The End of Putin - By Julia Ioffe. MOSCOW – On the night of Monday, Dec. 5, blogger, anti-corruption activist, and budding politician Alexey Navalny was one of 500 people arrested at a protest denouncing fraud in the previous day's parliamentary elections. Surrounded by some 6,000 people -- an unheard-of number for a protest in the center of Moscow, a dozen years into the apathetic Putin era -- Navalny had delivered an angry, guttural, less-than-diplomatic speech. "We will cut their throats! " he proclaimed, then tried to lead a march down the street to the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the powerful successor to the KGB known by its Russian initials FSB.
This had not been permitted in advance, so he was bundled up, stuffed into a police van, and shuttled around nighttime Moscow to keep his supporters from picketing his detention. The next day, he was given a 15-day sentence for disobeying police orders. It was true: Russia had changed while Navalny was in jail. What is my electorate? Why then? Putin’s Election Dilemma. Just weeks ago, Russia’s March 2012 presidential election seemed a foregone conclusion, with Vladimir Putin’s “victory”—by whatever means—virtually guaranteed. So much so that most opposition leaders, with the exception of liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky, decided to skip the contest altogether, mindful of the experience of 2008, when pro-democracy candidates Vladimir Bukovsky and Mikhail Kasyanov were denied access to the ballot.
The 2012 field (again, with the exception of Yavlinsky) narrowed to a handful of Putin’s handpicked “shadow boxers”: Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, former Upper House Speaker Sergei Mironov, and ostensibly “center-right” billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. Another contender, Kremlin-appointed Irkutsk Governor Dmitri Mezentsev—Putin’s old colleague from St. Petersburg—was chosen as a purely “technical” candidate, for the unlikely event that all the others stood down, thus annulling the election. Is Putin's Fake Rival the Real Deal? - By Simon Shuster. MOSCOW – From the crowd that gathered on Jan. 13 at Moscow's Central Telegraph building, just up the block from the Kremlin, you would think someone was handing out envelopes of cash. There were pensioners, housewives, college students, and school teachers packing into the entryway and spilling out onto the street, all craning to get a look at the narrow head that stuck up above the throng.
Even from the back of the crowd you could see it -- the bobbing noggin of the 6 foot, 8 inch, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who was there to open a campaign office as part of his race for the Russian presidency. The strange part was that he seemed to be having fun interacting with voters, listening to their lamentations, letting them pinch the fabric of his coat. But here's the really strange part: Everyone there, except for most of the journalists, really believed he could win. "Um. Um. I decree that all presidential powers should immediately be transferred to Putin. " So what about Prokhorov? Kremlin Talks to Opposition as It Readies ‘Victory’ Above and Beyond - By William F. Browder. When my Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in police custody in November 2009, I thought that there was a good chance of getting justice for him from the Russian legal system for what I believe to be his murder. Unlike in many other human rights abuse cases, there was a mountain of documentary evidence proving exactly who killed him.
Sergei had given official testimony to Russian investigators prior to his arrest describing how the police were involved in stealing our companies as well as the $230 million in taxes we had paid to the Russian budget. Official police documents show that the same police officers who Sergei testified against arrested him. After his arrest, Sergei wrote 450 complaints during his 358 days in detention detailing exactly how his rights were violated and who did what to him at every different moment of his horrible ordeal. Unfortunately, contrary to my initial hopes, there has been no justice. The facts of this case are so damning that the U.S. The sense of an ending - Stephen Holmes, Ivan Krastev Putin and the decline of "no-choice" politics.
Blatantly rigged elections are the easiest way for the Putin regime to mimic the authoritarian power it does not possess. December's protests destroyed Putin's reputation of being in control; even genuinely competitive elections would be unable to restore his legitimacy. The protests in Moscow and other cities following the parliamentary elections in December 2011 did not hail the beginning of a Russian version of the Arab spring.
Nor did they represent the belated arrival of a Ukrainian-style coloured revolution. Russia is not Egypt, for one thing. Nor does Russia in 2012 resemble Ukraine in 2003. This article is part of the focal point Russia in global dialogue, which is a cooperation with the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM). But how exactly should we understand this "managed democracy" – an obscure system that until recently seemed set to be the way post-communist Russia would be ruled for the foreseeable future. Until now, that is. The People vs. Vladimir Putin. This past Sunday, a few minutes before two o’clock in the afternoon, the Garden Ring road in Moscow, a ten-mile-long, multilane circle that wraps around the city center, was covered in a light, wet snowfall. The organizers of Russia’s opposition protests had hoped to organize a human chain that would stretch across the entire ring, which at an average width of a foot and a half per person, they estimated would take 34,000 people.
