Analyst Dmitry Oreshkin says Medvedev has to make changes if he wants a second term.
October 15, 2009
The events in the Duma yesterday and today have naturally given birth to considerable speculation. Nothing in Russia, of course, is what it appears to be. It couldn’t be that elections were massively falsified and people are justifiably outraged about it. That would be too simple.
Grani.ru made the rounds of some leading analysts and here are excerpts from their comments:
Political commentator Kirill Rogov said the October 11 polls were a “traditional ‘vote gathering’ characteristic of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes.”
Undoubtedly this demarche is not so much connected with the problem of democracy in the country as it is with definite splits within the political elite and among those who stand at the top of the political pyramid. The initiator was Zhirinovsky, who fairly consistently tailors his actions to the current circumstances. I think this is a serious demarche against United Russia and that group within the political leadership that relies on it. It seems intended to increase Medvedev’s influence, including his influence in parliament since those factions that walked out have appealed to him and intend to meet with him.
It is an interesting twist in the intra-clan struggle that demonstrates that the monolith of the power vertical against the background of the worsening economic situation has been shaken and that conflicts within it are inevitable.
He adds that the walkout was an intrigue “aimed at, in part, Surkov and the leadership of the Central Election Commission.”
INDEM foundation head Georgy Satarov doubts the situation “will produce any effect, since our senior leadership does not like to create dangerous precedents, as it has shown repeatedly.”
Since the federal authorities are fairly monolithic, it can’t be excluded that some factions will appear that will decide to use the situation for an attack on Luzhkov. This is a completely possible scenario. Even if this is the reaction, it will nonetheless be useful. It will create a precedent. The important thing here isn’t motive, but real actions. How will Medvedev act? He will most likely run off to consult with his patron and then will do what his patron tells him to do.
As always, commentator Dmitry Oreshkin was blunt:
Of course, this “kow-towing revolt” will be pacified and put down and everyone will return to the Mother Church. But it means a lot. Churov shrugs and says: “That’s politics.” Maybe Churov doesn’t know that elections are politics. He is used to the idea that politics are bad and he simply transcribes figures and everyone cringes and is grateful to him. He carries out the political task that was given to him when he was appointed: Putin is always right.
It makes sense that the rebels are appealing to the president to guarantee theconstitution, although they know perfectly well that Churov is Putin’s man, not Medvedev’s. Politics are at heart very primitive, clan interests. In this case, the losing clans – the LDPR, A Just Russia, the Communists, and, of course, all the democrats – they are all interested in having an honest, working system for counting votes. And here they are united with the president. If he wants to run for a second term, he cannot allow Putin’s team to count the votes.
Finally, journalist and political commentator Yevgeny Kiselyov notes that the three revolting factions are thoroughly in bed with the Kremlin, but adds that “in the history of Russia there have been situations when revolts were led by political forces that had previously been absolutely loyal to the ruling regime and had played strictly according to the rules.”
I don’t mean to say that this demarche will lead to any titanic changed in the political system of the country. It is more likely that it won’t than that it will. But there is the concept of “materials fatigue.” You can bend something over and over again but at some indefinable moment, it suddenly breaks. I think this is the case with our Russian political life. You can go against elementary common sense, against all civilized concepts of democracy five times, 10 times, 100,000 times, but on the 100,001st time, even the most loyal ones lose their patience.
I think it is obvious that this vertical – which has been under construction for 10 years – sooner or later will break. There are some constructs that simply cannot stand the test of time. I don’t mean to say that these events are the bomb that will do it, but it is not possible to keep building higher and higher, more and more vertical, forever. It will shake and it will break. Horizontal constructions are a lot more stable and long-lasting.
--
Robert Coalson
The loyal opposition walks out of the Duma on October 14.
October 14, 2009
The only surprising thing about the recent regional elections in Russia was the extent of the manipulation and falsification. Everyone knew United Russia would win enough to control everything, but no one expected they would leave so few crumbs even for the loyal “opposition,” including A Just Russia, the Communist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.
