Putin’s Defenders: Still Disconnected From Reality
Putin’s Defenders: Still Disconnected From Reality
Russia’s minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, is a self-styled historian who recently acquired a much-criticized and allegedly plagiarized Ph.D. in the discipline and has penned numerous publications on the political history of Russia. His knowledge of the basics, however, does not appear to be strong. In a recent blog post that instantly became an internet sensation, the minister called Vladimir Putin “the first Russian ruler since Nicholas [II] Romanov who came to power 100 percent legally … who preserves power 100 percent legally … the first [leader] in Russia’s history [to have come to power] in an honest universal-suffrage election.”
Regrettably, not one of the three parts of this statement is true.
Russia has had three legal and legitimate leaders since Nicholas II’s abdication. Prince Georgy Lvov, prime minister between March and July 1917, received a dual mandate: a last-minute appointment from the departing czar and the nomination of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, which represented the parliamentary majority. Alexander Kerensky, prime minister between July and November (October, old style) 1917, became head of state and government following Lvov’s resignation. He held the position before being deposed in the Bolshevik coup d’état.
In 1991, Boris Yeltsin became Russia’s first legitimate head of state after a seven-decade-long dictatorship, and the first democratically elected leader in the country’s history: in the June presidential poll, the then leading critic of the Kremlin defeated the ruling Communist Party’s candidate, Nikolai Ryzhkov, by 57 percent to 17. In 1996, Yeltsin was re-elected to a second term in a vote often criticized for the anti-Communist bias in the national media, but assessed by the Council of Europe as free and fair.