At exactly two o’clock, the hour the demonstration was supposed to start, the patch of sidewalk where I was standing near the Sukharevskaya metro station was thick with people standing arm in arm, chatting and joking, white ribbons pinned to their winter coats. A young couple, Alexei and Nina, had just arrived. “We wanted to be with all these people,” Alexei told me. A few steps down, a group of young men were waving at the passing cars and taking pictures. But that does not mean their desires will be easy for the Kremlin to sate. Loading... "Putin’s Choice" by Charles Tannock. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space BRUSSELS – Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin as Russia’s president was always a foregone conclusion. But, when he is sworn in on May 7, he will retake formal charge of a country whose politics – even Putin’s own political future – has turned unpredictable.
Putin’s return to the presidency, following a period of de facto control as prime minister, was supposed to signify a reassuring continuation of “business as usual” – a strong, orderly state devoid of the potentially destabilizing effects of multiparty democracy and bickering politicians. Instead, the Russian people have now challenged the status quo. How Putin, an astute politician, responds to that pressure will determine his political legacy. Nothing illustrates Russia’s malaise under Putin better than the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer working for a British investment fund. Vlad Putin and the loneliness of the long distance president. Vladimir Putin unexpectedly pulled out of last weekend’s G8 summit in the USA, sending Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in his place. He gave as his reason the need to finish work setting up his new cabinet, but eminent Moscow journalist and music critic Artemy Troitsky has another explanation for the president’s change of plan. When the newly installed Russian president suddenly decided not to go to Camp David for the G8 summit, experts and analysts, both in Russia and the West, were ready with all kinds of explanations for this move, what message it was supposed to convey to the assembled world leaders and what political convolutions were behind it.
All rubbish – or at best a sprig of parsley to garnish the main reason. 'Relations used to be a bit warmer, and Putin always had Berlusconi as a crony in the ‘semi-outcast’ fraction of the G8…but now it’s a complete washout.' So OK, outside Russia no one, apart from a handful of lost souls, needs Putin. Muscovites Go to the Streets as Putin Declares ‘Victory’ MOSCOW — An uninformed tourist who happened to be in Moscow in the past three days could be forgiven for thinking that the Russian capital is under a military siege.
Thousands of special police forces, interior ministry troops, the elite Dzerzhinsky Division, as well as Chechen police units, were brought to central Moscow to protect Vladimir Putin’s fraudulent “victory.” According to the official results, Putin received 64 percent of the vote. Addressing his supporters, who were brought from across the country to downtown Moscow on Sunday night, Putin declared his “win” and denounced efforts to “destroy Russia’s statehood and usurp power.” According to a parallel vote count, conducted by the independent election-monitoring organzation Golos, Putin’s actual result hovers around the 50-percent mark—and that with the removal from the race of Grigory Yavlinsky, the only truly alternative candidate, and television coverage heavily skewed in favor of the regime.
Photo by Vladimir Kara-Murza. Chechen precinct gives 107 percent. As usual, the restive region of Chechnya went a bit over the top with the election fraud in Russia's presidential contest, with 99.59 percent reported turnout and 99.82 percent of voters backing Vladimir Putin. One precinct, according to the New York Times, really went above and beyond: The final tally: Putin, 1,482 votes; Gennady A. Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, one vote. This result was in itself statistically improbable. But even more difficult for the teachers who had been drafted onto the electoral commission to explain was the turnout: there were only 1,389 people registered in the precinct, meaning that the turnout was 107 percent. Given what was going on elsewhere in the region, it's not really hard to understand how this happened: Through the day in this neighborhood of Grozny, dozens of minibuses, some bearing the emblem of the local Gazprom affiliate, ChechenRegionGaz, shuttled voters to, from and — significantly — between polling stations.
STR/AFP/Getty Images. ‘This Is How You Elect a F*cking President?’ - By Julia Ioffe. MOSCOW — When Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov left Pushkin Square Monday night, the crowd -- estimated by the police at 14,000 -- was just starting to disperse. They had stood for two hours in sub-zero temperatures, not 24 hours after Vladimir Putin wept after sweeping to victory in Sunday's presidential race with 63.6 percent of the vote. They had listened to speeches from the whole gamut of the opposition -- the leftists, the nationalists, Alexey Navalny, Mikhail Prokhorov, all had their turn at the microphone.
They chanted "Putin is a thief! " and "We are the power! " Gudkov, who represents the Just Russia party and has been a central figure in this winter's opposition protests, made sure to talk to the police officer overseeing the whole operation before he left for his appearance on opposition channel RainTV. It didn't quite go down like that. They got Udaltsov, Navalny, opposition figure Ilya Yashin, a Western journalist, and Ponomarev, who stood shouting into a loudspeaker: "Police! How Russia’s urban middle class can bring an end to Putinism. I first went to the Soviet Union in 1979 as a graduate student.
