For 12 years, Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia in an increasingly authoritarian manner, slowly squeezing the life out of the country’s political opposition and independent media. His many detractors always struggled to get around the awkward truth that he did so with a large measure of popular support.By voting for the opposition in large numbers in Sunday’s parliamentary election, Russians across the country signalled they were no longer onside with the direction Mr. Putin was taking the country in. The rebuke to Mr. Putin – who recently announced his plan to return to the Kremlin for up to another 12 years as president – was clear.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of central Moscow on Monday, calling for “Russia without Putin!” and trying to break through a thick police cordon that blocked them from marching toward the Kremlin. It was the biggest demonstration the Russian capital has seen in years, and more may be on the way as anger spreads over Twitter and other social networking sites. A smaller protest broke out Monday on the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg.
If not for heavy-handed Kremlin manipulation – including the disqualification of the most vocal opposition parties, the harassment of independent monitors and apparent ballot-box stuffing in Chechnya (where United Russia won an improbable 99.5 per cent of the vote) and other regions – the results of Sunday’s Duma election would surely have been far worse for Mr. Putin’s United Russia party.
On paper, the party still won enough seats to form a simple majority in the country’s parliament, the Duma. In reality, no one believes it earned that victory. The sheen of legitimacy that Mr. Putin and United Russia had earned through previous elections – which saw similar violations, but a much wider margin of victory – is gone.
Sunday’s vote was a warning shot fired over the Kremlin wall, a notice that politics-as-usual isn’t acceptable any more.
The real battle for Russia’s soul will likely come in March, when voters will have their say on Mr. Putin’s planned returned to the presidency, which has become a lightning rod for dissent from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. If the Kremlin follows the old script and bars all serious opposition candidates from standing, there may well be much larger trouble on the streets.
The possible future is on display in tiny South Ossetia, a Kremlin protectorate that was the nexus of Russia’s 2008 war with neighbouring Georgia. Since last Wednesday, small crowds of South Ossetians have taken daily to the snowy streets of their capital city, Tskhinvali, to reject Kremlin’s attempt to overturn election results and impose a leader they don’t want. Calling it the “Snow Revolution” – a nod to the colour-coded revolts that brought down autocratic regimes in Ukraine and Georgia not so long ago – they vow not to leave until their chosen president, Alla Dzhioyeva, is allowed to take office.
“It’s not a very convenient time to be a dictator,” warned Andrei Piontkovsky, a Moscow-based political analyst with ties to the opposition. “[Mr.] Putin is on the wrong side of history.”
That doesn’t mean Mr. Putin wouldn’t win an open and fair election. He still has substantial support, and a reasonable record to run on. Many Russians see his time in office as he does: he inherited the mess left by Boris Yeltsin, and managed to stabilize the country. The troubles Russia has experienced since the global economic crisis began (the country’s economy shrank 7.9 per cent in 2009 before returning to modest growth last year) can even be used to bolster the argument that he needs to return to the top job after four years in the theoretically subordinate position of prime minister under president Dmitry Medvedev.
But the message from the Duma vote and South Ossetia is that the system of “managed democracy” that Mr. Putin and his coterie have created – one in which voters are given the appearance of choice, but little to choose from – is no longer functioning. Russians want their leaders to treat them with more respect.
The Kremlin’s initial response to the backlash has not been promising. The website of the country’s only independent election monitoring organization, Golos (Russian for “Voice”), remained under sustained attack Monday, preventing Russians from accessing a map of electoral violations around the country that the group has put together.
“They’re doing exactly what Soviet authorities used to do. Make sure that people in one city don’t know what’s happening 300 kilometres away,” said Yevgenia Albats, editor of The New Times, a pro-opposition newspaper that was also under direct denial-of-service attack that she blamed on the Kremlin.
Ms. Albats said the Kremlin’s over-the-top effort to stop the spread of information revealed how nervous the authorities are about the feelings of the people they rule. “When you realize that you are not alone in opposing power, you are not so afraid.”
Origin
Source: Globe&Mail
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