Monday, February 27, 2012

RUSSIA’S LOOMING CRISIS

From FPRI:

RUSSIA’S LOOMING CRISIS

                by David Satter


David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent, is a longtime 
observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is a senior 
fellow of FPRI, the Hudson Institute, and a fellow of the 
Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of 
Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Satter has written three 
books about Russia and the Soviet Union, most recently, It Was 
a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the 
Communist Past (Yale, 2011). 

This essay is drawn from a 45-page FPRI E-Book just posted at: 
http://www.fpri.org/pubs/2012/201203.satter.russiasloomingcrisis.pdf 


Until late last year, there appeared little doubt but that 
the victory of Vladimir Putin in the upcoming March 2012 
presidential elections was a foregone conclusion and that 
Putin was likely to rule in Russia for another 12 years. 

All of this changed with the fraudulent December 4 
parliamentary elections. Putin’s announcement that he would 
be running again for president evoked some cynical reactions 
on the part of a population which now saw that the four-year 
presidency of Putin’s long time protégé, Dmitri Medvedev, 
had been nothing but a masquerade. But it was only the sheer 
scale of the vote rigging in the elections for deputies to the 
State Duma that brought home the degree to which Russians were 
saddled with a leadership that had no intention of giving up 
power and that they were powerless to change. 

The conditions in Russia had been giving rise to discontent. 
In 2011, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, polls 
showed that a record number of young Russians wanted to leave 
the country. A poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research 
Center put the number at 22 per cent of the population. This 
compares to 16 per cent in the early 1990s when, after the fall 
of the Soviet Union, the population was plunged into grinding 
poverty. Among Russians between 18 and 24, the number who wanted 
to leave was almost 40 per cent. (In 2011, the state audit chamber 
said that 1.25 million Russians had left the country in the 
previous three years, more than after the 1917 revolution.)  

Some of the reasons were given by a 25-year-old woman in an 
article on the website gazeta.ru. She cited fear of the police, 
an absence of professionalism “beginning with medicine and ending 
with the laundry,” corruption and the lack of respect for the 
rights and freedoms of others, “intolerance often bordering on 
fascism.”[1] 

Dmitri Oreshkin, a Russian political scientist, said the reason 
for the desire to leave was atmospheric. It “is the same one that 
[Russian poet Alexander] Blok once gave for Pushkin’s death: not 
enough air. It’s harder and harder for a free, self-sufficient person 
to breathe in Putin’s Russia. There’s no place provided for him 
here.”[2] Andrei Geim, a Russian émigré living in Manchester who won 
the Nobel prize for physics last year, answered when asked what it 
would take for him to return to Russia: “Reincarnation.”[3] 

In the weeks after the results of the election for the State Duma 
were announced, however, Russians began to protest against a 
situation that they had long seemed to accept. On December 10, 
60,000 persons rallied in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square against vote 
fraud and to demand new, honest elections. On December 24, a rally 
drew 100,000 persons and the rally on February 4, drew more than 
100,000. Previously, opposition rallies drew only a few hundred 
persons. These, however, were the largest demonstrations since the 
ones in 1991 that led to the fall of the Soviet Union. 

Russia now faces a momentous political crisis. The abuses of the 
Putin regime are so fundamental that, without profound change, the 
protest movement is unlikely to be stopped. Putin, however, is 
unlikely to agree to reforms that would threaten his hold on power. 
The stage is therefore set for a protracted conflict between Putin 
and the opposition that it likely to touch on each of the corrupt 
aspects of the present regime’s policies – the authoritarian 
political system, the corrupt and criminalized economy, the war in 
the North Caucasus and threat of terrorism, and finally the aggressive 
foreign policy that has put Russia at odds with the West and made it 
an object of resentment and fear on the part of the former Soviet 
republics and former Warsaw Pact members that are its closest 
neighbors. 

Yevgeny Gontmakher, a sociologist with the Institute of Contemporary 
Development, said in an article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the 
situation in the country was similar to what it was on the eve of the 
1917 revolution. “The political machine built by Putin was effective 
in some places until 2007,” he wrote, “but the regime has started to 
malfunction, like a car whose guarantee has long since expired and all 
of whose systems are starting to fail.” If the world’s largest country 
in terms of area is heading for a system crisis, the result could be a 
new round of tragedies for the Russian people and a serious danger for 
the whole world. 

To read more, visit: 
http://www.fpri.org/pubs/2012/201203.satter.russiasloomingcrisis.pdf 

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Notes

[1] A Reader, “Devyat prichin, po kotorym ya uezhayu iz Rossii,” 
www.gazeta.ru, August 22, 2011 

[2] Max Seddon, “Young Russians move abroad for ‘breath of fresh air,” 
Russian: Beyond the Headlines, April 8, 2011

[3] Mark Franchetti, “Young choose to abandon corrupt Russia,” Sunday 
Times, August 14, 2011


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(http://www.fpri.org/). 

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