MOSCOW, September 17, 2007 -- Putin’s plucking from obscurity a financial technocrat as the new prime minister has tongues wagging throughout Russia and -- judging from news accounts – the world.
Dowdy Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov’s resignation was expected as part of the pre-election shuffle, but his replacement was expected to be the man Putin wanted to see as the next president, much like Yeltsin plucked Putin out of obscurity to become prime minister before naming him interim president when Yeltsin resigned on the last day of 1999.
Does Putin’s selection of Viktor Zubkov mean he really wants Zubkov to be the next president? Or is this simply a move to confound the Kremlin Watchers?
Only a couple of days before, student Andrei, the IT executive that I’m giving daily lessons to now, shared some new speculation that he’d heard: If Putin selected a prominent Russian as the new prime minister, like Sergei Ivanov or Dmitry Medvedev, it would mean Putin really planned for this guy to fill his shoes in the election next March.
However, if he chose an unknown, it would mean he intended to get the guy elected, after which he would soon resign and appoint Putin to replace him. Thus Putin would serve the remainder of the dude’s term and would be eligible for two more elected terms – making him, counting the two-plus terms he’s already served, virtually President for Life.
If this is the scenario that’s been put into play, we can expect Zubkov to serve as prime minister for the remainder of Putin’s term, after which Putin will anoint him his as his preferred candidate in next March’s vote. Then after a few months in office, Zubkov will dutifully resign and hand the reigns back to Putin. They are old friends, so Putin isn’t worried about a double cross.
Well, that’s the speculation among the Kremlin watchers.
Of course, that may not happen. Putin, the master politician, likes to keep his second-guessers off guard, so anything could happen. For instance, the leering Ivanov continues to groom his public image carefully and to be featured prominently in Russian TV and print news, so he could actually still prove to be the chosen one.
Another rumor is that Zubkov’s real role is as a stalking horse for Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who is married to Zubkov’s daughter. In this scenario, Zubkov would act as the lightning rod, drawing out all the opposition, disposing of them, then stepping aside to let Serdyukov enter the scene and win the election handily.
Does anybody really care? Does it really make a difference? Nah. It’s just a game you can occupy yourself with these days to make it sound like you’re an informed observer.
What is not arguable is that the election season – and the Kremlin’s iron tight control over it -- has begun.
It is commonly said in Russia today that there is only one Russian politician. Everyone else dances to his orders. He manipulates the entire sham. He has created a make-believe opposition party – “A Just Russia” – while rigging election procedures to be sure that no real opposition gets into the Duma, or parliament.
But in fact, A Just Russia, as are Putin’s own United Russia party and Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), is sworn to support El Presidente. Even the Communists have pretty much fallen in line. No party will win any seats in the Duma without Putin’s confirmatory nod.
As for the real opposition, Michail Kasyanov and Garry Kasparov are already complaining that they are being blocked from local appearances and repeatedly harassed by local and federal authorities.
And the hapless mayor of Archangelsk, Alexander Donskoi, has been sitting in prison for two months on charges of abuse of office and faking his university diploma.
His real crime, though, was announcing last October that he planned to run for president. Prosecutors started investigating him immediately, and in July he was dragged out of his apartment in his shorts by masked riot police and has been sitting in jail ever since.
He is in fact a “political prisoner,” declared human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
Denis Bilunov, Executive Director of the opposition coalition called United Сivil Front, told a news conference that opposition meetings have already been blocked in the cities of Nizhny Novgorod, Smolensk, and Rostov on Don.
As a case study, he also described a failed attempt to organize an opposition rally in a Moscow theater .
“Everything was in order until the very last minute,” he told the news conference. “On Friday at noon, we received a call. Naturally, we had a
Contract and had made a down payment. The proprietor’s representative told us the event was not coordinated with city officials and could therefore not take place.”
But later, when he pointed out that Russia does not require official permission for meetings in closed venues, the theater owners offered technical problems as the reason the meeting couldn’t be held.
Garry Kasparov, former chess champ turned Putin oppositionist, said old fashioned bureaucracy is also frequently used as a tried and true means of thwarting the political opposition. As an example, he pointed to the judicial response to his court challenge of his arrest during a Moscow dissenter’s march in April (Chapt. 244, Zhorik interlude proves frustrating): An upper court rejected the complaint, he said, because it declared the lower court’s documents were not properly filled out; to wit: A rubber stamp was purportedly in the wrong place and sheets of paper were improperly bound.
