Orientalizing post-Soviet politics?

[image source]

Andrew Wilson has an article out on openDemocracy that provides a taxonomy of post-Soviet political systems and where they stand in terms of their employment of "political technology."  The piece is interesting for its anecdotes, and I've always been a big fan of Andrew Wilson's work introducing Westerners to the concept of "political technology."  Some of the main ideas from his seminal 2005 book, Virtual Politics, are outlined in a shorter format in these remarks of his from a few years ago.

The questions that Wilson really seems to be asking with this new article - why do governments of states like Russia and Kazakhstan bother orchestrating falsely competitive elections? what is it about the political culture of certain post-Soviet states that has allowed them to more or less leave the pervasive use of "political technology" behind? are some of these countries destined to remain in some sort of political purgatory, having left behind the "hell" of an authoritarian one-party state but never reaching the "heaven" of the (ultimately unattainable) idealized, squeaky-clean, competitive political system extolled by classic democracy promoters? - are very good ones and have concrete policy applications in addressing Western approaches to other political systems now in transition in the Arab world and elsewhere, not to mention American budgets for the variety of activities that fall under the umbrella of "democracy promotion."

The clarity of the current article's thesis, though, suffers a bit from the author's implication that political dark arts and even practices as benign as the manufacturing of artificial campaign narratives are somehow unique to the post-Soviet space and are something that should be "gotten rid of" as these countries move toward some democratic ideal. 

Is it possible that Wilson believes what he calls the "highly developed industry of political manipulation" that exists in Russia and elsewhere in the region is not in many respects an imitation of our own political system with many more rough edges (and a much smaller price tag, at least when compared to American electoral politics)?  The ghost of Lee Atwater, along with generations of dirty tricksters (from both of America's august major political parties) - not to mention a fella named Breitbart - would beg to differ.

[image source - "history reveals that smear campaigns are as American as apple pie"]

I'm not proposing throwing in the towel and allowing moral relativist "whataboutism" to triumph by making us all shrug and say our systems are no better - because that's not the case.  However, I'm not sure how much we do for the cause of "democracy," however one defines it, by lumping in things like politicized judges, politicians advancing the causes of favored business interests, and advanced political campaigning - which has become a career track and educational specialty in its own right in the U.S. in recent years and includes what Americans call "dirty tricks" and Russians call "black PR" - with factors more uniquely present (one hopes) in the transitional, soft- or hard-authoritarian political systems that Wilson writes about - actual ballot-rigging, the use of law enforcement to muzzle political opponents and domination of the media space by the government.

I also take issue with Wilson's assessment that Moldova became one of the post-Soviet world's "serious potential democracies" only in 2009, but that's another story...

"For Putin," once again...

I first reported on the online For Putin (Za Putina) movement last year. At the time, it was an amorphous initiative which seemed at first to be aimed at encouraging Putin to stick around for a third term. It ended up doing nothing more than providing another platform for Russia.ru videos and, one supposes, a bit of assistance with online PR during the election cycle and presidential transition.

As with all such websites, one might just as easily conclude that it was set up in order to attract Kremlin or campaign funds (if there was any difference between the two) to web design companies affiliated with its organizers or to demonstrate the zealousness of their support for the correct political line.

Now, ITAR-TASS reports the following (via JRL):

Nationwide Movement 'For Putin' Flings Doors Open

MOSCOW, November 18 (Itar-Tass) - The all- Russia movement "For Putin" is opening public offices in all regions of the Russian Federation to improve the population's competence in matters of law, Co-chairman of the public movement. Lawyer Pavel Astakhov declared at a forum " In Support of Vladimir Putin's Course."

The public offices will provide juridical consultations to the population to improve their knowledge of law, Astakhov said. Such offices will be affiliated to Vladimir Putin' public reception rooms in regions, the lawyer added. Such public offices are needed as much as ever now because the population is concerned over the world financial crisis and consequences it might entail for the Russian economy, Astakhov said.

The Movement " For Putin" created a year ago fully supports the present course "Strategy-2020" and the initiatives voiced by President Dmitry Medvedev in his State of the Nation address to the Federal Assembly, Astakhov said.

Initiative groups in support of Vladimir Putin met in the city of Tver last November and organized a public movement "For Putin". Representatives from 80 regions, where meetings had been held in support of Vladimir Putin's course, attended the meeting. They elected a ten-strong Coordination Council that represents all the federal districts of the Russian Federation. Lawyer Pavel Astakhov, surgeon Renat Akchurin and Head of the trade union of workers of the agrarian -industrial sector Natalia Agapova were elected co- chairmen of the Coordination Council of the movement " For Putin".

At the moment, the news feed on Zaputina.ru hasn't been updated to reflect the new initiative. My first thought is that, although Putin did attend university at LGU's law faculty, it's odd that he would become the public face of what seems to be some sort of nascent legal aid movement. After all, Medvedev was a practicing lawyer for much longer. Anyway, perhaps this is a meaningless bit of non-news, but it was an item that caught my attention.

As a side note, Astakhov, a real lawyer who studied first at the KGB's higher school and later at Pitt Law, achieved notoriety for his involvement in the defense of accused spy Edmond Pope and as a lawyer for NTV during its last days under Gusinsky. He has found widespread fame in Russia as a TV lawyer and was one of the people associated with the ZaPutina website when it was launched in November 2007. An interview with Astakhov on his own website (as in many interviews of this genre, the interviewer is not identified and the responses appear to have been carefully drafted) contains a passage, in which he essentially embraces being called a "careerist." He does seem to have made a seamless jump from defending the '90s-era oligarchy to promoting Putin's course, although in this he has much in common with many Russian political pundits.

His "Hour of Trial with Pavel Astakhov" TV show already apparently provides free legal services to the public (see page 5 of this pdf), so perhaps for him this is an extension of a personal project under the Presidential Prime Ministerial banner.

As another side note, the site that went live last year (which, one can assume, will be rolled out once more if Astakhov's statement is more than a flash in the pan and "Za Putina" returns to the public eye) is not the first iteration of an online movement unabashedly "For Putin." The website's earlier incarnation, which looked virtually the same from its launch in March 2005 through the beginning of November 2007 (shortly after which the new, improved ZaPutina 2.0 was rolled out), has been preserved by the good people at archive.org. Archive.org's "Wayback Machine" is an extremely useful resource for sifting through the dirt of Russian politics as it appeared on the internet for the past 10 years or so.

