TOP
Another interesting resemblance between Putin’s and Mussolini’s systems was the diarchy at the top. Mussolini was prime minister and Duce, but until the armistice in 1943 Italy was a monarchy and Mussolini had to deal with King Victor Emmanuel III, the Italian head of state. In Mussolini’s case this diarchy was not of his own making. It was forced on him by the specificity of the Italian situation. After the election of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president in March 2008 and Putin’s appointment to prime minister, there was created, in Russia also, a diarchy, called the tandem. But unlike the Italian situation, where the diarchy was an unintended consequence of a historical situation, the diarchy in Russia was the result of a deliberate choice. In the beginning there was a lot of speculation about the reason for this construction. Some Western observers obstinately wanted to believe—even as late as the fall of 2011—that this diarchy did have some real substance. It did not. The reason for Putin installing the tandem was to guarantee Putin’s iron grip on power for at least another decade. The second reason was to hide this manipulated usurpation of state power behind a smokescreen of formal legality. The Russian constitution did not permit a president to run for a third term. Putin easily could have changed the constitution, but he chose to step down and leave his place to his young cabinet chief Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev was the ideal choice for Putin. He had no political experience, no apparent power ambitions, nor an independent power base in society, and he was, moreover, totally devoted to his boss. Playing the game of “the constitutional president,” who “scrupulously applied the existing legal rules,” Putin planned to become a “legal” ruler who would remain in office longer than any of his foreign colleagues.[51] Putin served as a prime minister under Yeltsin for almost five months, was subsequently president for more than eight years, remained prime minister for another four years, which already makes altogether twelve and a half years. During Medvedev’s presidency the presidential term for the next president was extended from four to six years. After his reelection on March 4, 2012, Putin had, therefore, theoretically the possibility of remaining at the apex of the Russian power system until 2024, which would make for a reign of almost a quarter of a century. This would bring the total time span of his reign close to that of an average Russian tsar (Alexander II, for instance reigned from 1855 to 1881 and Nicholas II from 1894 to 1917). It even comes close to the almost thirty years’ reign of Putin’s admired geopolitical genius, Joseph Stalin.[52]
Chapter 7
Preaching the Ultranationalist Gospel
The Transformation of “United Russia”
The Putinist “dynamic of change” expressed itself not only in the manipulation of the “pluralist” party system by the presidential administration. It was also at work inside the parties. This dynamic was characterized by the emergence of an ultranationalist and chauvinist ideology in the ruling party United Russia, as well as in the tolerated “opposition” parties. This development was especially unexpected in the case of the CPRF, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which considered itself as the successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[1]
THE ULTRANATIONALISM AND REVISIONISM OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
Immediately after its foundation, in February 1993, the party—while still clinging to the old communist symbols and keeping “leftist” demands in its program—took a chauvinist-nationalist course that was not much different from the Liberal-Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In both cases the party labels were misleading. Like the Liberal-Democratic Party, which was not liberal and not democratic, the Communist Party was not communist. Outward-looking Communist internationalism had been replaced by inward-looking Russian chauvinism. Stephen D. Shenfield wrote that many observers declared that the “ideology dominant within what still goes under the name of the communist movement is no longer communist, but fascist or close to fascist. The most unequivocal of these observers go so far as to claim that ‘the CPRF is in effect a fascist party, both at the top and at the provincial grassroots’… or that ‘the CPRF has for a long time been following the ideas not of communism and socialism, but of national-socialism.’”[2] This opinion was confirmed by Dmitri Furman, an analyst of the Gorbachev Foundation, who wrote: “In the ideology of the largest party, the CPRF, fascistoid features are so salient that one has to be blind and deaf not to notice them.”[3] In a report of the Moscow-based SOVA Center, the cooperation between the CPRF and the extreme right (and now forbidden) Movement Against Illegal Immigration, DPNI, has been amply documented. Aleksandr Belov, the leader of the DPNI, and one of the agitators of an anti-Caucasian pogrom in the Karelian town of Kondopoga in the summer 2006, was invited as a speaker by the CPRF.[4] On the list of the CPRF for the municipal elections in Moscow in 2008 were at least thirteen candidates who were members of extreme right organizations.[5]
46
Cf. Aleksandra Samarina and Ivan Rodin, “Partiyno-politicheskiy modern,”
47
Emilio Gentile,
50
Possibly different clans are behind the launch of different pro-Kremlin parties. According to Philip P. Pan, Dmitry Medvedev was behind the launch of
51
Roy Medvedev seemed to anticipate this scenario in a biography of Dmitry Medvedev. “[T]he power question in Russia has been resolved,” he wrote, “and not only for the next four years. One can say with certainty that this question has also been resolved for the next twelve [years], and, maybe, even more.” (Cf. Roy Medvedev,
52
This scenario was predicted by Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s prime minister for almost four years until 2004, but has since fallen out with the leadership and now heads an opposition party. “I am convinced,” said Kasyanov in 2009, “that Putin will run in 2012 for two six-year terms.” “Putin’s bid,” he added, “[is] to become the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Stalin.” (Conor Humphries, “Russian Ex-PM Says Putin Will Rule to 2024,” Reuters (September 25, 2009).)
1
Almost until the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia (then called RSFSR), unlike the other fourteen Soviet republics, did not have its own Communist Party, but fell directly under the CPSU. It was only in June 1990 that on the initiative of conservative circles inside the CPSU, a Communist Party of Russia was constituted. After the 1991 August putsch this party was banned, together with the CPSU and the local parties in the other republics. The party was refounded in February 1993 under the name Communist Party of the Russian Federation. (Cf. A. Shlyapuzhnikov and A. Yolkin,
2
Stephen D. Shenfield,
4
Cf. Aleksandr Verkhovsky and Galina Kozhevnikova,
5
Cf. “Ksenofobnye kandidaty KPRF na Moskovskikh munitsipalnykh vyborakh,” SOVA (February 22, 2008). http://xeno.sova-center.ru/29481C8/AA109CD.