Category Archives: Russia

Russia

Why Dan Savage’s campaign against Russian vodka is naive and counterproductive

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moscowprideattack

Dan Savage, when he’s not answering the love and sex queries from anguished writers to his column, has now taken it upon himself to become the arbiter of outrage about Russian treatment of LGBT rights.Russia Flag Icon  Savage, taking on the burden of activist-in-chief for the U.S. LGBT community, has started a campaign demanding that bars throughout the United States start boycotting all Russian vodkas:

If you drink a Russian Vodka like Stoli, Russian Standard, or any of the other brands listed above, switch to another brand from another country, or even a local brand from a local distillery. Stoli is the iconic Russian Vodka and it’s returning to Russian ownership in 2014. Other brands like Russian Standard should also be boycotted. Do not drink Russian vodka. Do not buy Russian vodka. Ask your bartender at your favorite bar—gay or otherwise—to DUMP STOLI and DUMP RUSSIAN VODKA.

The SPI Group, which owns Stolichnaya*, responded with a defensive letter to The Advocate and other sources earlier today, outlining its ongoing outreach to the LGBT community and noting that, at least as of today, their vodka is produced from Russian ingredients in Latvia, which is of course a NATO and European Union member, and earlier this month secured its entry early next year to the eurozone single currency:

Stoli’s production process involves both Russia and Latvia. Stoli is made from Russian ingredients (wheat, rye and raw alcohol) blended with pure artesian well water at our historic distillery and bottling facility Latvijas Balzams in Riga… We fully support and endorse your objectives to fight against prejudice in Russia. In the past decade, SPI has been actively advocating in favor of freedom, tolerance and openness in society, standing very passionately on the side of the LGBT community and will continue to support any effective initiative in that direction.

There’s some debate over whether the brand will revert to Russian ownership in 2014, but that really doesn’t matter — neither Stoli, the SPI Group or any other major Russian vodka company is owned by the Russian government.  It should miss no one’s attention that much of public-owned industry from the Soviet era was privatized for fire-sale prices in the first years of Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s administration.  Whether you think that the oligarchs that benefitted from those poor Yeltsin-era decisions are culpable for their own economic sins, they are not the ones setting anti-gay policy today in Russia.  Many oligarchs, such as Mikhail Prokhorov, the owner of the New Jersey Nets (now Brooklyn Nets) basketball team, who made his fortune chiefly in nickel mining in the 1990s, actively supports the opposition and ran himself as a candidate against Putin for president last year.  Earlier today, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that aspects of the trial against Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky were unfair (though the court avoided the legal finding that the trial is politically motivated, as been widely alleged for a decade).

Savage’s campaign would be like Russian bars boycotting Coca-Cola in 1996 in retribution for the U.S. Congress’s decision to pass the Defense of Marriage Act.  If Coca-Cola happened to be a Canadian company.  And that doesn’t make an incredible amount of sense.

The latest kerfuffle reached a roar in the United States following an op-ed by Harvey Fierstein in The New York Times last Sunday accusing Russian president Vladimir Putin of scapegoating gays and lesbians following the passage of high-profile legislation that bans the adoption of Russian children by gay parents and that allows the harassment and detention of gay and lesbian foreign nationals in Russia:

Mr. Putin’s campaign against lesbian, gay and bisexual people is one of distraction, a strategy of demonizing a minority for political gain taken straight from the Nazi playbook. Can we allow this war against human rights to go unanswered? Although Mr. Putin may think he can control his creation, history proves he cannot: his condemnations are permission to commit violence against gays and lesbians. In May a young gay man was murdered in the city of Volgograd. He was beaten, his body violated with beer bottles, his clothing set on fire, his head crushed with a rock. This is most likely just the beginning.

Nevertheless, the rest of the world remains almost completely ignorant of Mr. Putin’s agenda. His adoption restrictions have received some attention, but it has been largely limited to people involved in international adoptions.

It should be no surprise to anyone that Russian policy — and representative Russian views — on homosexuality is troubling, and that’s something we should all be concerned about, and many of us have been concerned about it for years.  Former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov initiated a tradition of using police violence to shut down Moscow’s annual pride parade that’s now seven years running (attacks on the 2011 parade pictured above).

It’s fair to say that Russia is one of the least LGBT-friendly countries in the world, let alone in Europe.