Medvedev changes the game

Реформа Медведева В своем первом послании Федеральному собранию президент Дмитрий Медведев провозгласил кардинальную реформу государственной власти. Меняются сроки полномочий и роли президента, председателя правительства, парламента, федерального и региональных, и политических партий. Далее

Six-year presidential terms? Weren't people talking about this a few years ago as a way of insuring that VVP doesn't, you know, get bored in his dotage?

See also aggregated coverage of this from Yandex.

Stability

President Vladimir Putin and First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, March 7, 2006.
[image source]

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, May 12, 2008.
[image source - some of the comments there are laugh-out-loud funny]

Tandemocracy, DIMAcracy, and other neologisms for a new era

Note the presence of "Iron Felix" in the background.
[Image source]

Tandemocracy (which I first saw as the headline of this Kommersant-Vlast' cover story, "Тандемократия") - this is certainly a more warm-and-fuzzy term than the archaic-sounding двоевластие (usually translated into English as the even more archaic-sounding "dyarchy").

DIMAcracy (or ДИМАкратия, which I first saw mentioned on Veronica Khokhlova's blog as "DIMAkratiya") - this is a witty pun on the nickname of the new president, but we'll have to see if it remains popular - as of now, Yandex blog search provides a number of results for the term but nevertheless comments, "Typo? You may have meant 'democracy'."

Putvedev - this is a nice way to refer to Russia's two leaders with a single term. The term occurred to me - and no doubt to many others - in February, but I believe the first use of it in the English-language press was in a Guardian column on March 3rd (translated into Russian by InoSmi under the headline "All Power to Putvedev"), followed closely by Sean Guillory's Pajamas Media piece the next day; and Lenta.ru headlined its March 3 roundup of Western press coverage of the Russian elections "The New Russian Putvedev."

Since people have started referring to the dyarchs - sorry, the tandemocratic leaders; tandemocrats, if you will - collectively as Putvedev, there is at least some possibility that if the tag-team arrangement continues and things happen to go south in the new era, it could come to be known as the time of Путведевщина.

[image source]

[update 3/19] - I realized that I omitted a few good ones.


ДАМ - The new president's initials, which turn out to be very punnable. The three-letter word formed by them is the genetive case of the word for "ladies"; it's also the first-person singular, future tense, of the verb "to give." For example, blogger kotoeb complained that the traditional Women's Day toast "за дам!" ("to the ladies") became "100% political as of March 2nd." And a witty commenter on the NYT's LiveJournal community suggested that the new "Damskaya" vodka (intended for ladies) is just a rebranding of Putinka vodka.

Диммовочка (so far this has not come into wide usage) - this is a play on the word "дюймовочка," which is what Thumbelina is called in Russian, and the new president's nickname"Dima" (для тех, кто не в курсе, it's also a reference to his height).

МДА - The new president's initials, arranged in a more traditional Russian order (ФИО, or last name, first name, patronymic). As it turns out, this is also a commonly used word in Russian internet-speak, meaning something like "uh, yeah" (to the extent such things can even be translated, and of course the meaning in any given case is highly dependent on context and inflection - you can read inflection on a computer screen, right?). Anyway, it seems like it's often used in online discussions to express skepticism or weariness. Here's where I saw it used in reference to Medvedev:

Некоторые думали он ДАМ (свободу дам, тв дам, оттепель дам),
а он просто МДА

The world of black and white, as described by yellow journalists

Evropa Publishing House came out with a book last year called "Putin's Enemies" by Pavel Danilin (he's listed as the main author on Evropa's website), a veteran of Pavlovsky's Fond Effektivnoi Politiki who blogs prolifically and whose writing frequently appears in online publications like Vzglyad. A couple of years ago, he wrote an interesting book on Russian youth politics, also published by Evropa.

Danilin has become one of the official chroniclers of "sovereign democracy," having written the chapter on that sacred topic in the controversial Kremlin-commissioned history textbook that came out last summer. He is also sometimes a real class act - for instance, in a recent post on the occasion of Boris Yeltsin's birthday, he wrote that the former president was "a piece of shit" who "should burn in hell, along with all of his supporters" (a commenter with a good sense of humor then posted a couple of Putin quotes in which VVP was full of praise for the man who put him in power).

But what I wanted to post was Evropa's English-language capsule summary of this book, the title of which they translate as "Putin's Opponents" (emphasis added):

Russia has only two friends: its army and navy. The enemies of Russia have always been innumerable. Recently we are seeing the enemies of Russia raise their ugly heads within the country with increasing impertinence. Their aim is to tear Russia apart and make it bleed to death. Their hate is aimed at the head of state, Vladimir Putin. They are confident that attacking Putin they are dealing successful blows to the country. Glancing above the ragtag up front we can see a number of grim figures who are the real enemies of Vladimir Putun [sic]. What binds them together is their shared hatred of the president for having cut short their murky dealings done at the expense of the entire Russian society. This is precisely why these people are the enemies of Russia.

This would appear to sum up the Kremlin's view of political opposition - or at least, the view that existed during the 2007-08 election cycle. If you don't support Putin's Plan, whatever it may be, you must be either an "enemy of Russia" or bankrolled by someone who is. Now that the election - or, as some prefer to call it, the "voting" - is over, perhaps there will be more official tolerance for at least a Kremlin-organized, vetted "loyal opposition." But, given the combined effects of the Kremlin's coordinated efforts at discrediting the very idea of opposition and the opposition's own self-discreditation (with its fragmentation and general incompetence), it's difficult to imagine there will be much more.

More recently, Evropa has published a collection of Dmitry Medvedev's articles and speeches, titled "National Priorities." Here is the English-language capsule summary of that book from the publisher's website, with an amusing contrast in tone to the blurb quoted above:

The collection includes articles, interviews and addresses made by Dmitry Medvedev at the time when he was supervising over realization of priority national projects. It was in those years that the First Deputy Chairman of the Russian government became a politician on a national level, known throughout the country. The high evaluation of his work by the society, political and government circles led Dmitry Medvedev to a crucial moment in his life, when President Vladimir Putin, the author of the strategy of priority national projects, which he put forward in the autumn of 2005, two years later, prior to the United Russia congress, said that his associate deserved holding the country’s highest executive position, being the President of Russia.

