When I first saw Mikhail Khodorkovsky's missive about the importance of voting in the coming elections (the scanned letter, handwritten on school notebook paper, is worth checking out even if some might find MBKh's handwriting challenging in spots) on Ekho Moskvy's elections blog, I planned to translate it. Sean has beat me to it, and the letter has sparked a bit of a discussion at SRB.
But I wanted to focus on one of the things MBKh mentioned in his letter (my translation):
The bureaucracy, and today it in particular is our chief opponent, feels quite comfortable in an environment of social apathy. For the bureaucracy, this [environment] is a confirmation of their monopolistic right to rule the country as they see fit.Khodorkovsky's conclusion was that people should vote for any the less odious of the smaller parties. I wonder what he would be recommending if Russia still had the "against all" option on the ballot, as it has in previous election cycles.
It is precisely the fact that citizens are prepared to entrust their choice, their fate, to a little-known bureaucrat that proves to them that it is unnecessary to take into account even minimally the opinion of the people.
Veronica at Neeka's Backlog ignited a comments clusterf*** (to use an ATL term, though I'm mildly ashamed to reveal that I read that blog regularly enough to know the local lingo) earlier this fall by declaring her intention to vote against all in the Ukrainian elections, so I guess some regard this as a cop-out option and one that concerned citizens should not take, but I think it is a good option to have on the ballot, and getting rid of it was of a piece with some of Putin's other reforms which strongly enhanced the "management" of Russian democracy. Actually, the Viitorul (Future) Institute's website, where I found the above image, has another poster which is applicable to one of Putin's more spectacular verticalizations of power in Russia:
Democracy without local autonomy is like a ladder without rungs[image source]
But back to MBKh's focus on the bureaucracy as the rot at the core of the Putinist system. This seems to be one place where the opposition could gain some traction with the public - anyone who has confronted corrupt or indifferent bureaucrats in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter) knows that such experiences can leave very strong feelings. The Moscow Times had a series of a few articles about various sdownsides of overbureaucratization during this year's slow August news period, though they weren't focused on grass-roots anti-bureaucrat sentiment.
But that sentiment is certainly there - a FOM poll earlier this year found that 23% Russians rated "bureaucracy, arbitrary rule by officials" as an annoying problem, a higher percentage than were annoyed by "lack of money for food and other goods" or "bad roads." And if you add in the 14% who noted "the poor performance of housing and public services" and the 14% who noted "corruption in regional government and legal institutions" as annoying (respondents were allowed to name up to five problems), it's obvious that a fairly large number of people are unhappy with the services they get from their flush-with-cash government.
The government deals with this by using their near-monopoly on the broadcast media to periodically publicize demonstrative anti-corruption crusades and by passing periodic pension increases, and so far it seems to be working - I doubt that any of MBKh's non-loathsome small parties will clear the barrier to enter the Duma, especially since it was hiked up a couple of percentage points by Putin in his earlier reform of the electoral process.