He said law enforcement officials at opposition rallies routinely exceed their authority and are making fewer attempts to conceal their excesses; and low-level KGB>FSB operatives are increasingly brazen, knowing anything they do to scuttle the opposition will get them an extra pat on the back from the Kremlin.
Kasparov also lays a publisher’s sudden refusal to publish his new book, “How Life Imitates Chess,” to political manipulation. “It is obvious that someone wants to deny the opposition any channel for communicating with Russian citizens,” he said.
“They have already confiscated the print runs of our newspapers and our leaflets, and now they have gotten to our books as well….I would not be surprised if my book…is not only not published in Russia, but is declared ‘extremist’ as well.”
In trying to research Russian elections on the web last week, I came across what I suspect is a bit of Kremlin election chicanery. A Turkish Daily News article by Sebastian Smith, apparently a Moscow correspondent for Agence France-Presse, presented a particularly succinct and critical summary of the present Kremlin puppet theater election charade.
There was only one problem: A pop-up immediately appeared in the middle of it and the cursor wouldn’t move. So it was impossible to read more than a couple of partially obscured paragraphs. I tried it several times the first day and again several times a couple of days later.
I was never able to read it.
When I tried to find it again on Saturday, it was not to be found among the articles on Russian elections. But fortunately, I had saved the web address: Agence France-Presse www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=82464
When I entered this in the “search” block of my Google search engine, it immediately came up. But so did the pop-up. Since I can’t pass on any of the very useful information contained in it, I would like for you to try the site on your computer and see if you are able to access and read it.
If so, I can only conclude that this is a problem only in Russia and that your friendly local KGB>FSB doesn’t want it read here in Putinland.
Please give me some feedback and let me know what happens when you try it.
In the meantime, between now and next March there will be massive overkill by all federal, regional, and local authorities to be sure that opposition voices are not heard in the run-up to the presidential election.
No candidate other than Putin’s chosen successor will appear on TV except to be ridiculed; candidates’ air flights will be routinely delayed; indoor meetings will be cancelled by bomb scares, “technical difficulties,” or red tape; campaign literature will be confiscated on charges of “extremism”; and arrests will be made as necessary to keep the scripted electoral process on track.
All the while, Putin will be self-righteously crowing “democratic elections” to Western critics.
The real tragedy is that Russia would not be a democracy even if Putin played by the rules. The constitution writers either had no idea what a democracy is or they purposely designed the process to keep the Russian voter powerless.
“Democracy” is hardly democracy if it is not representative; i.e., if your elected congressman isn’t answerable to, and can’t be replaced by, the people who elected him.
Hong Kong Harry, my American friend who is a professor of Russian History at Univ. of Hong Kong and therefore should know better, used to rant and rave – rightfully, of course – that the Duma representatives ignored the will of the voter.
“Why don’t they just elect another representative?” he would demand.
But the Russian electoral process is set up so that the voter has nothing whatsoever to do with selecting the candidate who will represent him in the Duma. That is the prerogative of the party. The voter votes for the party and the party decides who will take the seats.
So your local congressman votes against everything you support? Tough turkey, pal. He’s not there to serve you; you can’t replace him, only the party can. So he’s there to serve the party. And now that all parties are controlled by the Kremlin, he’s there to serve the power verticle. If you don’t like it, don’t vote.
Oh, that’s another gift from the Putin-controlled Duma. It used to be that a certain percentage of the voters had to vote or the election didn’t count. That posed a dangerous possibility in a population who figures there’s no point in voting because they can’t affect the outcome anyway, so at the behest of the Kremlin the Duma scuttled that provision. So if you don’t like the candidate, don’t vote. It makes no difference. He’ll win no matter what.
There never has been representative democracy here, and most likely never will be, which makes the very title “democracy” for the Russian government – even if were the paragon of squeaky clean politics – a farce.
It would still not be a democracy.