I found the contrast between the verbal beat-down of the first and the gentle fawning of the second quite striking, though of course not surprising.

It's funny because it's true...

This video has over half a million views on YouTube (is that a lot? I confess I don't know...but it seems like a lot, so I apologize if this post is the equivalent of an email forwarding you a joke you've seen five times already) and has been up since last month, but I first saw it today thanks to someone emailing me the link. It is by a KVN team from the city of Perm'.



So basically, a bunch of guys in Perm' got together and - using a comedy skit uploaded to YouTube - did a pretty good job of making the same basic point as Human Rights Watch did in its 2008 World Report about the problem of a "democracy charade" in many countries (see also here for a discussion putting Russia in the context of that report).

An Echo of Moscow

Tverskaya, Feb. 23, 2005 - from this set

Shortly after the Duma elections last December, I saw this article and wanted to translate it. I didn't have time then, and in truth it's a fairly challenging text to translate, since it is all about mood and atmosphere. The furor around Putin's Luzhniki speech has faded, but Nizhny Novgorod, where part of the article is set, is still in the news as the location of Medvedev's one official day speaking as a candidate and (perhaps less significantly) as the region singled out by the New York Times in a controversial article about the Kremlin's (ab)use of "administrative resources," so this seems like a suitable item to post as we await the inevitable result on March 2.

By way of background, this piece was supposed to appear in the Moscow weekly Bolshoi Gorod, but the head of the publishing house that prints BG decided not to print it as written, and BG's editor chose to publish it on his ZheZhe rather than edit it. The comments on the blog where it was posted suggest a range of assessments of that decision - mostly praise for the article, but also some averring that it was proper not to publish it, because it's not "journalism" and is more suitable for a ZheZhe post, or that it's an "empty" tale describing a political reality that has existed for years but is just now being noticed by the creative intelligentsia (it is indeed something one could see hints of a few years ago).

Comments elsewhere (and there were many, at the time) speculated about censorship or self-censorship and led in some cases to soul-searching online discussions among old friends divided by their opinions of Russia's path... but I should let the piece speak for itself.

An Echo of Moscow
by Roman Gruzov
c. December 3, 2007

The city before the elections

In late November it was cold in Nizhny Novgorod, and the people handing out United Russia fliers on the streets were bundled up in scarves against the chill. Nizhny covered in snow feels oppressive to a person unused to the Russian provinces. The industrial areas which die out towards the evening and the touching wooden downtown, restored in some places and lop-sided and half-abandoned in others, seemed like some sort of different, unknown, incomprehensible and thus not entirely safe country. There were campaign banners on every corner, so the word "Putin" was always visible from several angles at once.

I stopped a car on the banks of the Oka and thought about those banners and about why they seemed different in Nizhny than at home. To be honest, I always paid attention only to the most odious images. For instance, on the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky, on the building where the editorial offices of Afisha used to be, there's a gigantic group photo that covers up the entire facade, with the caption "Putin's Petersburg." The second lady from the left has such a ghoulish smirk that it looks like she's promoting the next of the "Dozor" vampire movies and not the Presidential line. Not far away, a poster on a pillar reads, "You are in Putin's plan," and my gaze has been stopping on that pillar for a month, too, but only because it's odd - he's not in my plans, but I am in his. In Nizhny the quantity of these pictures is something qualitatively different, perhaps because based on the way the locals look, it's hard to understand what they have to do with these banners.

I was picked up by a green Moskvich with a driver of indeterminate age wearing yellow wraparound shades and a shabby sheepskin coat. The radio was bellowing frightfully, and I thought the speaker's voice sounded familiar. But as we drove alongside the still unfrozen river, I had a moment of doubt - the rhetoric of the person shouting from the ragged car speakers about jackals and foreign embassies was just too coarse. I thought, "Could it be Zhirik?"

The driver turned the volume up louder - louder than was proper, so much louder that it became unpleasant to be in the car. After a couple of minutes I was sure that it really was the President speaking - the radio was picking up the TV broadcast from Channel One. I felt uneasy - at any other time I would have asked the driver to turn it down, but I kept quiet. The voice coming from the radio was too insistent, the city too incomprehensible, and the driver's murky gaze from behind his yellow glasses too unpredictable. I had absolutely no desire to argue with him about politics - practically for the first time in the last seventeen years I decided that it would be better to hold my tongue. It was unpleasant, strange and somehow radically new, all at the same time - to be driven around a dark, cold city, listening to the stadium responding to the speechmaker, and to feel that you are living an a new, different time, a time when if you don't know your interlocutor's mindset it's better to stay silent. And we did stay silent - we drove along and listened as various not-so-picky people made speeches at the stadium. Then the driver drew his hand out of his tattered cuff and sharply turned off the radio. It got quiet. Then he said:

"Those assholes!"

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, opened the window and spat angrily into the frosty evening.

In Moscow the next day I learned that many of my friends had been through something similar during the past few days, and that for almost all of them the feeling of a qualitative shift was surprisingly connected with something trivial - not with the Luzhniki rally, but with some silly story. One friend's kid got sick from paint fumes, because they were painting the school starting first thing in the morning, rushing to beautify it in time for the elections. Another got into a fight with drunken teenagers on the street, and at the police station noticed they had "I'm for Putin" scarves around their necks. And in response I told everyone how to my own surprise I had been afraid to ask the driver to turn down the radio.

When I returned to St. Petersburg a day later, there were heavy trucks with barred windows parked by the train station. There were more police on Nevsky than there were pedestrians, and the farther I went the more men in uniform surrounded me. Closer to Palace Square, when the police turned into riot troops, I realized that it was because of the dissenters. There was no march whatsoever - a dozen or so pensioners stood by watching the hundreds of soldiers who had secured the square. Then they came up to me, looked at my press card, and put me in a police bus.

"You have a laptop in your bag," said a calm, mustachioed officer, "and today only journalists accredited by the Main Internal Affairs Directorate [ГУВД] are allowed to be here. Let's take a ride to the precinct, and we'll take a look at what you've got in your computer."