But it’s also one of the least friendly countries in the world to be a journalist, to serve in the armed forces, to have too dark a skin tone, to speak out against the government, to be relatively poor, to be too rich for your own good (in the eyes of the government, at least), or to be unfortunate enough to serve time in prison.

And it’s been that way — for gays and for everyone else — long before the decision that Sochi would host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

That the latest LGBT protests in the United States follow the promulgation of two laws that are particularly geared toward discrimination against gays and lesbians outside Russia leads to the uncomfortable possibility that the Johnny-come-lately crusade against Russia’s laws is motivated by a mostly self-serving, nazel-gaving campaign that’s based less on protecting Russian gays and lesbians and indignation about the treatment of U.S. gays and lesbians — and it’s not clear that kind of effort won’t be even more harmful in the long run by giving Putin a new reasons (anti-American nationalism) to persecute Russian gays and lesbians further. Continue reading Why Dan Savage’s campaign against Russian vodka is naive and counterproductive →

Russia

Opposition critic Navalny’s conviction, in Putin’s Russia, is a badge of authenticity

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navalny

So right on time, the Russian government has engineered a conviction of Alexei Navalny, the outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin.Russia Flag Icon

His conviction stems from a truly bizarre accusation that he embezzled around $500,000 out of a timber company in Kirov, an industrial town hundred of miles northeast of Moscow, and all signs indicate that the conviction is politically motivated to remove Navalny as a Putin critic whose following is growing — and his conviction is likely to only enhance his attraction.

Navalny now faces five years in Russian prison far away from Moscow, where Navalny was running to contest the mayoral election on September 8, an election that’s now even more likely to be won by incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin ally who took power after former mayor Yuri Luzhkov was pushed out of office by then-president Dmitry Medvedev in 2010.  The election’s sudden timing effectively prohibited prominent billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov from arranging his complex international finances in order to contest the race, leaving Navalny as the leading prominent challenger.

Prokhorov, who owns the New Jersey Nets, and who waged a presidential campaign in March 2012, has shown that his opposition is a much more delicate dance with the Kremlin than Navalny, who led full-throated protests in Moscow protesting the presidential vote and credible allegations of fraud in the December 2011 elections to the ду́ма (Duma), Russia’s lower legislative chamber.  In contrast to Navalny’s sledgehammer opposition, Prokhorov has been more hesitant to cross Putin and Putin’s allies, and it was even speculated last year that Prokhorov’s opposition was entirely manufactured by Putin’s allies.  That’s probably not true — after all, Prokhorov, as a good businessman, has much more to lose from a full-throated attack on the Kremlin than Navalny — and he’s forged links with other credible opposition figures like former Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin.

Navalny had become such a radioactive political figure in recent days that Prokhorov even refused to back Navalny in the Moscow mayoral race, instead endorsing Sergey Troitsky, the lead singer of a Russian heavy metal band, ‘Corrossive Metal,’ and who is most well-known by his stage name, Pauk, which means ‘spider’ in Russian.

But Navalny’s conviction today means that he’s likely to leapfrog the tentative Prokhorov and other anti-Putin activists as the central figure of the Russian opposition.  Russian prisons are notoriously brutal places, rife with violence and diseases, including drug-resistant tuberculosis, and Navalny faces some amount of peril in the years ahead.  Navalny’s conviction is already drawing international condemnation, and Putin will now have succeeded in elevating a one-time gadfly into a political figure empowered with the authenticity of someone who’s willing to face down Russia’s horrible prisons as the price of speaking out against Putin.

Navalny tweeted and blogged to his supporters, encouraging them to keep up his fight against Putin’s dominant Еди́ная Росси́я (United Russia) party, which he famously referred to as a ‘party of crooks and thieves.’

After the verdict, Navalny tweeted: “So that’s it. Don’t get bored without me. Most importantly, don’t sit around doing nothing. The toad won’t get off the oil pipe by itself.”

In his LiveJournal blog on Wednesday Navalny said: “The current authorities are not a big, healthy fish, but rather a bloated fish or Latin American toad, which puffs itself up when it sees danger, with the help of television.”

Utlimately, Navalny’s trial and conviction are another indication that the Putin administration intends on being as fully authoritarian as it needs to be to hold onto power, in the same way that prominent opposition leader and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko remained — and still remains — in prison over politically motivated charges in neighboring Ukraine during last October’s parliamentary elections.

