Russia
The hollowing out of politicsFrom The Economist print edition
Feb 22nd 2007 | MOSCOW
SourceThe installation of a warlord as Chechnya's president reflects a wider trend as Russia braces for next year's presidential electionALU ALKHANOV is unusual among ex-presidents of Chechnya, be they secessionists or Kremlin puppets: he is alive. Last week he was peacefully relieved of his responsibilities by Vladimir Putin, who appointed as acting president the 30-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov, a volatile former rebel warlord who is the son of another (deceased) Chechen leader.
Chechnya's fate and Mr Putin's have long been intertwined. He rose to power on the back of the Chechen war launched in 1999. Mr Kadyrov's elevation (to be rubber-stamped by the Chechen parliament) is designed to ensure Chechnya's stability in the nervous run-up to Mr Putin's putative departure from office in 2008. It formalises the de facto power that, with his feared militia, Mr Kadyrov has long wielded anyway. But it also reflects, as Chechnya tends to, the wider political situation in Russia. It is part of what Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent member of the lower house of parliament, the Duma, describes as a political zachistka (purge): a word mainly used to describe bloody Russian raids on Chechen villages.
The raids on Russia's constitution are incremental but no less insidious. The 5% threshold to win seats in the Duma, already set high enough to keep out all the liberal parties at the 2003 election, will be raised to 7% for the parliamentary poll later this year. Parties are barred from forming coalitions to get over it. Candidates may come only from party lists; in the previous system half were directly elected by district (that enabled Mr Ryzhkov, for example, to survive). Candidates can be debarred for “extremism”; that includes slandering a public official. Minimum turnout rules have also been scrapped, as has the option of voting “against all”. So boycotts and protest votes can no longer be used to register dissent.
Dirty tricks are common. Halls booked for opposition party meetings become suddenly unavailable. Rallies and protest marches are easily banned, and smothered by riot police when they are not.
“All our actions”, Mr Putin said recently in Munich, “are designed to strengthen a multi-party system in Russia.” Quite so. Along with United Russia, the blindly loyal majority block, the next Duma will most likely have a Communist rump and the Liberal Democrats: a largely comical faux-nationalist outfit also loyal to the Kremlin. The main “opposition” party may be a new one called A Just Russia, created by the Kremlin last year to appeal to left-wing and nationalist voters. The result, says Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko, a fading liberal party, is the “illusion of competition”, rather like that between rival boyars in tsarist times. Mr Ryzhkov, whose Republican Party is also stymied by election rules, calls it the “Dresden system”, a reference to East Germany's bogus multiparty system, which Mr Putin doubtless recalls from his spying days in Dresden.
There are other obstacles for the outsiders. After the example made of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon now facing fresh criminal charges from his Siberian prison, businessmen are disinclined to fund Mr Putin's critics. Meanwhile, the Kremlin's grip on the media ensures such voices are rarely heard.
Some small-scale independence survives. Take Novoye Vremya (The New Times) a new magazine whose boss was sacked from a big daily paper for his too-frank coverage of the Beslan school siege in 2004. Yevgenia Albats, its political editor, blames the tameness of much of the print media on self-censorship and ambition. “If you want to be part of the establishment,” she says “you cannot write the truth.” Outside Moscow journalists face graver perils: this week, in the North Caucasus town of Vladikavkaz, the office of IWPR, a brave London-based journalism network, was raided by the police. Yet there are signs of life too: Victor Fedofenko quit his paper in the Siberian town of Khanty-Mansiysk, after its owner vetoed an article on embezzlement. He and his colleagues started a new one, with a picture of Che Guevara on its first front page, because, says Mr Fedofenko, “We associate him with freedom.”
But television—from which most Russians get their news—is another story, as even Kremlin officials admit. Political news is dominated by flattering coverage of Mr Putin's day. All the main channels are in effect controlled by the Kremlin. The general trend, says Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, is to safe, non-political subjects.
Mr Putin and his aides argue that similar approaches can be found in Western countries. But cumulatively they represent a concerted erosion of democratic freedoms. Some measures, such as onerous new registration rules for campaigning groups, have not yet resulted in the draconian clampdowns some predicted. But they create anxiety and instil obedience simply by existing. So does the re-emergence of Soviet-style checkups on those citizens having too close contact with foreigners and other undesirables.
The mystery is why, popular as he is, Mr Putin bothers with all these superfluous instruments of control. Part of the answer is: because he can. But another part is that his worry is probably not defeat in stage-managed elections, but rather unrest on the streets (hence the creation of a pro-Kremlin youth movement). That, plus infighting or palace coups inside the Kremlin, where Russia's real political competition takes place.
The need to maintain a balance between rival Kremlin clans seems to explain Mr Putin's other main personnel move last week, which was to shift Sergei Ivanov from the defence ministry to be a first deputy prime minister. That rank is also held by Dmitry Medvedev, who like Mr Ivanov is considered a frontrunner to succeed Mr Putin in 2008. That may free Mr Ivanov from the tarnish of perpetual scandals over brutality in the army (one recent allegation is that soldiers in St Petersburg were forced into prostitution). Some now speculate that the 2008 presidential contest will be between two approved candidates. But the main benefit of the change is to Mr Putin, who has reasserted his grip on the succession process and shored up his power.
That is another way in which Chechnya reflects, in extreme form, the general situation. Under Mr Kadyrov in Chechnya, as under Mr Putin in all Russia, economic improvements have come at a cost of corruption, opacity and lawlessness. Both regimes rest on highly personalised rule that looks secure but may yet prove unstable.