In the new era this was normal, and I climbed into the dark freight box of the truck without a fight. Inside were about six dejected Tajiks, a gray-haired old man with a hearing aid and teary eyes, and a radical who looked like a sad demon with horns of hairsprayed dreads. They drove us around the city for a long time, and tears flowed down the old man's cheeks from the wind blowing through the cracks in the truck. It was unpleasant to see, so we looked out through the cracks - at the police, roaming about on Nevsky among billboards showing "Putin's Petersburg," and at the people avoiding the billboards and the policemen. Everyone was silent, but this time I knew for sure what everyone else was thinking. And after three more hours or so they photographed us and let us go - all but the radical, who didn't want to hold a number up to his chest for the camera. My number was 809.

"Assholes," said the Tajiks, stepping out into the fresh air.
"Assholes," I agreed.
The old man said nothing.

That was the winter; let's hope the spring will be different. Some observers seem hopeful.

By the way, the imprecation that is repeated in the middle and at the end of the article is "суки" in the original (literally, "bitches," which somehow didn't seem to fit in English), so I took a bit of license with it - though not much license, actually. According to my trusty Русско-английский словарь ненормативной лексики (М: Астрель, 2002):

Сука ж. [...] 3. груб.-прост. Употр. как бранное слово Cf. bastard, shit, asshole (used as a term of abuse).

[Update 3/5] According to many election-day reports, Medvedev likes the metaphor of a change of seasons as well:

"Mood is good, spring is here," Medvedev said. "Though it is raining, it's a different season. It's pleasant!"

Or maybe he just didn't want to talk about anything more substantive than the weather; that, at least, was the conclusion of the NYT's Clifford Levy, who suggested that talking about the weather on election day - as opposed to, I guess, the election - was "a reflection of the tenor of the campaign." The optimist in me wants to believe he missed the subtlety of Dima's metaphor.

Speechless

The text says:
"Vladimir Putin, let's continue to work together in the future!" and
"Chief Teddy-Bear, take care of the little children!"
[image source]

Speechlessness - or a brief, shocked (resigned?) obscenity - has been the response of many Russians and Russia-watchers to the latest brick in the pro-Kremlin wall.

The good news? "Restless Bears Have Found a Job for Putin," reports Moskovsky Komsomolets. The bad - or at least profoundly questionable - news? Those "bears" are children aged 8 to 15, who will now have the chance to be involved in a nationwide movement called "Teddy Bears" ("Mishki"). The new organization has been rolled out in the midst of a circus-like frenzy of pro-Putin demonstrations in Moscow. According to the Nashi website (all of the quoted texts in this post are my translations):

On the 6th of December over 35,ooo commissars and activists from the Nashi movement, the "Our Election" (Nashi Vybory) all-Russian youth program, the All-Russia youth education project "Cadres for modernizing the country," the interregional child-youth movement "Mishki," the "Shapovalova" designers' project, and the federal programs Our Army ("Nasha Armiia"), Friendship Lessons, Blood Group, Voluntary Youth Militia, Our New Education, and Hiking, came [to Moscow] to congratulate the President, and also to present their plans for the future.

Actually, it would seem that the powers-that-be initially positioned the busing of provincial youth to Moscow for several days and kitting them out in Putin ponchos at least in part as a way to have a bulwark against the "orange infection" - at least, that motivation is expressed in a Nashi flyer that came out just before the elections. Another funny thing about Nashi's version of events in the paragraph quoted above is that nearly all of these groups and "programs" are parts of or organized by Nashi. But I guess there is strength not only in numbers (and official sanction!) but also in lots of bombastic names.

One thing officials should remember - people care less and less about slogans and politics, but Muscovites always care about anything that will impede traffic. And apparently Nashi's antics throughout the city in recent days have caused lots of probki. Gazeta.ru's story about this was titled "Teddy Bears Lock up the Center" and was illustrated with a picture of a traffic jam and a map showing road closings. Kommersant had a story about the traffic-diverting meeting involving Mishki:

Yesterday on Bolotnaya Square the childrens' movement "Mishki" made itself known for the firs time. The movement is for children from 8 to 15 years old, and their counselors [вожатые - for which my dictionary actually gives "young pioneer leader," so strong is the association] are Nashi commissars. According to the organization's internal hierarchy, a counselor who is able to organize ten events with children is called a "Restless Bear" ["медведь-шатун" - a term for a bear which has woken up for hibernation], and one who unites children from ten apartment buildings is a "Polar Bear." The most senior counselors carry the title of "Brown Bear."

According to the movement's organizer, Yulia Zimova, "Mishki" have organized mainly in the regions [i.e., not in Moscow or SPB], and the parents of the children involved have nothing against their children's participation in public life. On Bolotnaya Square "Mishki" recorded a video message to Vladimir Putin. In it, they called on the president to head up their group, "since he is the most important Teddy Bear in Russia," and asked him to "assign the group a developmental vector."

"I would like to note that any forced participation of schoolchildren in political life is prohibited by law in this country. Especially considering that this took place during the school day," Moscow City Council Deputy Evgenii Bunimovich told Kommersant. "Russia always had enough good sense not to get children mixed up in politics. And today this is happening, and it is horrible."

Representatives of the parties and movements which, according to Nashi, had planned to foment an "orange revolution" in Moscow, told Kommersant that the actions of the pro-Kremlin youth was just bewildering. "The authorities have dishonestly won this election, and no children will make them any more legitimate. [...]" thinks SPS's Boris Nemtsov.

"I would be interested to talk to the city authorities, who swore that they would never permit mass events in Moscow that would cut off traffic downtown," added Denis Bilunov, executive director of Unified Civil Force and a co-organizer of the "Dissenters' March" that was dispersed on November 24.

Kremlin-friendly (or so it seems to me, at least on the CIS issues that I follow) news portal RosBalt.ru had the following to say about Mishki:

Little Teddy Bears Ask Putin to Be Their Megasuperbear

The Mishki movement appeared in September and unites children from 8 to 15 years old. The counselors - high school students - have their own "positions"... the apex of the hierarchy is the "brown bear."

"That is a megasuperbear, who can with his skill and experience solve children's problems in a particular city - for example, someone who can organize the construction of a playground," said the organizer of "Mishki," who is also a Nashi commissar, Yulia Zimova, in an interview with Trud.

"We expect to succeed," said Zimova. "Even if the President doesn't become the leader of Mishki, we hope that he will still support us one way or another."

Mishki already participates fairly actively in pro-Kremlin demonstrations organized by Nashi. For example, they were present at the demonstration celebrating Putin's birthday [Mishki's LJ identifies this as the source of their first press mention] with posters reading "Thanks to Putin for our stable future."

