What Russia’s Election Was Really About
sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com
As far as the actual voting was concerned, the only real question in Russia’s parliamentary election this week was the degree to which the “party of power,” United Russia (or, as it is known by much of the public, partiya vorov i zhulikov, the party of thieves and swindlers) would win. Would it again receive around two-thirds of the votes or rather—despite ballot-stuffing, forced voting by state employees and students, manipulation of absentee ballots and, of course, the assistance of the Central Electoral Commission in tallying up the results—just miss the mark? (The answer: United Russia, although down, will end up with at least as many seats in the Duma as the other parties combined.)
But “elections” of this sort have never just been about the outcomes. They are also occasions for Russia’s leaders to descend into the public arena and “send signals,” as they used to say in Soviet days, about the country’s direction. Stalin started the tradition with his February 1946 Bolshoi Theater speech, in which he prepared Russia’s “voters” for the end of the wartime “liberalization,” the tightening of the ideological straitjacket and, not even half a year after V.J. Day, the end of the war alliance with the West and the beginning of Cold War. By necessity or instinct, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly chosen the same mode of communication in order to display the same authoritarian inclinations.
Two weeks before the previous Duma “election” in 2007, at a nationally televised United Russia rally in Moscow’s largest stadium, Putin compared pro-democracy opposition to “jackals” searching for “crumbs” near Western embassies. This time, he signaled the tightening of the screws by labeling “Judas” the only independent national election monitor watchdog, Golos, which receives grants from the Western governmental and non-governmental agencies —or as Putin put it, from those who “brief [Golos] on how to ‘work’ in order to influence the election campaign in our country.”
Consistent with its domestic tenor, this election campaign has marked a definitive end to the Obama administration’s pursuit of a “reset” with Moscow. Hopes had been high. Key among them were cooperation on isolating Iran; the removal or at least diminution of Russia’s objections to European missile defense; and the start of meaningful negotiations on reducing Russia’s tactical nukes, of which it has orders of magnitude more than all the other nuclear powers combined. Policymakers in Washington probably hoping that détente’s momentum would bridge the ideological chasms separating the United States and Putin’s Russia. It must have come as a shock to the White House to behold the ferocity with which the Kremlin has set about demolishing its cherished reset.