But Putin, in attempting to silence a 21st century critic with ham-fisted 20th century methods, risks that his strategy will backfire by bringing Navalny even more notoriety and credibility.  Just witness the international attention that the politically motivated trials against oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky commanded, the sudden 2006 murder of prominent anti-Putin journalist Anna Politkovskaya, or even the suspicions of foul play in the apparent suicide earlier this year of exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky in London.

Continue reading Opposition critic Navalny’s conviction, in Putin’s Russia, is a badge of authenticity →

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Putin ally Sobyanin maneuvers to hold onto power in Moscow in snap September election

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Though it’s sometimes easy to forget in the post-Cold War era, Moscow is still the most populous city in Europe and one of the five most populous cities in the world — it not only Russia’s capital, but Russia’s central city for power, politics and finance. Russia Flag IconMoscow

That makes the city’s mayor one of the most powerful official in the entire Russian federation and, with snap elections due for Moscow’s mayor in September, it gives some of the most unpredictable voters in Russia the opportunity to make a rare popular statement with five years to go until another presidential election, despite fears that the vote may be titled in favor of the incumbent mayor, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Earlier in June, Moscow’s current mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced his resignation, despite the fact that his term runs through 2014, setting up snap elections for September 8 that seem increasingly likely to be an easy victory for Sobyanin as his most viable rivals have either stepped aside or face an uphill challenge even making it to the ballot.  Critics immediately called Sobyanin’s resignation and the early elections a ruse to avoid real competition, thereby cementing control over Russia’s largest city within Putin’s grasp.

Elections for Moscow’s mayor are themselves a new phenomenon, given that then-president Dmitry Medvedev and the Russian Duma only reintroduced direct elections for governors and other positions last year, after president Vladimir Putin suspended gubernatorial elections in 2004 on the somewhat dubious rationale of national security and anti-terror efforts.  Under the new direct elections law, however, new hurdles have been introduced that require candidates to have the support of other lawmakers in the region.  Given that Putin’s United Russia (Еди́ная Росси́я) is by far the dominant political party in Russia, that means Putin will continue to have at least some influence on gubernatorial and local elections.

Moreover, earlier this year, Putin pushed through another law allowing regions to avoid direct elections through an alternative process whereby each party in a regional legislature submits three candidates to the Russian president, the Russian president chooses three finalists, and the regional legislature elects a governor from among the three finalists. (You can’t make this up!)

The man who was most widely anticipated to challenge Sobyanin — former presidential candidate and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov — opted out of the mayoral race in mid-June when it was clear that he would not be able to meet the legal requirements in time for the snap race.  Prokhorov, who formed Civic Platform (Гражданская Платформа), a liberal political party in June 2012 in the wake of his relatively successful presidential race.  But Prokhorov, who is the owner of the New Jersey Nets professional basketball team in the United States, would have run afoul of requirements that require his assets to be repatriated prior to serving as Moscow’s mayor. Continue reading Putin ally Sobyanin maneuvers to hold onto power in Moscow in snap September election →

Russia, United States

Boston bombing suspects could cause uptick in anti-Chechen feeling in the US

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UPDATE:  Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president, has come out with a statement disclaiming Chechen culpability, but in a way that blames American ‘attitudes and beliefs,’ and I doubt it will do much to lift American hearts and minds in favor of Chechnya:

Tragic events have taken place in Boston. A terrorist attack killed people. We have already expressed our condolences to the people of the city and to the American people. Today, the media reports, one Tsarnaev was killed as [police] tried to arrest him. It would be appropriate if he was detained and investigated, and the circumstances and the extent of his guilt determined. Apparently, the security services needed to calm down the society by any means necessary.

Any attempt to draw a connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevs — if they are guilty — is futile. They were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America. The whole world must struggle against terrorism — that we know better than anyone else. We hope for the recovery of all the victims, and we mourn with the Americans.

 * * * * *

It’s a small Caucasian republic in Russia with barely over one million people, but Chechnya attracted attention worldwide in the 1990s when it fought two wars against Russia to become a separate republic.