One blog commenter responded to that last quote by recalling a phrase from the 20th century: "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!" At least one other commenter on a different internet forum had a similar thought:

"We've already been through this, and it was thanks to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood. Except that then it was much more sincere, and now it's done to order and for money."

Another commenter questioned the age bracket involved:

I also remember that they used to accept people at age 14 into Komsomol, i.e., into a totally adult socio-political organization. And here it's "plush teddy bears" until age 15. This is some kind of retarded infantilism.

Yet another commenter on the same forum went off:

Can't you see where this is all headed? I support the right of any party to freely campaign. BUT NOT A MONOPOLY!!! What difference does it make - teddy bears, jerboas, or baby crocodiles? If you pound something into a child's unformed head from the age of eight, he'll accept it uncritically as the truth. This is straight-up zombification of children.

Others took a more humorous tack, and tried to come up with nicknames for this new organization (all based on puns that aren't really translatable) : "путинята" or "едросята," proposed one commenter at that same forum. At another forum, proposals for pejorative nicknames were "Putin's Hamsters," "HitlerJungend" (rather unoriginal, since Nashi has already been slapped with this somewhat over-the-top label), and "Медвебрята", "Медвеонеры" and "Медвемольцы" (puns using the word for "bear" with the words for "recruit," "pioneers," and "Komsomol"). On both forums, people lamented the fact that children so young are apparently the subject of a political "hearts-and-minds" campaign.

Would you trust this man with your children?

Most likely, Russian parents have new Minister of Youth Vasily Yakemenko (ex-Nashi head commissar) to thank for the expansion of Nashi's ambit to include the pre-teen set. A Radio Svoboda interviewer got one of the participants to say a few embarrassing things about the way they got kids involved (not-very-good Google translation), and that account suggested that the "Young Russia" group might also have been involved in organizing Mishki's Moscow meeting.

I decided to see whether this new "movement" has a website. Mishki.ru got a "server not found" message, but then I thought that maybe this group uses the same cringe-inducing top-level-domain as Nashi's website. Sure enough, punching in Mishki.su got me to the freshly-baked website of this teddy bear of a youth group, says it has been online since November 21. The website, though, looks like it's still in beta. The front page has impressive, appealing graphics of bears cavorting in red neckerchiefs (a la the Soviet-era Young Pioneers), but the "contact" page lists just some nonsense characters - here's a screenshot, since that's likely to change:


On the section of the site called "Media about us," the only link at the moment is to what appears to be Mishki's official LiveJournal blog, the profile page of which provides an abbreviated mission statement:

We are the All-Russian [sic - even though it's called "Interregional" elsewhere] Child-Youth Movement "MISHKI" [Nashi also likes to write its name in all-caps sometimes, not because it's an abbreviation, but just 'cause, I guess]. We invite you to connect with the future of your country, to touch the creation of the history of Russia - to not allow the loss of the young generation.

Every generation can make a contribution to the country's development. Today, practically a whole generation of Russian citizens has grown up not feeling responsible for the future of their Motherland. At best, they will leave behind graffiti in courtyards, at worst, nothing at all will be left after them. We are people who believe in the future generation and who think that their fate is in our hands. The fate of Russia is in our hands.

The LJ itself has an odd header with what looks like a cartoon version of the Sydney, Australia, skyline; and a couple of posts like this one with photos of children doing wholesome-looking things and not much text. And although that "mini-manifesto" is a bit bombastic and self-important, I certainly can't argue with the principle of raising kids to be conscious of their debt to their society and country. It's a different matter whether this type of consciousness-raising should be a task for a political party that already dominates the public discourse.

At the moment, there's something wrong with the text spacing on the page describing the organization's "Manifesto," but it's nothing a quick edit by a good web designer couldn't fix. The Manifesto itself - or the document on the page labeled "Manifesto" - offers a lot of nice thoughts on values - volunteerism, physical fitness, etc. - and how to inculcate them, but toward the end it depicts something so involved that I can't imagine much of it ever being done in real life by volunteers. It also offers a lot of insight into what values are most important to the people who have set up this organization, and what kind of citizens and country they hope to create (strange numbering as in the original, though I have introduced line breaks for clarity in some places):

III. Once you have earned their trust - start building a state: the Courtyard Democratic Republic
1. The building of a state can start with having the children do what adults do in real life. Children always want to try themselves out at adult tasks.
The children can be actors and play in a theater, or anchors and cameramen and film the courtyard news [...]

1. When you start to build a democratic republic, it doesn't necessarily have to function as a state economically at first. It all depends on what the children want.

The economy should involve around 100 people. Every child should know that, for example, in stairwell 5 of building 7 between the first and second floors, every day between 19.00 and 20.30 the Courtyard Bank, Employment office, and Tax Inspectorate will be open. If he wants to earn Mishkarubles, he can go to the Employment office, where someone will give him a job. For example, if there's going to be a play the next day, then he can set up the chairs for 15 rubles, make the set for 40, or for 30 Mishkarubles take a role in the play. The child takes on the job, gets the money on the day after he works, pays a tax, for example, one Mishkaruble. At the end of the week or month the Leading Mishki conduct an auction, where the little Mishki can buy theater or movie tickets, flash-drives, picture frames, etc. - it depends on the interests and age of the children.

When the children get used to this system, you can build a real state - the President and government of the Courtyard will plan the budget for the month, based on which one or another ministry will conduct events in the courtyard, government employees will get a salary, and some will even be able to open their own companies, for example a firm that does homework assignments, or open their own private bank.

1. When the republic grows to include several courtyards, you can set up a big parliament, buy up land in the courtyard, found an inter-courtyard state television station, hold beauty contests, set up advertising companies, walls of honor for Mishki and Little Mishki.

Before the launch of any courtyard democratic republic, a seminar will be conducted with all organizers who are Leading Mishki in your city.

IV. The Unique thing: the city becomes a single united state of children, where they are the main citizens and are responsible for everything. Now your children have opened real companies, they defend in election campaigns their projects to improve life in the courtyard, they earn money and pay taxes. They are learning management, learning to think independently and make decisions. Now your task is to introduce their projects into the system of regional government. Teach them not to be afraid to live in the adult world, to achieve the goals they have set. [...]