The theft was so egregious that those three factions walked out of the State Duma today and vowed not to return until they are granted a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev (of course, this isn’t a problem for the Duma, which can continue working just fine because United Russia’s faction is so massive). They still hope that the “Good Tsar” will make everything right, although Medvedev has already stated that the vote gave United Russia the “moral and legal right” to govern.
Political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin’s take on the recent events was published on grani.ru and deserves citation at length:
I have always thought it was important to understand where the line of permissibility lies – how far can one go and how far is too far? Say, you can falsify elections by 20 percent, but not by 80 percent. In Chechnya, you can falsify 100percent, while in Moscow they tried to shift 25 percent and it produced this scandal. It is obvious that the Duma is completely controlled, that everyone in there got there by a Kremlin decision. It is clear that they are ready to wash the authorities’ feet and drink the water. But suddenly, at some tipping point, the drink gets a little too thick, and they begin to get nauseated. The most interesting thing is to catch that moment.
It would seem the authorities thought they could do what they wanted without limit. But in order to do things “without limit,” you have to resort to shooting. Every person has some minimum of self-respect and if there is not the direct threat of death or imprisonment, he will refuse to be taken for an idiot. In this situation, the authorities demanded that they be complete idiots because it is obvious to everyone that the elections were falsified. You don’t even need to prove it – it is obvious to anyone whose eyes are open. And so the day of anger has arrived, the moment of refusal. It had to come because if we develop this model further, the next step is to start building labor camps. Since deputies don’t face that threat, they still have some sense of dignity. This is good. This is a sign the mechanism has stopped, that we still have some living people.
If Medvedev intends to run for a second term, he must either remove [Central Election Commission head Vladimir] Churov, as Putin’s man, and put in his own man, or he must restore honest elections with some risk that he might lose. In any case, he must do something with the election commissions.
I think we are gradually approaching a political crisis and that there is nothing good in this. It could end up with shooting. The mechanism called elections is a political conflict that is regulated by law. Yes, there might be violations, some sort of falsifications, and if they don’t go past certain limits, the elite groups are willing to swallow them. But if they go beyond some limit, it becomes clear that the mechanism isn’t working and intra-elite competition moves outside the scope of regulation by law. And questions are decided either by summoning dangerous people in the middle of the night and shooting them, as happened under Stalin, or by returning and expanding the institute of honest elections. The problem comes when those who are afraid to lose power attempt to maintain it by violence. If that does not happen, then gradually under public pressure it will become necessary to put a respectable person (or respectable people) on the Central Election Commission and begin everything over again. That is democracy. And it doesn’t appear because we really want it to, but because powerful elite groups have no other way of peacefully reaching compromises.
Another interesting point is that the outrage is limited to the political elites. Average Russians seem, once again, to be indifferent to what has happened. Russia does not seem even close to experiencing anything like what we saw in Iran during the summer.
This offers Medvedev a golden opportunity to turn this potential crisis into a grand coup for himself, precisely by taking on the Good Tsar role that the outraged loyal oppositionists in the Duma are offering him. Churov is a political hack who is easily replaced. Even the return of his predecessor, Aleksandr Veshnyakov -- who engineered United Russia’s rise to power nationally and oversaw the managed 2004 reelection of Vladimir Putin, but who was not viewed as strong-handed enough to ensure the post-Putin transition – would be seen as a “victory for democracy” under the current circumstances.
Most likely, the lackeys in the Duma “opposition” that Oreshkin depicts so vividly would be satisfied with that gesture alone. They would be willing to “move forward” and would sweep last weekend’s travesty under the rug.
But Medvedev shouldn’t let them be so docile! He could easily go further and cast the blame – rightly – on the regional leaders who turned the elections into a farce. It has long been rumored that the Kremlin wants to get rid of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov – now it has a “democratic” reason for doing so. People wouldn’t even notice that he replaced Luzhkov with some other pliable figure or that he gave Luzhkov some other government post (ambassador to South Ossetia?). And they’d certainly wouldn’t get around to insisting on restoring gubernatorial elections or making the systemic reforms that Oreshkin calls for.
In
a recent interview with RFE/RL’s Russian Service, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said the real task of the genuine opposition in Russia is “to shape public opinion about what is happening.” He says that change will come only when the Kremlin sees that a tipping point has been reached for a wider range of the population than just the elites that Oreshkin talks about. If this happens, he says, “the authorities will see that society is changing and it will understand that people might come out into the streets if expectations are formed that there will be normal elections in 2011 or 2012 and if those expectations are dashed.”