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Now, with word that the two bombing suspects are/were Chechen (or perhaps from neighboring Dagestan, it’s unclear to me), Chechnya is likely to come to the forefront as a topic of U.S. foreign relations, even as one of the suspects has been killed overnight and a wide manhunt continues for the second suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

We still have more questions than answers at this point, and there’s no evidence, as far as I can tell, that this is some concerted plot concocted in Grozny or Makhachkala, so I’m wary to make any sweeping statements.

But Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution worries that it will destroy the chances of the U.S. Congress passing a comprehensive immigration bill later this year, and while I think that’s a valid concern, I worry more that this will cause  huge anti-Chechen sentiment in the United States, emboldening Russian president Vladimir Putin to effect a crackdown on the North Caucasus, which still features some amount of insurgent activity since Russian troops asserted control over Chechnya in 2000.

Predominantly Islamic, Chechnya largely held off the assertion of Russian political and military control following the First Chechen War from 1994 to 1996, and the Russian military’s failure was one of the reasons (aside from Russia’s economy) that former Russian president Boris Yeltsin became very unpopular in early 1996 months ahead of his reelection.  Yeltsin, and Putin thereafter, from 1999 to 2000 in the Second Chechen War, definitively brought Chechnya under federal control.  Ramzan Kadyrov, the current Chechen leader since 2007, is the son of a former-rebel-turned-Kremlin-ally, and his iron rule has restored some amount of political and economic stability to Grozny, though his tenure’s been marked by a number of accusations of human rights violations.

If anything, neighboring Dagestan has become the more recent problem as a seat of instability and violence, and the struggle in the two regions has transformed from a largely post-Soviet nationalist struggle into one that’s much more religious in nature over the past decade.

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Bush administration, John Bolton, is already claiming they are hired killers in a grander conspiracy.

As Politico notes, U.S. presidents haven’t exactly been profiles in courage on the Chechen issue in the past:

For years before the Boston Marathon suspects were identified, American presidents have avoided talking about Chechnya — it’s been a prerequisite demanded by Russia’s leaders for maintaining strong relationships.

President Barack Obama and his administration have been quiet on the continued tensions between Vladmir Putin’s government and the area that is its federal subject. That follows the pattern of his predecessors: Bill Clinton pushed Boris Yeltsin to find a peaceful settlement to what began in 1994 as a war to gain independence from Russia, as did George W. Bush.

Since taking office, Obama hasn’t said the word “Chechnya” publicly. The Treasury and State Departments have, though, taken action.

Reports of Russian military abuses abound from its Chechen campaigns from the 1990s and 2000s, many documented by the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.  Pro-Chechen groups have conducted a number of terrorist activities against citizens in Russia, many of them harrowing — the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, the 2003 Stavropol train bombing, the 2004 Moscow metro bombing, the 2004 Beslan school siege — but never outside Russia.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on current Chechen rebel activity, but I fear that Putin could use the Boston bombing — if indeed the link to Chechnya is confirmed — as a pretense for another campaign against Chechen and Dagestani rebels.

Photo credit to BBC News. 

Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine

Red October? Four autumn elections boost Moscow’s influence in Russian ‘near-abroad’

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It’s been a good October for Moscow.

In each of the four former Soviet republics with elections scheduled for late September and October 2012 (Belarus, Georgia, Lithuania and Ukraine), Russia has reason to believe that its relations with each such country will strengthen.  The elections have ranged in character from incredibly free, open and fair to completely rigged, and the countries fall across the spectrum of geography, economics and political development.

The one factor they have in common is the success of political leaders who aim to nudge their country’s foreign relations some degree friendlier with Russia:

  • In Belarus on September 23, Alexander Lukashenko and his allies ‘won’ all of the seats in the House of Representatives in an unfair and unfree election.  Lukashenko, in power since 1994, is one of the most pro-Russian leaders among former Soviet republics; Belarus and Russia share very tight-knit economic ties, a common approach to rule of law and human rights (not particularly progressive), and Lukashenko has at various times contemplated bringing Belarus and Russia back into some form of union.  Belarus and Kazakhstan, for instance, joined a formal customs union with Russia in January 2012.
  • In Georgia on October 1, an opposition coalition led by Georgia’s richest man Bidzina Ivanishvili took control of the Georgian parliament from the party of Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili.  Ivanishvili, an oligarch who made his fortune in the 1990s and 2000s in post-Soviet Russia, has argued that Georgia can remain committed to economic and democratic reforms and the rule of law and strive for better relations with Russia (though Ivanishvili says he’d still like to seek Georgian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).  Under Saakashvili, Russia imposed a trade ban on many Georgian exports, including wine, agricultural products and mineral water; in 2008, after provocation from Saakashvili, Russian president Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops to the breakway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which remain occupied by Russian forces.
  • In Lithuania on October 14, in the first round of parliamentary elections, the Labour Party of Russian-born Viktor Uspaskich narrowly won the largest share of the vote and will likely form part of the next government coalition.  Uspaskich’s party also finished first in 2004, but since then, Uspaskich has been charged with corruption and spent parts of 2006 and 2007 in apparent hiding in Russia.  In any event, Uspaskich’s presence in the government could bring about more favorable relations with Russia, and it could possibly slow Lithuanian accession into the eurozone.
  • In Ukraine on October 28, pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who narrowly defeated the more pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko in the 2010 election (who was promptly charged, tried and imprisoned on politically motivated charges relating to the 2009 pipeline crisis with Russia) is leading his largely united pro-Russian Party of Regions in parliamentary elections, while the various pro-Western political parties remain split.

This autumn’s elections follow the September 2011 Latvian parliamentary elections, in which the Harmony Centre party won the largest share of the vote, a watershed for a party that derives much of its support from ethnic Russians and which actually signed an electoral pact with Putin’s ‘United Russia’ party in 2009.  The result caused alarm in Washington and Brussels — Latvia joined NATO in 2004 along with Lithuania and Estonia, so a pro-Putin government in a NATO government would naturally be alarming.  But despite some legitimate doubts about Harmony Centre, its anti-austerity platform attracted even not just ethnic Russians, but ethnic Latvians, and it seems more interested in elevating Russian as an official language in Latvia (one-fourth of Latvia’s population speaks Russian) than reconstituting a political union with Russia. In any event, other Latvian parties united to keep Harmony Centre out of the government.

Although some Western media have already started pearl-clutching about this month’s elections, it’s important to keep some perspective — it’s not exactly the second coming of the Warsaw Pact.

Putin, in 2011 as Russian prime minister, proposed a ‘Eurasian Union,’ although it’s unclear whether that has any chance of succeeding — the Commonwealth of Independent States, which incorporates nine of the 15 former Soviet republics, has not exactly prospered (and ask former French president Nicolas Sarkozy how his proposed ‘Mediterranean Union’ is doing).  In recent years, Russia has reduced energy subsidies to Ukraine and Belarus, despite clearly pro-Putin governments, and it took a curiously lackadaisical approach to the 2010 coup in Kyrgyzstan.  Except for perhaps Belarus, none of the Soviet republics seem to have the stomach to return to a ‘Soviet Union light’ alliance with Russia.

Rather, there’s a more pragmatic realization in the former Soviet republics that even if Russia isn’t quite the superpower that it was in the 20th century, the inevitability of geography suggests that it will continue to exert some influence, for good or for ill, in its ‘near-abroad’ — in terms of economics, energy, security, and in some cases, continued cultural and political ties.  As the Cold War recedes further into history, though, it’s becoming less necessary to think of having to choose between ‘the West’ and Russia as a binary matter.  If former Soviet republics overlearned the lessons of 1990 and 1991, perhaps they are now learning the countervailing lessons of Saakashvili’s mistakes — needlessly antagonizing Russia (not to mention ethnic Russians within former Soviet republics) is probably counterproductive, even for more pro-reform, pro-Western leaders.

Continue reading Red October? Four autumn elections boost Moscow’s influence in Russian ‘near-abroad’ →

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Putin inaugurated for third term, announces Medvedev as PM, amid Moscow protests

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Vladimir Putin was sworn in as president today, amid protests across Moscow, following his election on March 4 in a vote widely seen as problematic and fraudulent.

Putin, whose term will run through 2018, also appointed former president Dmitri Medvedev as his prime minister — the appointment had been expected, but was not entirely certain.  Medvedev served as prime minister previously under Putin until his election in 2008 as president.  Putin, in turn, had served as prime minister during the entirety of Medvedev’s presidency.