Based on a successful small model, any child, and then teenager and adult, will build a larger model. The model of his city, his state. And even if in that model not everyone will be a government employee, the rest will one way or another be representatives of nationally oriented businesses, or socially responsible entrepreneurs. A country where the children are occupied and involved is assured to have great success. To be the best. To be beloved.

It struck me that a lot of these things - having a "government" and even sometimes a "TV station" are things that kids experience through their schools in the U.S. Strangely, this document says nothing about using the school as an organizing principle.

"Chief Teddy Bear - Take Care of the Children!"
[image source]

Confusingly, the section of the website titled "For Mishki" also has a document that is labeled a Manifesto. Maybe they just accidentally swapped the two texts when they put the site together. This document must be the actual manifesto, for it contains principles rather than a specific plan of action:

Why Now?

A country's prosperity, as a rule, is accompanied by a the mass development of a children's movement. The wise ruler ["Мудрый правитель" - I'm not making this up] wants to know into whose hands the country for which he is responsible will fall, and the residents want to be sure of what will happen tomorrow. Today, we have something to pass along to the next generation - the ability to cope with difficulties, achievements, experience, knowledge, faith in Russia. We can instill much in the generation that will follow us: tolerance, collegiality, the ability to empathize and survive, independence and responsibility. And most important: the ability to be a human being and a patriot. This is not simple, as we know. But it is necessary. After all, this will allow us to create the Russia of our dreams.

The manifesto document talks about developing creative talents, promoting a healthy way of life and charitable work, patriotism and professional preparation, and other worthy things for a youth organization to do. And then it ends with a bang (my translation, italics in original):

A child-youth courtyard movement is something that has never been done before. Perhaps a children's courtyard movement is the very path which will lead us to the development and consolidation of not just new traditions, but also an interesting, kind mass culture. It's possible, that we will raise the sort of citizens, who will be able to take to the streets nationwide and demand that TV shows which degrade the personalities and minds of their children be taken off the air. The Little Mishki who grow up and become Mishki, will preserve the country, the people, history, and culture.

We will raise the sort of citizens who will be a source of pride not only to us, but also to other countries.

Fascinating indeed. But for a post titled "Speechless" I've gone on at great length about this embryonic children's organization - who knows if it will go anywhere? I'll end the post with a bit more info from the MK article I mentioned above:

One of the "Restless Bears" is 18-year-old Masha from Sochi. But she spoke in a way not entirely appropriate for her age: "Sood Uncle Putin will resign, he won't have anything to do, and he'll accept our offer!"

The counselors plan to politically enlighten the children in their charge: "At eight years old it's pointless, but we'll tell the older ones about the 'orange' threat."

As far as Mishki's funding, people in the organization say that the counselors are volunteers and that parents help out with the supplies. But it's doubtful that transporting a thousand citizens to Moscow was within the parents' means. We have heard that the "Restless Bears" are sponsored by large banks and regional businesses.

Can the pro-Kremlin enthusiasts at least leave children alone? If things keep going in this direction, soon the members of "Teensy Bears" [“Медвежулечки”] will be rolled out onto the street in strollers, and after them we'll have pregnant women as members of "Clumsy Embryos" [“Косолапые эмбриончики”]...

On to the next episode

It's always hard to come back from a hiatus of a few weeks, especially in such eventful times. One builds up so many things to say which have remained unsaid for so long...

But happily others have had much to say about last Sunday's Duma elections - SiberianLight has a few posts with pretty-colored graphics; Moscow Rules gave his impressions from ground zero; Wally Shedd weighed in; PutinWatcher has had some interesting posts on the elections, including this one; Jesse Heath at Russia Monitor put up a valiant effort in the face of law school finals; Robert Amsterdam's blog had wall-to-wall coverage as usual; Veronica at Global Voices Online wrote a couple of roundup posts and posted a link on her own blog to a fantastic article that I hope to have time to translate; TOL's dedicated elections blogs covered events in English and in Russian [UPD - engrossed in that orgy of link love, I somehow neglected to mention the kingpin of Russian election coverage, Mr. Guillory]; and of course the izbircom LJ community had lots and lots of reports about what went down last Sunday at the polls.

Speaking of the ties that IzbirCom (that's the Central Electoral Commission, or TsIK) has to the blogosphere, it looks like the powers-that-be at TsIK have realized the power of the internet. The LiveJournal community represents TsIK's first attempt at a blog, although they don't seem to have put a link to the community anywhere on the main TsIK website. Here's what one member of the electoral commission had to say about the effort in an interview:

This electoral cycle is the first time that TsIK has set up a blog. Is this a faddish thing or a real instrument to increase voter turnout and popularize the institution of elections?

Fashion and popularization are inextricably connected, but to be more specific, we understand perfectly well that the Internet is a very important instrument for communicating and broadcasting information. Therefore, Russia's TsIK cannot ignore this method of communicating with and receiving feedback from the citizens of our country. We are of course interested in ensuring that active Internet users (first and foremost, the younger generation) know about the elections and in giving them a chance to state their position and to ask us questions, and in having the chance to search together with them for answers which are important to everyone.

TsIK's effort at mastering the blogosphere is being trumpeted on the Vzglyad-, Kremlin- and Zaputina-affiliated "internet TV channel" parked at the posh "Russia.ru" domain, which has a very nicely produced video clip titled "Our Man in TsIK":

The clip (nestled in among other classic Russia.ru content - clips with titles like "Bondarchuk is for Putin," "30-year-olds are for Putin," "The Crisis ofLiberalism," "Day of the Jackal" (featuring Nemtsov) and "Nizhnii on the Rise") is shot in black-and-white, with one of the songs from the classic spy thriller "17 Moments of Spring" as part of the soundtrack.

Prominently featured in the nearly nine-minute video are two fairly widely read bloggers from the RuBlogosphere - Sholademi and Casualmente (who also has a friends-only journal here) - who are the "curators" or moderators of the electoral commission's LJ community. I can't help noticing, though perhaps it should be irrelevant, that neither of these bloggers is an ethnic Russian. The bloggers are shown helping TsIK Chairman Churov learn to surf the web, and it is suggested that they will have regular audiences with Churov and may have exclusive scoops for their readers.

The LJ community looks like a way for the authorities to demonstrate that they are attentive to potential complaints about the elections. On an LJ community, any blogger can sign up and post material (subject to the moderators' approval), and according to the izbircom community's profile, Churov and/or his colleagues read the postings there regularly.