Only this kind of pressure can push the authorities – even the “liberal” Medvedev – to embark on real democratization. But it seems like a quixotic hope. RFE/RL’s Russian Service recently produced
a video report about the return of a praising reference to Stalin to an inscription in the Kurskaya metro station in Moscow. At the two minute mark of the video, one typical Muscovite sums up the tide that Kasyanov and others are swimming against.
“Why not,” a middle-aged woman in an orange shirt says. “If they think it is necessary, why not? I’m for it.”
--
Robert Coalson
Russian "national leader" Vladimir Putin met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in October 2007.
September 24, 2009
The reports of U.S. President Barack Obama’s private talks in New York yesterday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have generally optimistically highlighted the two leaders’ apparently growing agreement on the need to step up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. Speaking to reporters after the talks, Medvedev repeated a statement he’d made earlier in Moscow that “sanctions are seldom productive, but they are sometimes inevitable.”
I have long been skeptical of the Kremlin’s interest in cooperating with the United States on Iran and should confess that I remain so. Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an analysis arguing that Moscow’s interest in weakening the United States and destroying the so-called unipolar world order trumped its interest in resolving the Iran dispute. The Kremlin views Iran’s nuclear program as the West’s problem:
Clearly, it is not in Moscow's interest to have a nuclear-armed Iran on its southern border with the capability of striking targets within Russia. However, this danger is remote -- it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Iran would risk total annihilation by destroying, say, Russia's Black Sea Fleet or leveling Volgograd with a nuclear strike. And that remote danger is made even more unlikely by repeated U.S. and Israeli declarations that a nuclear-armed Iran is "unacceptable." The refusal of the United States to pull the military option off the table means the worst-case scenario for Moscow, in the event talks fail, is not a mushroom cloud over Kuban but seeing Washington become bogged down in yet another military involvement with the inevitable further sapping of its strength and prestige. The facts that oil prices would also likely skyrocket under such a scenario and that Moscow would emerge as a "reliable energy partner" are probably also not causing Kremlin strategists to lose any sleep.
I still find this analysis compelling. So I was pleased to find the same arguments put forward
in an interview with former KGB turned Putin critic Konstantin Preobrazhensky on the website frontpagemag.com.
Preobrazhenksy is an old acquaintance who wrote occasional commentaries for “The Moscow Times” when I was the opinion-section editor there back in the 1990s and early 2000s. A lot of what he wrote then seems quite prophetic now. For instance, in December 2000,
he wrote: “Russia is once again on the path toward establishing a totalitarian state. Instead of communism, a sort of nationalism is fast becoming the ideology of this new structure, which is waging open warfare against civil society.”
In a July 1998 piece called “
A New Era For The FSB,” he rightly noted that the appointment of the little-known Leningrader Vladimir Putin to head the resurgent security agency was a watershed event, although he was uncertain then whether Putin would be able to overcome the resistance of the Moscow-based elites entrenched within the organization.
In his September 2 frontpagemag.com interview, Preobrazhensky throws cold water on the idea that Moscow will come to the United States’s aid on Iran:
Americans still cannot get rid of the illusion that Russians are thinking like them. For Americans, it goes without saying that Iran is a dangerous country which can hurt them with its nuclear weapons. But for Russians it is not so at all. They are fine with the current situation. Weakening America is a strategic goal of the current Russian regime.
Asked directly whether Moscow is afraid of Iran’s missiles, Preobrazhensky was direct: “No, it’s not.”
He goes on to offer informed speculation about the extent of covert cooperation between Tehran and Moscow. He concludes that “the intelligence services of Russia and Iran are cooperating. Not only on Afghanistan, but on America too. And on Armenia and Azerbaijan and also on the interior situation in Russia.” By the latter, he has in mind Russia’s Islamic minority.
