United Russia, with the sitting president at the top of its list, enjoyed every imaginable advantage, both legal and illegal. Opposition groups, including our own Other Russia coalition, were denied access to the ballot by meticulous new election laws designed for exactly that purpose. The alternatives left for voters on Sunday were mostly Putin supporters or parties that had made deals not to oppose Putin if they were allowed to stay in the parliament or on the ballot.
In the first category there was “A Just Russia,” whose first move after the election was to propose an extension of Putin’s presidency. Some opposition! In the second category were the Communists, who received, or you might prefer “were allowed,” 11.6 percent of the vote (around 20 percent according to an independent count), for 57 of 450 Duma seats. This low number angered Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who rumors said had been promised at least 90 seats by the Kremlin for his loyalty. Zyuganov started making charges of election anomalies. As I joked in an article after the election: “I hate to say it, Gennady, but I told you so!” As the joke going around had it, the difference between democracy and the Putin system was like the difference between two chairs: one leather and one electric.
Not that it really mattered, but the most damning of all were the official statistics in places like Chechnya and Dagestan where there was little monitoring at the polls. With an outlandish 99.5 percent voter turnout, 99 percent of Chechen votes went to United Russia. Do not forget this is a party led by Putin, the author of the second Chechen war that razed the Chechen capital Grozny to the ground. As usual, the truth is visible in the actions of lackeys who are too eager to please their Kremlin masters. My wife commented darkly that the only ones who didn’t vote in Chechnya were those who died on election day.
One can only imagine what the United Russia bosses thought of Hugo Chavez losing a referendum by a measly 1 percent on the same day. What an amateur! Meanwhile, despite the absence of real alternatives on the ballot and with all the chicanery included, United Russia barely topped 50 percent in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It’s no coincidence that the residents of these cities had much greater access to news not provided by the Kremlin thanks to greater Internet penetration and Echo of Moscow, the one radio station where a variety of views was still heard.
It was a clear indication that Putin considered these elections important when he gave several frenzied speeches to get out the vote. The vicious language he used could barely be called coded as he warned against “enemies within” and “jackals” supported by the West. It was less Russian than what we might call Putinese, with a vintage Austrian-German accent.
Why bother making such an effort when the Kremlin’s control was apparently so absolute already? First we should recall that even Stalin held elections in 1937 during the Terror. The results on that Sunday weren’t in any doubt either, confirming our return to the rule of an all-powerful single-party state. But the elections were important to Putin’s regime for several reasons, starting, of course, with financial ones: Putin’s. Putin’s close relationship with Western leaders served as a guarantee to his ruling oligarchs that their money was safe. Had he discarded the last vestiges of democracy too blatantly at that stage this cozy situation might have ended, a risk Putin was not yet ready to take.
The first indications were bad. Nicolas Sarkozy had touted himself as a tough guy but seemed to have gone weak in the knees after a few drinks with Putin. The French president wasted no time in calling his counterpart to congratulate him on his big win. Putin always watched these signals from the West carefully, looking for signs of any real pressure. Most comments about the blatantly fraudulent elections weren’t favorable, especially in the media, but how much danger could there be if Sarkozy and Putin’s old buddy Tony Blair called him?
The other purpose of the Kremlin campaign was to provide the regime with pseudo democratic cover for whatever machinations they were going to come up with to keep their hold on power after the March 2 presidential elections. Putin couldn’t run again, or at least the constitution said he couldn’t and he had promised not to change it—if you wished to value the promise of a KGB lieutenant colonel.
After eight years blessed with record oil prices and a compromising West distracted by the “war on terror,” the Putin regime had reached its crisis. The Kremlin’s presidential candidate had to be named soon. Would it be a feeble puppet, leading, by “popular” demand or maybe a health emergency, to Putin’s return? Or could they find someone foolish enough to step in and risk taking the blame when the neglected Russian infrastructure and economy finally collapsed? Or would they change the system, eviscerating the constitution in some way so Putin could keep power in some new role?
After Putin’s friendly visit to Iran in October 2007 I wrote in an article that perhaps he was considering a new title for himself, one above the petty responsibilities of prime minister or even the old grandeur of the general secretary of the party. “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Putin” had a nice ring to it, I wrote, and I was sure he had always dreamed of running things from behind the scenes, without the petty annoyances and appearances of the presidency. My joke was closer to the mark than I could have imagined.
I was tempted to reproduce in this book a sort of protest that I employed in an article I wrote on the state of Russia in 2009 by not mentioning the name of Dmitry Medvedev even a single time. Ignoring him completely would be a fitting treatment of the man who held the presidency of Russia from 2008 until 2012, when he handed it back to Vladimir Putin like a dog bringing a stick back to its owner. There is no sense obscuring this story for the sake of personal protest, but I will keep my remarks on him brief.
Medvedev the human being was, and is, completely irrelevant. But the idea of a Medvedev, the idea of a young liberal president who might turn the country back toward the path of modernity, that was very, very useful. You can almost envision Putin and his inner circle in a laboratory, designing the ideal Medvedev. He had to be fresh-faced and bright-eyed and capable of spouting reformist jargon for the intelligentsia and keeping a straight face while politely acknowledging that things in Russia weren’t all great, but were definitely going to improve. The Medvedev also couldn’t have any mind, ambition, or power base of his own, just in case. Finally, he also needed to be shorter than Putin and with even less charisma, a very rare combination indeed. Fortunately for Putin, he happened to have one on hand right in his own cabinet.
On December 10, 2007, Putin made a big fanfare of endorsing his first deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, to succeed him in the presidency. He was quickly nominated by United Russia and its puppet parties, and a week after receiving Putin’s blessing Medvedev was officially the candidate. His first priority was to announce that, should he be so lucky as to win the election, he would make Vladimir Putin his prime minister. Putin graciously accepted and that was that. (Medvedev also resigned as the chairman of Gazprom in order to run for president, leading to jokes about his being demoted to the presidency of Russia.)
One response from the Western leaders to the news will serve as an example of nearly all of them. The day after Putin’s endorsement of Medvedev, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had a round-table discussion with the editorial board of the newspaper USA Today. They covered Iraq, Iran, and then moved to Rice’s former area of expertise, Russia. She made several solid remarks about how “democratic processes have taken a step backward in Russia” and “it’s not an environment in which you can talk about free and fair elections.” But then she went on to say that she knew Medvedev, and that he was “intelligent” and “of another generation,” as if any of that would matter, true or not.