Perhaps the more important story, however, are ongoing protests in Moscow, which flared over the weekend and drew tens of thousands in protest of Putin’s inauguration:

A number of demonstrators were injured by riot police, who wielded batons in clearing crowds from Bolotnaya Ploshchad, the site of a planned opposition rally Sunday evening to protest Monday’s presidential inauguration. Seventeen people requested medical care for injuries sustained during the event, a hospital source told Interfax.  Around 450 protesters and opposition leaders Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov were arrested, police said….

Despite the event’s ambitious name, “March of Millions,” organizers did not expect Sunday’s event to draw the estimated tens of thousands who attended.  City Hall had given advance approval for 5,000 participants to take part in the march  and rally.

Protestors came out in force after last December’s blatantly fraudulent parliamentary elections, as well as in the days leading up to and immediately following the March 4 presidential vote, although a show of force on the streets of Moscow on March 5 had appeared to stall the momentum from any such protests — until this weekend.

Ironically, as police were clashing with protestors who were demanding a more democratic Russia, Putin promised in his short inauguration speech to ‘strengthen Russian democracy.’

 

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Next steps for the Russian opposition?

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In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s outsized 64% win in the first round of the Russian presidential election earlier this month, the initial protests against likely fraud — and fraud in December’s legislative elections — have fizzled as Putin and the Russian government quickly made clear they had little appetite for too much protest, deploying a near-military police presence throughout Moscow.

In the subsequent weeks, however, third-place finisher billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov (pictured above, middle) has made good on his promise to keep up the pressure for a more democratic Russia — and appears to be teaming with former Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin (pictured above, at top) in that effort, leading some amount of credibility to his efforts.

Prokhorov’s campaign was greeted with a healthy amount of skepticism; Prokhorov had previously been on fairly good terms with the Kremlin and his was one of very few candidacies permitted to proceed (unlike longtime liberal reformer Grigory Yavlinksy, who was alleged not to have gathered up enough signatures in the runup to the presidential vote).  Since the election, Prokhorov has also ruled out serving in any future Putin cabinet as well.

Kudrin resigned as finance minister last September over a fight with President Dmitry Medvedev over budget issues, having previously served in the role since 2000.  Kudrin presided over the economic boom that lifted Russia out of the dire economic conditions of the 1990s.  Indeed, notwithstanding the turbulence of the financial crisis in 2008 and onwards, Russia today remains in much better economic condition than in the 1990s in no small part due to Kudrin’s stewardship.  In his 11 years as finance minister, Kudrin prioritized the repayment of Russian’s significant foreign debt accumulated in the 1990s and steered wealth from the oil boom of the mid-2000s into a stabilization fund for Russia.  At a time when Russia became politically more ostracized from the United States and Europe, and as the Putin-Medvedev regime became disturbingly less tolerant of dissent and less respectful of democratic norms and freedoms, Kudrin’s prudence as finance minister won plaudits from global investors.

Since his resignation, Kudrin has expressed enthusiasm in working with Yavlinsky (picture above, at bottom) to consolidate the liberal movement in Russia, supported the protest movement in the wake of December parliamentary elections and established a fund to promote democratic reforms in Russia.

Prokhorov, who owes his fortune to the sale of his share in Russia’s largest nickel mining operation and who owns the New Jersey Nets, could bring a lot of financial firepower to the Kudrin effort and a potentially young, energetic and popular face to the liberal movement — he finished second to Putin in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The troika of Kudrin, Yavlinsky and Prokhorov would be perhaps the strongest pro-democracy front in Russia’s post-Soviet history and would present a center-right opposition against both Putin’s siloviki state of former military and security officers and the dwindling leftist movement led by the Communist Party (its perennial presidential candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, finished second and attracted almost 20% of voters). Continue reading Next steps for the Russian opposition? →

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Largest street protests in Moscow since the Soviet Union’s fall?

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UPDATE (1:15 pm ET): Alexey Navalny (@navalny), a top blogger and critic of the Putin regime, has been arrested in Moscow.

