Putin’s initiative seemed to make a mockery of Russia’s already emasculated party system. Instead of having normal political parties, representing different sectors of the political spectrum, Putin now envisaged United Russia as an amorphous mass organisation, representing all groups. It is worth recalling that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union also did not ‘fight’ elections alone but as part of ‘the indestructible bloc of communists and non-party people’ – claiming, in other words, to represent everybody.
Here is how Putin introduced his idea in his speech to United Russia members in Volgograd:
I have some suggestions. I will explain them now to you. I want to note that selections to the State Duma candidate pool must be completed before August. We then need to discuss the candidates, so that the electoral list can be finalised in September at the party congress. The selection procedure should not only involve party members, but non-affiliated United Russia supporters, trade union members, members of women’s and youth organisations, public associations, citizens who take the initiative, who are actively engaged. In short, all those willing to have a direct influence on government policy through United Russia in the State Duma.
What am I suggesting and how do I propose we do this? Essentially, I propose creating what in political practice is called a broad popular front.
[Applause]
Thank you very much for that reaction, for your support.
This approach to consolidating the efforts of a broad range of political forces ahead of major political events has been taken in the past and is still practised in various countries at various points by a variety of political forces: by those on the left, and by what we know here as right-wing liberal, nationalist and patriotic forces.
How it is called is not the issue. The issue is how we conceptualise it and what we want to achieve. This is a tool for bringing together like-minded political forces.
And I would very much like United Russia and other political parties, trade unions, women’s organisations, youth organisations, for example, veterans’ organisations, including World War II veterans and Afghan war veterans – everyone who is united in their common desire to strengthen our country, united by the idea of finding optimal solutions to the challenges before us – to benefit from this single platform, let’s call it, say, the ‘All-Russia Popular Front’, because ahead of May 9 and at Stalingrad, this kind of rhetoric is in the air, and the name ‘All-Russian Popular Front’ seems quite apt…
[Applause]
Thank you.
I suspect that this was the event that Peskov predicted to me would cause ‘hysteria’, because it appeared to be so obviously aimed at further side-lining President Medvedev and positioning Putin as ‘national leader’ – head not just of a declining party but of a ubiquitous People’s Front. The coming Duma elections would be dominated by People’s Front posters and Putin’s image.
Medvedev at first reacted coolly – describing the idea merely as ‘legitimate’ – and then hostilely: a week after the prime minister’s announcement, he told a group of ‘young parliamentarians’ from various parties: ‘Attempts to tailor the political system to one specific individual are dangerous… Excessive concentration of power is definitely a dangerous thing that has happened repeatedly in our country… As a general rule, it led to stagnation or civil war.’
By the summer, Medvedev was beginning to sound defeatist. In an interview with the Financial Times he admitted for the first time that he did want to stand for re-election: ‘I think that any leader who occupies such a post as president, simply must want to run. Another question is whether he is going to take that decision for himself or not. The decision is somewhat different from his desire to run.’6 It was a humiliating admission that no president fully in charge of his country would ever make: I want to stand for re-election but it’s not my decision, or not mine alone.
Medvedev still ‘campaigned’. At a huge Putin-like press conference he showed his liberal side: Khodorkovsky, if released from jail, would be ‘absolutely no danger to society at all’, he said. In an interview to mark the third anniversary of the war against Georgia he showed he was just as tough as Putin, insisting that he alone took the decision to invade Georgia. At the St Petersburg Economic Forum he declared that Putin’s reforms, though necessary, had run their course: ‘Yes, we had a stage of development that is associated with an increased state role in the economy. It was important to stabilise the situation after the chaos of the 1990s. But now the potential of this path has been exhausted… Such an economic model is dangerous for the country’s future.’ At a closed meeting with business leaders he reportedly appealed to them to support his economic policies, rather than his predecessor’s. And he told leaders of political parties that he wanted to roll back several of Putin’s political reforms: lowering the threshold to enter the Duma from 7 to 5 per cent, ‘decentralising’ power, and promising other, unspecified changes.
Some commentators suggested that Medvedev and Putin were in fact still working in tandem: one out front pushing for reform, the other calling for caution to stop the process from spinning out of control.7 But that ignored the one indisputable fact: that an election was approaching and only one of them would be the ruling elite’s candidate. Neither man was indifferent as to who that candidate would be.
It seemed that Medvedev was approaching an ignominious moment, when he would – in the words of the veteran Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky – ‘tiptoe out of the Kremlin’, confirming to the entire world that he had only ever been a stand-in for Putin. His four years as president would look like a farce, designed to keep the constitution formally intact while actually entrenching Putin’s autocratic rule.
In August, Putin went scuba-diving in the Black Sea, over an ancient archaeological site, and emerged from the water clutching two Grecian urns that were conveniently lying on the sea bed, having escaped the attentions of thousands of other divers over the centuries. There seemed to be no end to his wizardry. Returning to the presidency would surely be no harder for him.
The announcement at a United Russia congress on 24 September that Putin would indeed run for president, and that Medvedev could become his prime minister, was therefore no real surprise – yet still, because of its implications, it came as a thudding shock. After all Medvedev’s talk of political and economic stagnation, and the need for reforms, Russia faced the possibility of another 12 years of Putin. The dreams of Medvedev’s ‘Go, Russia!’ article had vanished. The smile stretched across Medvedev’s face could not hide his humiliation. Most cynically, the two men revealed that all the talk for the past year of ‘taking a decision when the time was right’ was a charade: the job-switch had in fact been discussed years ago, when Putin handed over to Medvedev.
With television and the electoral process controlled by the Kremlin, there was little doubt that Putin would be re-elected as president in March 2012. Russia’s future had been decided by two men, behind closed doors.
CONCLUSION
The picture of Russia that has emerged from these pages is not the one I would have wished to paint, or that I imagined painting 20 years ago, when the country emerged from the destruction and humiliation of communism.1