Russia: The Restoration of Vladimir Putin -The iPINIONS Journal

Political corruption has become so endemic in Russia that elections there are every bit the pro-forma farce they are in unbridled dictatorships like North Korea and Zimbabwe.

This is why the only uncertainty about the outcome of yesterday’s presidential election was over what percentage of the vote Vladimir Putin instructed his apparatchiks to assign to his victory. Evidently he thought 65 percent would be enough to claim an unqualified mandate, while giving the appearance that he faced bona fide challengers.

To his obvious chagrin, however, this appearance was fatally undermined – not just by the thousands of complaints about ballot stuffing and other fraudulent activities at the polls, but also by no less a person than former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev claiming that the fix was in.

(Recall that Gorbachev is the man who set Russia on its crooked path towards democracy with his Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) policies in the late 1980.)

Here is the pithy lament he offered even before a single vote was counted:

These are not going to be honest elections.

(The Daily Mail, March 4, 2012)

But here are just a few excerpts from previous commentaries in which I presaged yesterday’s events:

I coined the term “putinization” to describe Putin’s neo-Stalinist tactics, which were (and are) clearly aimed at neutralizing all political dissent, quashing all civil liberties, and making him a latter-day Czar.

(“Hail Putin,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 3, 2007)

The only thing that explains Putin’s selection of Medvedev as president is Medvedev’s willingness to be even more deferential to Putin than Zubkov…

Medvedev went out of his way during his first televised address [as president] to assure the Russian people (and warn the world?) that Putin shall continue to be the most powerful man in Russia.[Here’s a little of what he said]:

‘Russia has reclaimed its proper place in the world community. Russia has become a different country, stronger and more prosperous… In order to stay on this path, it is not enough to elect a new president who shares this ideology… That is why I find it extremely important for our country to keep Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin at the most important position in the executive power, at the post of the chairman of the government.’

(“Putin Taps His Protégé, Medvedev, as His Successor,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 12, 2007)

Instead of hammering through a self-interested constitutional amendment [to allow him to serve unlimited consecutive terms instead of just two], Putin seemed content to serve as president for life with four-year interregnums by his chosen lap dogs to preserve the patina of democratic legitimacy. Nevertheless, he prevailed upon the Russian parliament to extend presidential terms from four to six years, prospectively; i.e., so that it does not extend Medvedev’s current term by two years, but takes effect only in 2012 when he clearly expects to be re-elected. This will then give him a more comfortable twelve instead of eight years between interregnums.

(“Remembering Stalin Exposes ‘Tensions’ Between Putin and Medvedev,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 10, 2010)

In keeping with this scenario, Putin has already announced his intent to appoint Medvedev as his lap-dog prime minister.

More to the point, though, when Medvedev implied in 2008 that Russia would become a failed state without Putin’s leadership, Putin did not hear (like most people did) a sycophant just saying what was necessary to secure his job. Instead he heard a nation clamoring for him to do whatever was necessary to remain at the helm of the Russian state.

I fear, however, that Putin will never subject himself to such constitutional niceties again. And nothing is more ominous in this respect than the way he dismissed pro-democracy protests in the run up to yesterday’s election as nothing more than mischief-making by Russian traitors being manipulated by foreign agitators.

[These are attempts to] destroy Russia’s statehood and usurp power. The Russian people have shown today that such scenarios will not succeed in our land … They shall not pass!

(Aljazeera, March 5, 2012)

This was the us-against-them tone Putin set for his presidency during his victory speech last night. But one can be forgiven for thinking that he was reading from the same political playbook as the dictators who reacted during the Arab Spring as if all pro-democracy protesters in their respective countries were flown in by the CIA….

Mind you, these local puppets and their foreign puppet masters are not to be confused with the “carousel voters” who wre reportedly driven by the bus loads from one polling station to another to vote over and over again for Putin.

But it’s one thing for a tin-pot dictator to utter such paranoid delusions. It’s quite another for the president of an erstwhile superpower like Russia to do so … with tears of religious conviction flowing down his cheeks no less.

Indeed, I am convinced that Putin is possessed by such delusions of grandeur that he is aching for a rematch of the Cold War to avenge what he famously claims was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, namely, the disintegration of the Soviet Union. (I suppose, in his mind, World War II – during which over 25 million Russians died, to say nothing of the Holocaust – paled in comparison.)

The danger of course is that Putin knows the only way he can play on the world stage is to flex his military muscles. And he seems quite willing to do so to feature Russia’s role in the economic-superpower dynamic the United States and China are now playing out. And, in this respect, I suspect there’s more than a little Kim Jong-il in Putin….

In the meantime, pro-democracy protesters are vowing to mount their own Russian Spring. All indications are, however, that instead of turning Russia’s Red Square (Pushkin Square or Revolution Square) into their version of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, they may end up suffering the same fate that befell pro-democracy protesters in China’s Tiananmen Square.

But hope springs eternal.