The formality of the Russian election

When it comes to domestic politics, Russian leaders have always been good about power. The two notable failures of internal power, the 1917 fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the 1991 collapse of the old Soviet Union, were both brought about by the consequences of monumental failures from which even a highly-efficient repressive security apparatus could not protect the leadership. After 1991 Russia had embarked with high hopes upon democracy and economic reforms. But the Kremlin of Boris Yeltsin was too steeped in the old Soviet ways to make a success of free market capitalism. Despite the ethnic Russian technocrats who returned particularly from the United States to help the motherland and the vast volumes of advice handed out by the IMF, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and countless think tanks and bilateral government missions, the new Russian leadership could not overcome its command economy instincts. Thus the Yeltsin Kremlin merely moved ownership of great quantities of state assets into the hands of a small coterie of oligarchs who became billionaires overnight and naturally rewarded their political masters. The result was economic confusion and failure with an international debt default, the collapse of the rouble and the destruction of the savings of tens of millions. Small reason that the arrival of Vladimir Putin bringing back a powerful and uncompromising figure was largely welcomed, because here again was a system that most Russians understood. For sure there was a middle-class pushback which reached its peak in 2011 when there was widespread fraud at the general election. But the large demonstrations and violence did not rock the Putin Kremlin and were followed by the assassination of opposition politicians and journalists. In the last five years the independent Russian media has been tamed and Yelstin-era oligarchs who failed to toe the Putin line jailed or exiled. Thus Sunday’s election was something of a formality. There was no way that Putin’s United Russia party and its political allies in the Duma were going to lose and so it has proved. The party has secured the support of more than half of the electorate but there is a worm in the bud. The turnout of 47.8 percent was a record low. That worm becomes larger when it is considered that there has once again been credible evidence, including covert video footage, of election officials stuffing ballot boxes. What would seem to be significant here is not that United Russia needed a helping hand to win a contest in which it would surely have triumphed anyway. What surely matters is that the real turnout was almost certainly considerably lower. Libertarians are bound to claim that Putin has effectively destroyed democracy, causing ordinary voters to despair of being able to have a voice in the country’s affairs. However, this conclusion is almost certainly wrong because it ignores Russian history of absolutism and overstates the attractions of pluralist politics. It is not that Russians do nor care about their leadership but rather that they assume and expect that it will get on with the job and win their emotional support by pursuing popular economic and geopolitical policies. On that basis the ballot box is seen by many an irrelevance. It was not indifference that caused people to stay away from the polls but an historic belief in a single powerful leader.