I was immediately struck by how Soviet citizens walked along — looking at their feet. This was a frightened and cowed population, many of whom remembered firsthand the oppression and violence of Stalinism. Repression casts a long historical shadow. When Putin took office, he reestablished the arbitrary power of the state — destroying the independence of the judiciary; appointing governors rather than voters electing them; and all but closing down independent television.
But Soviet-style repression it wasn’t — neither in its brutality nor its reach into the general population. At a meeting with young entrepreneurs during a visit to Moscow as secretary of state in 2007, I voiced concern about the absence of independent media. He might have added that all of them had worked outside Russia — in global law, consulting and accounting firms. These young people are a relatively small percentage of Russia’s population. La Nausée Russe - Andrei Piontkovsky. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space MOSCOW – The history of successive authoritarian regimes in Russia reveals a recurring pattern: they do not die from external blows or domestic insurgencies. Instead, they tend to collapse from a strange internal malady – a combination of the elites’ encroaching disgust with themselves and a realization that the regime is exhausted. The illness resembles a political version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential nausea, and led to both the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet Union’s demise with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika.
Today, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s regime is afflicted with the same terminal disease, despite – or because of – the seemingly impermeable political wall that it spent years constructing around itself. Two events have sharply accelerated the collapse of confidence in Putin’s regime, both among the “elite” and ordinary Russians. What is happening in Russia today is part of a global phenomenon. In Sunday’s Vote, It’s Putin vs. Russia. Russia's Activists Regroup. Letter From The economic boom that took place under the watch of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave birth to a new middle class in Russia. But now, in the run-up to Sunday’s presidential election, that very group has turned against him and taken to the streets. The speeches at the protests last weekend were uninspiring and off-message.
By focusing on vote-rigging, which was not nearly as prevalent as in other recent elections, organizers sidelined themselves. Russian police detain a protester in St. Petersburg, March 5, 2012. Vladimir Putin did not wait long to celebrate. With such language, Putin returned to the idea that has undergirded his reign for the past 12 years.
You must be a logged in Foreign Affairs subscriber to continue reading. With ‘Election’ Over, Putin Faces a Changed Country. Why are Russians attracted to strong leaders? The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. In this week’s VSI column, we give you Russian History: A Very Short Introduction. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series! Russian History: A Very Short Introduction By Geoffrey Hosking After a decade of a chaotic but exhilarating democracy in the 1990s, Vladamir Putin as president and prime minister has been restoring a strong state.
This is all part of a well-established historical pattern. Older people can still remember the German invasion of 1941, in which such scenes were reproduced over broad swathes of the country. The latter accusation resonates with Russians, since they also fear troublemaking underlings inside the country. Putin returns, but will Russia revert to ‘virtual democracy’?
"Putin’s Final Act" by Nina L. Khrushcheva. Putin's Secret War - By Anna Nemtsova. Russia's Surprisingly Liberal New Cabinet - By Anders Åslund. Putin’s New Cabinet Offers More of the Same. "Russia Stays Home" by Javier Solana. Putin Between Assad and Mubarak | Opinion. The Temporary Return of Putin Co. Putin’s Brezhnev Syndrome - Pierre Buhler. News Desk: Putin’s Big Mistake? Vladimir Putin's Cyber Warriors. The Kremlin Strikes Back by Amy Knight. A Warning Shot For Putin. Petrushka v. Mr Botox. This Could Be Putin's Last Election | Opinion. Vladimir Putin, Democracy, and Activism in Russia. Kremlin Moves to Silence Independent Radio. Mission to Moscow. Tightening the Screws - By Julia Ioffe. The Kremlin versus the bloggers: the battle for cyberspace. The Kremlin and the hackers: partners in crime? Cleaning Up in Moscow - By Julia Ioffe. Pussy Riot’s show trial.
Russia urges Putin to step down. News Desk: Putin: A Used President? A Russian Awakening? - Jeffrey Tayler - International. The Autumn of the US-Russia Reset. The End of the 'Reset' Won't Get Fooled Again - By Julia Ioffe. Putin and the Uses of History. Portrait of the Young Vladimir Putin. 'I, Putin': An Inside Look at Russia's Aging, Lonely Leader - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International.
With my little eye. Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky: One Man’s Truth, Another Man’s Tyranny | Politics. Vladimir’s Tale by Anne Applebaum. Putin Forever - An FP Slide Show. Was There Really a Plot to Assassinate Putin? Putin the Peacemaker? - By Dmitri Trenin. Vladimir the Unstable. Russia’s ‘Public’ TV, Putin-Style.