Protestors are gathering on Pushkin Square in Moscow against widespread fraud in yesterday’s Russian presidential election for what could be the largest anti-government movement since the fall of the Soviet Union.  Former Guardian Moscow correspondent Luke Harding has called this moment newly restored President Vladimir Putin’s “Brezhnev moment,” the moment where Putin stops bearing any semblance to a truly elected leader:

Sunday night was Vladimir Putin’s Brezhnev moment. It was when he ceased simply being an elected leader and segued towards a lifetime presidency. Having neatly sidestepped the rules by doing a stint as prime minister (no Russian leader can serve more than two consecutive presidential terms) Putin can now go on and on. Brezhnev did 18 years, Stalin 31. Despite the whispers of revolution lapping at the Kremlin’s walls, who would bet against Vladimir matching Leonid?

Julia Ioffe has a thoughtful column in Foreign Policy today that sets forth the fundamental choice that Putin will have to make in the days ahead in response:

What Putin decides to do come March 5 is “the central question, not because Putin decides everything in politics on March 5 but precisely because he can no longer decide everything himself,” says political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky, who worked on Putin’s 2000 presidential campaign but was fired by the Kremlin in the last year. “It’s become a very complicated scene.” The way Pavlovsky sees it, there are two possible paths: modernize and reform the political system or “play the tsar.” The first option is the more difficult one, but should Putin choose the second door, Pavlovsky predicts, “He’ll become a prisoner of his own system, completely out of touch with reality, locked in the Kremlin and with his minions ruling in his name. And this is the worst possible outcome.”

I would put it in even starker terms: if the protests gather the kind of momentum that’s being expected, Putin will have to choose between Iran 2009 and Tunisia 2011.  Putin can “play the tsar” (which is much the same in this context as playing the ayatollah) and use brute force to kill, imprison and scare away the opposition, but in doing so will only delegitimize his regime further in the eyes of the opposition, of the international community and within the Russian elite.  Putin can compromise with the opposition, but risks a slippery-slope that leads to his downfall (much like deposed Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali) or, at the very least, the kind of embarrassing electoral re-run that occurred in 2004 after the fraudulent Ukrainian elections spawned the “Orange Revolution.”

Either result would sharply reduce Putin’s current position of strength, which should make the next 12 hours fascinating for Kremlinologists.

In the meanwhile, as protests are scheduled to get underway, we have an indication of what the future might hold:

 

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Official Russia results

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Official results are in from Russia’s Central Election Commission, notwithstanding reports of massive fraud, as reported widely on Sunday — including the use of “carousels” of voters bussed from one voting district to another with the purpose of casting multiple votes.

To no one’s surprise, the results make clear that Vladimir Putin will be returning to the Kremlin after just the first round of the presidential election, and Putin tearfully declared victory in a Sunday night victory rally.  Putin’s campaign manager Stanislav Govorukhin said the election was the “cleanest in the history of Russia,” notwithstanding thousands of individual reports of fraud.

As previously noted by commentators inside and outside Russia, however, the key question was not the election result, but rather how the Russian populace responds in the coming days, weeks and months to the victory and how the Kremlin, in turn, responds to any protests.

The Moscow Times notes that protests against fraud in both Duma and presidential elections are likely to continue through the summer. It predicts that while President-elect Putin may keep his promise to appoint outgoing president Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister, he could quickly replace him with former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, who has threatened to form a new liberal party in Russia.  Such a move could be seen as a concession to reformers.  Although it seems unlikely that Putin would allow Duma elections to be run again, it is conceivable that he might permit the direct election of state governors, a practice curtailed in 2004 in favor of Putin’s appointment of regional governors in the name of anti-terrorism and state security.

In The Moscow Times live blog of the vote returns, it notes a turnout of 99.59% in Chechnya, the one-time breakaway province that’s been the subject of much brutal force directed from Putin and Boris Yeltsin before him.  Astonishingly, 99.73 of Chechen voters have supported Putin.

In Moscow, Putin was held to under 50% of the vote, with just 48.25% to Prokhorov’s 19.39% and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov’s 18.96%. Prokhorov threw a party in Moscow Sunday, and declared “victory,” but was remained uncommitted to attending any rallies in protest of the vote on Monday.

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Putin 2018: Looking beyond Sunday’s election

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The Economist‘s cover story this week features “The Beginning of the End of Putin,” with a thoughtful piece looking beyond Sunday’s election and a companion piece about how different Russia is today from the Russia that first elected Putin in 2000 — it is presumed that Putin will win, likely in the first round, and likely with some amount of electoral fraud, which was so comically and blatantly deployed in the December 2011 parliamentary elections to the Duma.