And the nice publicity given to the bloggers involved looks like a kind way for the government to reward and encourage its helpers, sort of like the "Golden Hundred" rating of journalists on the Press-Ministry-sponsored Mediacratia website. I don't necessarily want to criticize the bloggers involved - after all, they really did provide a good vehicle for feedback - e.g., this open thread calling for reports of ballot-rigging - much of which was critical of the elections. However, it's another matter entirely whether the authorities cared to read that feedback, and it's certainly possible to see this foray onto the Internet as just another bit of legitimizing window-dressing for Putin's Plan.

I may have a few more retrospective posts about the Duma campaign when I get some more free time, although the issues may start to seem stale fairly quickly - lord knows I've stored up lots of interesting links over the past few weeks on issues like election observers, western-oriented "jackals," and the like.

The only thought I had when I saw the poll results - and I've read enough to know that it wasn't a unique reaction - was that the result for "Fair Russia" seemed awfully high for a party which had been hemorrhaging high-profile members for months before the elections.

For now, Russia is on to the next episode - the Presidential race (or whatever form of succession the next few months have in store) is already gathering steam, although even VVP expressed a sense of weariness about having to go through another round of elections.

Consolidating support for the President's course

Now that articles are appearing with titles like "You Must Not Leave Again. The Campaign for a Third Term Signifies That Both a 'Designated Successor' and a 'Caretaker Czar' Have Been Demonstrated to Be Excessively Risky Solutions to the '2008 Problem'" (Andrei Ryabov, Nov. 3, Gazeta.ru) - the 2008 problem looks like it really has become a problem, even for the people supposedly with their hands on all the levers.

Notwithstanding the elaborate versii (a post I had hoped to translate, but it's over a month old and thus may already be hopelessly stale by the standards of Russian politics - anyway, Google does an OK job of translating it here.) cooked up by professional political handicapper, blogger and anticompromat webmaster Vladimir Pribylovsky, it can be said rather simply that a lot of people - powerful and not-so-powerful alike, it would seem - want Putin to stick around in one Tsar-like guise or another. Others have been writing about how it would be the biggest mistake of his career for him to do so, and that if he really believed in or wanted to construct the institutions of democracy in Russia, he would step down.

Apparently, Putin is being "Driven to the Kremlin Wall" by his supporters - certainly those among the narod, but presumably more importantly, those among the elites, fretting in their Maybachs and Rublyovka mansions about what might become of their cash flow in a post-Putin Russia.

I ran across a crazy and somehow very disturbing website that seems to be part of the universal Putin love-in (last week, K-Vlast' got Russian politicians to respond to the question "Does the universal love [всенародная любовь] alarm you?" - another article I'd like to translate but haven't had time to; here's Google's best effort at a translation). The website is zaputina.ru, which launched last week and apparently is all set to become part of a nationwide "For Putin!" movement. I think I'll let the article from ostensibly objective business news portal RBC (an article which I found through a link on the zaputina website) speak for itself and also show how RBC seems to have been reduced to shilling for the regime on this story (my translation):

Virtual voting "For Putin!" is taking place on the Internet
[Nov. 8, 2007]

The internet campaign [Интернет-акция] "For Putin!" taking place on the Russian-language internet, has collected over 16 thousand votes in support of the President of Russia in a day and a half of existence. The creators of the project state that their goal is not to campaign for Vladimir Putin but to consolidate his supporters on the Internet.

As the organizers note, it is not only residents of Russian cities who are voting for Putin. Votes are coming in from London, New York, Kiev, Khar'kov and the other cities of the world.* "We don't want to convince anyone or encourage them to change their political views in favor of Putin's course," says one of the initiators of the project, political scientist Aleksei Zharich.** According to him, the goal of the project is to consolidate supporters of the president and his course.

Writer and former head of Boris Yeltsin's press service Marina Yudenich says that she decided to become involved in the project because she "watches the positive changes in the life of the country very closely." Lawyer [on TV, at least - trans.] Pavel Astakhov, another participant in the project, agrees with Marina Yudenich. "As a lawyer, I better than others understand and see the results of Vladimir Putin's work over the past eight years. These are lower taxes, social projects, and children's programs, and the development of the economy in such private-sector areas as consumer credits," says Astakhov.

The project's goal, in Pavel Astakhov's opinion, is "to show ourselves that we can choose our own leadership [власть] and can preserve those gains [завоевания] and successes which have already been achieved." Marina Yudenich thinks that the "For Putin!" project will show the part of society which is in doubt that the country's president really "possesses nationwide [всенародной] support."

The project allows internet users, aside from just voting, to publish their photo and leave a link to their web page. This personalization, according to Marina Yudenich, is very meaningful, since it "demonstrates that people are not just voting for the president, but they are doing this openly, showing their face and identifying themselves by name."***

* Here we see one of the more bizarre fixations of Putin's team (and often of Russians in general): a fixation on the support of foreigners, even those from countries perceived as enemies.
** Calling a campaign PR specialist or "polittekhnolog" a "political scientist" is such a very "virtual politics" thing to do. Or perhaps Zharich majored in politologiia at the MVD university (yes, that really is his alma mater, at least according to his LJ profile). Zharich's main contribution to the project appears to be that he had bought the zaputina.ru domain awhile back - I wonder if there is anything interesting lurking in the cached earlier pages from that domain?
*** I guess the secret ballot is no longer good enough. Ms. Yudenich neglects to mention how easy it is to manipulate such a website by posting fake photos and identities or filtering out ones the webmaster would rather not have appear; not to mention the comical idea of a "vote" on a website where there is only one choice.

It seems to me that Pribylovsky gets it just about right when he dubs this project "licking together" (a play on the name of the now-defunct, original pro-Putin youth movement, Walking Together).Strangely, there is also a za-putina project (the hyphen makes all the difference) which has been around longer and thus has more "votes"; according to Zharich, though, it's run by the same person who runs an anti-Putin site. Predictably housed at protiv-putina.ru, at least this website allows "voters" to leave comments. These sites could perhaps be seen as metaphors for the Russian political process - such polarization between a certain wing of the opposition and the mainstream that they can't even have their "voting" on the same website! And of course the more perfect way in which the official zaputina project simulates the Kremlin's view of the proper way for the people to interact with the authorities - the only form of acceptable feedback is a vote of approval; no comments, please.