I concluded my analysis of Moscow’s Iran policy last year with this argument:
While combating terrorism and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction are broad goals to which virtually every international actor can subscribe, they encompass myriad specific cases and issues, any one of which may be sacrificed to broader strategic interests. Moscow has declared the erosion and eventual replacement of what it defines as the unipolar global structure as a key security priority. Moscow's Iran policy is a clear example of a situation where, for the Kremlin, getting the right result -- an end to Tehran's nuclear-weapons ambitions -- is not as important as getting there by a process that promotes its broader agenda.
But Preobrazhensky’s formulation is a lot clearer: “Weakening America is a strategic goal of the current Russian regime.”
--
Robert Coalson
SM-3 missile launched from the destroyer USS Decatur in June 2007.
September 21, 2009
Is Moscow already having second thoughts about vocally embracing the U.S. Barack Obama's changes in Washington's missile defense plans?
Apparently so. The head of Russia's General Staff, General Nikolai Makarov, said on Monday that Russia has a problem with potential U.S. plans to place a radar system in the Caucasus. Makarov also said that Moscow has not backed off on its plans to deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, despite announcements over the weekend that it had.
It is still unclear whether Makarov's remarks indicate a change in the Kremlin's approach to Obama's missile defense plans. But it does raise questions about the extent to which the timing and circumstances of Obama's announcement on missile defense last week influenced Russia's initially positive reaction to the news.
According to my sources, Obama signed off on the Pentagon's proposed changes on Wednesday September 16 and planned to announce them on Friday September 18. This schedule would give the White House time to dispatch U.S. delegations to Prague and Warsaw to inform the Czech and Polish authorities that the administration was altering its missile defense policy.
But as is often the case in Washington, word of the decision leaked overnight on Wednesday, forcing the White House to move its roll out of the new policy forward by a day.
The symbolism of making the announcement on September 17, the 70th anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, was unfortunate. And in the interim between the leaks and Obama's official announcement, the White House briefly lost control of the story as it made its way through the European news cycle.
By the time of Obama's announcement Thursday morning in Washington -- which was already Thursday evening in Europe -- perceptions had already set in that Obama had abandoned missile defense.
As Gregory Feifer notes in his post yesterday, this led to triumphalism and crowing in Moscow about how the Kremlin forced Washington to back down on its plans. It also caused deep concern in Eastern Europe that the Obama was abandoning the Czechs and Poles in the face of an increasingly assertive Russia.
I spoke to James Goldgeier, a senior fellow the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of the book "America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11," shortly after Obama spoke on Thursday:
It is unfortunate that the president, secretary of defense, and [Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [James] Cartwright didn't speak [on Wednesday] because they were very clear in presenting the decision that the administration has made -- which is to construct a missile defense against Iran. But unfortunately for the administration -- because the decision was to do something different than the deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic -- the story that was out this morning on CNN and wires was 'Obama Scraps Missile Defense' or 'Obama Shelves Missile Defense Shield.' And that was incorrect.
It was indeed incorrect. But it was also this incorrect interpretation everybody -- including the Russians -- reacted to. And it will be very difficult for Moscow to walk back their lavish praise of Obama's decision now without looking rather silly.
It is hard -- if not impossible -- to view what Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and General Cartwright
announced on Thursday as a climb down.
The previous plan, to place an advanced radar in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland, was designed to counter a long-range Iranian missile threat that the Pentagon has concluded will not materialize nearly as quickly as they had previously feared.
Instead, the threat from Iran today stems from their development and acquisition of short and intermediate-range missiles that can already strike Europe.
In the short term, the administration plans to deploy dozens of SM-3 interceptors using the sea-based Aegis system as soon as 2011.
The system will be upgraded in 2015 and will include interceptors based on sea and land -- possibly even in Poland and the Czech Republic. A more advanced system would be built in 2018 and 2020, with the capability to intercept long-range Iranian missiles, should that need arise.
In place of the sophisticated radar the Bush administration planned for the Czech Republic, White House officials say they would use a more modest version that would be located in Turkey or the Caucasus.
Goldgeier described the administration's decision as based on "the threat we see" and "the best technology we can deploy against that threat."
Do General Makarov's tough comments today mean that Russia is about to take a harder line on the new U.S. plan? We should probably have a better idea when Obama meets Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in New York later this week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
-- Brian Whitmore