Meanwhile, on the eve of the election, there’s some doubt as to whether Putin will countenance any of the rising protests of the Russia middle class:

  • Putin is already making noises about running for reelection in 2018, which would keep him in office until 2024.
  • He’s refused to a re-run of the Duma elections from December, which were notoriously fraud ridden, sometime to comic effect, as shown in clips on YouTube.
  • News reports have placed in doubt whether current President Dmitri Medvedev, one time a proponent of more liberal reforms in Russia, will return to the prime minister’s office when Putin returns to the Kremlin.

All of which means that the popular response to Sunday’s vote matters more than the actual vote itself.

The fundamental question is not whether the inevitable Russian protests following the vote will grow, but whether the standoff will end like in Iran in 2009 or Tunisia in 2011. Stay tuned.

Russia

Kremlin Kops or Keystone Kops?

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After a weekend in which anti-Putin protestors united in a ring of defiance around the Kremlin, truly wacky reports have surfaced of a potential assassination plot against Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, stymied by Ukrainian security forces:

The Russian prime minister’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told the BBC “this was absolutely a plot to kill the prime minister.”

It seems not outside the realm of possibility that Ukraine’s government, which is currently controlled by pro-Russian factions under pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, could be convinced to help legitimize the gravity of the plot.  Certainly, the Kremlin ploy helps to distract, in part, from anti-Putin protests just six days in advance of the first round of Russia’s presidential election.

In a piece in The Guardian yesterday, Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was jailed by Putin a decade ago and removed as CEO of Yukos Oil, advocates a vote for any of the four opponents to Putin, thereby forcing Putin into a second-round runoff vote.  He compares the recent grassroots protests against Putin to the Arab Spring protests of 2011 that toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt:

By forcing a second round we will push our country down the path of positive change. Presidential power that previously answered to no one would have to start listening to the people it serves. The state that until now took the monopolistic presidential power for granted would be more wary of its hold and start moderating its behaviour. The politicians who gathered the opposition votes could become a force to be reckoned with, a voice for articulating the thoughts and views that have been ignored before. The establishment would have to start negotiating with the opposition and an evolutionary transition could meaningfully begin. Continue reading Kremlin Kops or Keystone Kops? →

Russia

Zhirinovsky vs. the donkey

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In my ongoing series of odd campaign video from Russia’s upcoming presidential election vote, here’s ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky flogging a donkey from earlier this month.  It’s unclear what exactly the point is here.

Zhirinovsky is one of the truly scary clowns of Russia’s political scene. In 1995, he threw a box of juice at an opponent on television.  In 1996, he called for recreating the Russian Empire and expanding it to the Indian Ocean and reclaiming Alaska from the United States.  He once promised free vodka to all Russians if elected.  He’s anti-Zionist, anti-Caucuses, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Western, anti-African, and you really could fill a book with outrageous Zhirinovsky quotes.  Much, much more here, and that’s just for starters.

From a 1994 article:

In numerous speeches and articles, Zhirinovsky has promised to bury radioactive waste on the borders of the Baltic states, turn Kazakhstan into Russia’s back yard,” provoke internecine wars between the clans and the peoples of Russia’s so-called near abroad (the former Soviet Union) and occupy what will remain of it when the war is over. The masthead of his movement’s magazine, Zhirinovsky’s Hawk, displays a map of Russia that includes Finland, Poland and Alaska, in addition to all of the former Soviet republics.

Of course, his importance as a figure in Russian politics has long since ebbed from its high-water mark in 1995-96.  But I’ve considered him for over a decade the personification of Russia’s nationalist id, which can sometimes be quite ugly and dark indeed.

Russia

More evidence of Prokhorov’s seriousness

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Not to be outdone by Putin’s sexy ads targeting younger Russian voters, Mikhail Prokhorov campaigns in rap yesterday in Russia.  If neither the New Jersey Nets and the presidential election don’t work out for Prokhorov, maybe he should team up with Jay-Z?

With the latest survey showing that Putin will win the first round of the March 4 presidential election with 66% of the vote (with Communist Party rival Gennady Zyuganov picking up just 15% of the vote for second place), it’s becoming clearer than ever that Prokhorov is not the serious candidate he perhaps once claimed.