The leaders of these countries—we might call them “hypocracies,” or use the term of a man who had great experience in covering Putin’s Russia, German journalist Boris Reitschuster’s democratura—are only partly concerned with duping their own citizens with the illusion of a voice in their government. A pervasive security force and domination of the mass media serve the dictator’s purposes well. Few people in Russia really believe in the electoral charade at this point. The polls are for the benefit of the international community and for the predetermined winners themselves.
I repeat my early example of Sarkozy’s shameful, or shameless, phone call to “warmly congratulate” Medvedev after his victory in 2008. The Russian media made a great fanfare about this call and the other encomiums from abroad, another indication of the importance the charade has for Putin and his allies.
There is more than ego and invitations to summits at stake, of course. The ruling oligarchy maintain their assets abroad and a chill in the cozy relationship between Russia’s leaders and the West could put those countless billions in assets at risk. Sarkozy aggressively promoted French companies like Alcatel, Total, and Renault in Russia, with some success. With that in mind, Sarkozy’s phone call was possibly one of the most lucrative in history.
So, no, I do not consider myself a former Russian presidential candidate. It was a civil rights protest, a corruption awareness campaign, and a way of helping people discover what real democracy could feel like. You can’t have real candidates without real democracy.
“How come I am still alive? When I really think about it, it’s a miracle.” Those were the words of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who for years fearlessly dug into the deepest depths of war-ravaged Chechnya. She is seen speaking the fateful lines in the documentary film Letter to Anna by Swiss director Eric Bergkraut. The film premiered in the United States on June 26, 2008, at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York City, a convenient moment in our chronology to again mention her work and her courage. She was as much of a crusader and partisan as a journalist, no doubt, and she didn’t try to hide that. Her passion made her work all the more essential and unforgettable.
Politkovskaya’s reporting on the atrocities in Chechnya usually took the form of conversations with families who had been ripped apart by war. She also served as a sort of confessor for Russian soldiers, even officers, who were ashamed of what was being done in Chechnya in Russia’s name. This sort of work made her enemy number one to a long list of powerful people and groups who had already shown their brutality many times over. It was still a heartbreaking shock when the forty-eight-year-old was murdered in October 2006.
For the sake of objectivity, here are two reviews, one from the KGB and the other from a famous dissident. Two days after Mrs. Politkovskaya’s death, President Putin, when asked at a press conference in Germany (not Russia, of course, where such a question would never be permitted), asserted that “her death caused more damage to the Russian government than her writings.” Former Czech president Vaclav Havel, at the film’s award-winning Prague appearance in March, stated, “It would be good if many people could see this film. Especially politicians who kiss and embrace Russian politicians, almost dizzy with the smell of oil and gas!” It may be difficult to find the film—I found it on YouTube in German and Russian but could not find it in English—but it is well worth tracking down. It’s a rare glimpse of an extinct species. By the time of Anna’s murder, independent journalism of the kind she produced was already cold in the grave in Russia.
At the World Russian Press Congress in Moscow on June 11, 2008, Medvedev pledged to “support media freedom.” Would there be any changes? The signs were not good. He touted the need for a “Cyrillic internet” and criticized the closing of Russian-language media enterprises in former Soviet states, where local languages were reasserting themselves after Soviet-era restrictions. Medvedev also added that Russian television is “one of the highest quality in the world.”
Kremlin paranoia about who and what appeared on Russian television had reached new heights by then. Vladimir Posner, president of the Russian Academy of Television, confessed that he submits a list of guests he would like to have on his own show to Channel One management, who then let him know whom he can and cannot invite. Needless to say, people like Nemtsov, Navalny, and myself have never appeared on his show.
The Kremlin’s subjugation of the Russian press was, along with the rise in oil prices of over 700 percent, the biggest reason behind the perceived success of Putin’s regime. The oligarchs of the 1990s may have been robbing Russia blind, but at least we could find out about it in the news. Those days are over and the elite circle of oligarchs around Putin have power and riches beyond the dreams of Yeltsin’s entourage. In 2000, when Putin took charge, there were no Russians on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s billionaires. By 2005 there were thirty-six. In 2008 there were eighty-seven, more than Germany and Japan combined, in a country where 13 percent of our citizens were under a national poverty line of $150 a month. Putin and his defenders abroad bragged about Russia’s rising GDP, but it was like taking the average temperature of all the patients in a hospital.
According to the 2015 numbers, even after a year of Western sanctions and plunging oil prices, there are still eighty-eight Russian billionaires on the Forbes list, which still doesn’t list Putin or several of his closest cronies. I find it impossible to believe that a man like Putin who holds the power of life and death over eighty-eight billionaires is not the richest of them all. The occasional leaks about mysterious Black Sea mansions and enormous bank transfers to nowhere add more circumstantial evidence to the case that by now Putin is likely the richest man in the world.
On October 25, 2011, I gave a lecture on Russia at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. Georgia was under great pressure from the United States and others at the time to allow Russia to join the World Trade Organization, despite two large pieces of Georgian sovereign territory still being occupied by Russian forces, as they had been since the 2008 invasion. Many in the media and even some governments still refer to Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “disputed territories,” not occupied, ignoring the fact they were taken by military force from Georgia by Russia.
Despite heavy pressure from Russia after the invasion, including economic boycotts, tiny Georgia had remained defiantly pro-democratic and pro-Western under Saakashvili, and yet it was clear that getting Russia into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was of greater importance to Europe and the US than protecting the rights and territory of an ally. Putin’s administration liked to boast about how they had kept Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO during the Bush 43 administration and that WTO membership would be another feather in their cap.
As part of my presentation, I put up a slide with an image of a set of folders, labeled like KGB case files. First came the folders for OPERATION YUKOS and OPERATION KADYROV. Khodorkovsky’s case has been well covered already. Ramzan Kadyrov is the Chechen warlord who boasted of killing his first Russian soldier at the age of fifteen and was put in charge of the devastated region by Putin in 2007. Kadyrov’s agents have assassinated Putin’s enemies in other Russian cities as well as on foreign soil. It is hard to compare what Putin has done to the Russian Caucasus to anything else anywhere. He is not interested in attempting to better integrate these peoples, who are, after all, Russian citizens. Kadyrov is still in charge in Chechnya and has become Putin’s most loyal soldier. How long that loyalty would last if the flow of money from Moscow dried up is yet to be seen.