Zharich is not particularly modest about the project he apparently manages. On his livejournal (his handle is brigadier - is that a coincidence?) he writes about what he sees as the main strengths of the zaputina.ru website:

1. Everything on one page!!! On one page.
2. Easy-to-use interface. The possibility of changing something around is excluded, but it's simple and maximally easy for a person to leave their vote.
3. Technologicity [Технологичность]: Video, audio, photo, entertainment [энтертеймент].* [...]
5. This is the real web two [point] zero.
(For those who want it to, their photo links to their web page, blog or online project, by the way. And that's the whole point. It's not a grey mass - but real people. You click and learn about the person, it's cool)
6. If Hillary, for example, had a project like this, the whole world would talk about it.**

* This sums up how Putin has managed to keep people watching TV even with all controversial or potentially controversial news programs dumbed down or removed. It is amusing that this guy seems to have forgotten that there are many perfectly good words in Russian for "entertainment."
** I wonder if this jackass savvy political operator knows anything about Moveon.org or other internet projects that made a splash in US campaigns. They weren't talked about by "the whole world" because they were domestic political phenomena. Why exactly should anyone (other than Russophiles/Russia-watchers like myself) outside of Russia care about this uncreative propaganda website?

For a guy who was born exactly a week before I was and cannot therefore pass as a callow youth, he has a strangely childlike glee about the whole thing.

Gazeta.ru covered the zaputina project and the affiliated (embedded, actually) russia.ru website, which is sort of like a unidirectional version of YouTube (you can watch what the webmasters have uploaded but cannot upload anything of your own or leave comments), in an article appropriately titled Путин-tube (here is a Google translation). The zaputina website is compared to a flash-mob ("where many people repeat the same, most often pointless, action") and it is suggested that these websites are efforts to attract some of the campaign funds which are no doubt flooding the country. You can follow what Russian blogs are saying about the zaputina website here.

So, is this a transparent, "democratic" feedback loop? Or a colossal, polittekhnolog-orchestrated circle jerk? Here at Scraps of Moscow, we report - and you decide.

Moving on to the partner site, Russia.ru calls itself a "Telechannel" (actually, the full text of the title that pops up in your browser window is "Telechannel Russia.ru: Glory to Russia!") and aspires to Internet TV status, although in the lower left-hand corner of the site is the logo and media license information of Kremlin-friendly news portal Vzglyad. As one commenter on a blog post about this story noted:

What do you think, will Russia ever have normal democracy? I think hope is dying out with each passing day...

Even Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru - which is back in operation, hooray! - had a vignette last Friday about the zaputina project, which I'm too tired to translate and which Google doesn't really do justice. And others are laughing about the whole effort to keep Putin in office as well:

The soundtrack to the above video (really a slideshow of entertaining Putin images) is a song narrating Putin's imagined interior monologue as he arrives at the conclusion that he must remain in charge of the country "for the people."

Meanwhile, from all indications, the runup to to Duma elections is less amusing for parties not enjoying the benefit of the "administrative resource" and is anything but democratic. SPS, for example, has had one of its regional offices vandalized (and was then not allowed to use its allotted campaigning time slot on the local state-run TV channel), its website hacked, and its campaign literature confiscated on a rather thin pretext:

News Friday, November 9, 2007. Issue 3782. Page 3. Police Seize SPS Election Booklets The Moscow Times Union of Right Forces said Thursday that police had seized 14 million copies of its officially approved campaign booklet in more than 20 regions this week. In an entry on his LiveJournal blog, party leader Nikita Belykh said police justified the confiscations by saying it was necessary to examine the campaign materials for content possibly violating extremism or anti-monopoly laws. The Neo-Print printing house in Moscow, which prints most of the campaign materials for Union of Right Forces, or SPS, was raided by police on Thursday and had its operations suspended pending inspections expected to last at least until Dec. 2, when State Duma elections will be held, he wrote. A woman who answered the phone Thursday at Neo-Print said the company was operating as usual and declined to confirm whether it was raided by police. An SPS spokeswoman could not specify which police department had conducted the raid. Meanwhile, Vadim Gologuzov, a senior police official in Krasnoyarsk, said his officers had seized 2 million copies of the party's booklet because it contained an advertisement in violation of election laws, Interfax reported. In Izhevsk, police official Nikolai Shvetsov said police had seized 800,000 copies after an anonymous caller reported a hostage-taking in a garage, Interfax reported. Police found no hostages in the garage, only the campaign materials, which were confiscated to establish their legality.

Things have gotten so bad for SPS (and this time, none of it appears to be the party's own doing, as is sometimes the case with the misfortunes of Russian liberals) that they have even appealed to the OSCE for help, complaining about a "wave of persecution." Good luck.

Update, Nov. 12, 11am: I see this website is a popular topic. Today's Moscow Times in a story titled "United Behind a Putin Third Term", rehashes Gazeta's coverage and provides some more denials and perspective:

[...] [S]ix days after it opened, 27,000 people have already voted on a web site, Zaputina.ru, calling for Putin to stay on despite the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms.

Zaputina.ru did not provide any information regarding its creators, while a United Russia spokesman denied any official party involvement Friday.

"If there is no party's logo on the web site, then it's not the party's project," he said on condition of anonymity, because only the party's chief spokesman was authorized to comment.

Gazeta.ru, however, has identified the site's creator as Konstantin Rykov, who is on the United Russia party list in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

"This could have been a personal initiative on Rykov's part," the party spokesman said.

Gazeta.ru identified Alexei Zharich as the web-site project manager, and the Nic.ru domain registration center said it was registered in his name in October 2004. Zharich is listed by the web site Vybory.ru as the general director of the Political Technologies company and a former Interior Ministry employee.

A secretary who answered the joint work telephone number for Rykov and Zharich said Friday that both were too busy to talk.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, reached on his cell phone Friday, said the presidential administration had no relation to the site. [...]

"United Russia's traces can be found everywhere in one or another form," Alexei Mukhin of the Center for Political Information said Friday. "Because the party has put Putin on top of its federal list, everything done in support of Putin is done in support of United Russia."

Mukhin said the regional rallies and Za Putina, despite United Russia's denials of involvement, could be aimed at pushing United Russia's share of the vote on Dec. 2 to 80 percent and "not permitting any other party pass the 7 percent barrier" to get into the Duma.

Vertical of bureaucrats?

Vertical of Power (chairs)
[image source]

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.

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.

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.

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.