Not only was Igor’s brother Denis a Narco-man, or drug addict (Chapt. 264, Craig: Scratch a homophobe and you’ll find…), but before I gave him the money to get back to Moldova for treatment, he managed to bring my apartment into the scope of the drug cops, according to what Andrei heard in a police station last week.
Sweet, baby-faced “Little Sasha,” who so kindly saw Denis to the train and channeled to him the money I gave him for the road (Chapt. 264), was stopped and searched by drug agents in a random screening and found to have several doses of heroin in his pocket.
Stupid shit! After watching what happened to Dennis, he still shoots up heroin? Got what he deserved, right?
The only problem was that Andrei was with him and they held Andrei in the metro station holding cell for seven hours before he finally convinced them that he and Sasha were only acquaintances and that he himself was not a drug addict.
In the meantime, Andrei heard Sasha tell the cops that he and Denis had shot up in the kitchen of my apartment!
“Apartment 75?” the drug cop asked.
So they’ve already got my apartment in their sights.
After they finally turned Andrei loose, he flew home and climbed up the fire escape and into the window because I was at a lesson and had the only key to the apartment.
Both he and Sergei were concerned that the drug cops would come search the apartment of a “rich American,” and not finding any drugs, would plant some that would be good for a $ 5,000 bribe to keep them from taking me to jail and deporting me.
The only solution, they decided, was to move immediately to a new apartment.
I agreed, though I was not as alarmed as they were. They’ve obviously known for a while that my apartment exists, and if they wanted to raid it for drugs, I think they’d have done it before now.
Andrei’s worries were heightened when he went to see Sasha and found out that his uncle is a high-ranking cop, that Sasha had been sprung, and that he had lied to his uncle that he and Andrei were using drugs together.
The question of moving was resolved by the reality of the Moscow real estate market when Andrei discovered how expensive it would be to move. A likely candidate apartment, several stops out from the center, was neat and clean and about $ 1,000 a month – the same as this one -- but I would have needed three months’ advance rent to move in.
So it looks like we’ll be here for a while longer. In the meantime, no new bodies will enter this apartment. Igor will return next week, but he has never even experimented with drugs, and I will forbid him to see any of Denis’s old friends or girlfriends to avoid guilt by association.
It would be supreme irony if I, who hate fucking drugs with as much passion as I can muster and have nothing but disdain and disgust for anybody stupid enough to use them, got drummed out of Russia on a drug charge.
But this is Russia, where innocence is no defense if they really want to nail you.
Zhorik finally got to a hospital almost a week after the cylinder of oxygen dropped on his hand (Chapt. 264, Craig: Scratch a homophobe and you’ll find…). It’s not broken, they told him, but the nerve is damaged and his hand was badly bruised. There’s also a large permanent knot on it. The hand will fully recover, they said, but they put it in a cast and ordered rest. So now Zhorik is exempt from duty.
‘Tis an ill wind….
His long distance messages have continued to be loving and sweet. On Friday we were communicating when I told him I wanted to take a nap. He wished me sweet dreams. I SMS’d back that “I love you and miss you.”
“I also deeply love you,” he replied.
Later he asked me if I’d decided what I was going to do for New Year’s. He had already made clear that he wanted Igor to come with me (Chapt. 264)
“But if there are three of us,” I countered, “there probably won’t be any chance to ‘play.’”
“I think there will be a chance,” he replied.
“In that case,” I said, “probably Igor and I will both come. Do you want us to?”
“Yes.”
“Very much?”
“Yes, very, very much.”
So maybe my New Year’s plans are made at last.
Igor SMS’d me on Saturday to ask for $ 150 -- $ 100 to come home on and $ 50 to buy flour and food. “There’s nothing at home.”
Fortunately, Master Bank was still open and I was able to immediately send the $ 150 by Western Union. But how is his mother going to survive? Denis is in the hospital and unable to work even if anybody would hire him. Their mom is in abject poverty. But I don’t need another family to support.
Igor says he has the choice of three jobs here when he gets back. Maybe when he starts working, he can send her $ 100 a month to live on. I’m trying not to let it be my problem.
I’ve got enough of my own.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #266 - Busy sched, Zhorik’s, Igor’s absence, curb love life
Chapt. #264 - Craig: Scratch a homophobe and you’ll find…
Chapt. #244 - Zhorik interlude proves frustrating
