Darkness is falling in Vladimir Putin's Russia
Pastor Dale Morgan
Darkness is falling in Vladimir Putin's Russia*
By Con Coughlin
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007
Soaring oil prices have made the country a power again - but its ruler's
grip on politics, the media and economy has sinister implications for
democracy. Con Coughlin reports from Moscow
Standing in the shadow of the Lubyanka, the notorious former KGB
headquarters in central Moscow, a small group of elderly women are
gathered around a large slab of granite that commemorates one of the
darkest episodes in Russia's history.
The slab was taken from one of the Solovetsky punishment camps near
Archangel on the White Sea, which formed what the Russian writer
Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as the Gulag Archipelago, where the
victims of Stalin's terror were sent to their deaths in their tens of
thousands.
It has been placed outside the Lubyanka as a memorial to the millions of
victims of state persecution and repression during the Soviet era. A
neighbouring monument to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Bolshevik founder of
the KGB, was unceremoniously torn down by an angry crowd of Muscovites
shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s: all that
now remains is a well-cut grass mound.
Wearing faded headscarves and threadbare coats to protect themselves
from the bitter cold, the frail old ladies - some of them in their
nineties - quietly intone their prayers for the dead, before placing
small, neatly bound clusters of flowers around the granite slab.
"I'm still trying to find out what really happened to my grandfather,"
says Lyudmila, an 82-year-old grandmother who has travelled 500 miles to
Moscow to mark Russia's official Memorial Day for Political Prisoners.
"They wanted him to work for the KGB, but when he refused they sent him
off to the Gulags. He died of starvation, but apart from that we know
very little."
Darkness is falling in Putin's Russia
Two nations: Moscow must rate as the world capital for conspicuous
consumption – luxury cars clog the streets while homeless people
scavenge for food
Russian experts estimate that seven million people perished in the
Gulags, and ordinary families are still struggling to come to terms with
the horrors they suffered under the Soviet era.
Even Russian president Vladimir Putin, a former senior KGB officer,
appears to understand the necessity of acknowledging the appalling
repression of the Soviet era. Later in the day he would make his first
visit to a memorial and church built at a site on the outskirts of
Moscow where thousands of people were executed by firing squad.
This year is the 70th anniversary of Stalin's Great Terror. It is also
an election year in Moscow, and ever-eager to consolidate his popularity
(Putin has an 80 per cent approval rating), the Russian leader paid a
fulsome tribute to the millions of victims.
"As a rule these were people with their own opinions," said Putin.
"These were people who were not afraid to speak their mind. They were
the most capable people. They were the pride of the nation. And, of
course, over many years we still remember this tragedy. We need to do a
great deal to ensure that this is never forgotten."
The implication, of course, was that nothing like this could happen in
Putin's Russia, a truly democratic state where the rule of law is supreme.
Well, tell that to Mikhail Khordokovsky, the former oil tycoon who only
six years ago had a personal fortune worth an estimated $10 billion
(£4.8 billion). But then he made the cardinal error of publicly
criticising Putin's decidedly autocratic style of government.
He now spends his days breaking rocks at a remote Siberian penal colony,
where he is halfway through an eight-year jail term on what many of his
supporters believe are politically motivated fraud charges.
The notion that Russia under Putin could return to the worst excesses of
Comrade Stalin is, of course, far-fetched.
For a start, the Communist ideology that inspired the Bolsheviks to
launch their class war against the governing and professional classes
lies buried under the rubble of the Iron Curtain, so much so that the
Communists will hardly feature in next month's parliamentary elections,
which will in turn set the tone for next year's presidential election.
These days, Russian politics is all about the exercise of raw power and
the accumulation of vast wealth. For some, like the closely-knit group
of former KGB officers around Putin - the siloviki - it is possible to
acquire both.
Putin is claimed by some to have a personal fortune in offshore bank
accounts in Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, while establishing an
authoritarian regime that has established a stranglehold over all the
key levers of power.
"To talk about democracy in Russia today is utterly ridiculous,"
explains Stanislav Belkovsky, a leading Kremlinologist whose new book,
Putin's Business, provides a detailed breakdown of the Russian
president's private wealth.
"Putin is one of the wealthiest men in Europe because his business
partners are running a network of companies while he runs Russia. So
many people want to get their hands on the country's wealth that they
are prepared to do anything not to upset Putin. It's a very effective
control mechanism."
The recent turnaround in the country's economic fortunes is almost
entirely to do with spiralling oil prices, which have recently risen
above $90 a barrel over fears that America is shaping up for a military
confrontation with Iran, a conflict Russia is anxious to avoid. But if
Moscow is unhappy with the Bush administration's warlike disposition, it
is nevertheless happy to reap the riches brought by the rocketing price
of oil.
It might seem hard to believe now, but when Putin came to power eight
years ago, Russia was an economic basket case. Boris Yeltsin's chaotic
presidency had left the country virtually bankrupt.
The debt default of 1998 had resulted in millions of Russians losing
their jobs and savings, and pensioners, servicemen, teachers and
scientists all went unpaid. This was a period when it was not uncommon
to find that the bellhop at one of Moscow's new, Western-financed hotels
had a PhD in nuclear physics.
Today, Russia has the world's third-largest currency reserves, standing
at £200 billion, mainly as a result of Putin's brutal repossession of
the country's main energy companies from the oligarchs who had bought
them cheaply during the 1990s and made themselves vast personal fortunes.
That wealth is channelled into propping up Putin's regime, and while
beyond Moscow there are still large swathes of the country where poverty
is rife and the population survives on a subsistence diet, in the
capital it is clear that life for Putin's supporters has never been better.
Moscow must rate as the world capital for conspicuous consumption. It is
said there are more Bentleys per capita than anywhere else in the world,
and boutique stores selling leading luxury brands, from Cartier to
Chanel, struggle to meet the demand generated by the city's new super-rich.
Nor has the new oil wealth only been concentrated in the hands of the
chosen few. There has been a tenfold increase in the national budget in
the past seven years, and there is a palpable sense of prosperity and
self-confidence running through the rapidly emerging professional classes.
But even if the economic feel-good factor is starting to trickle down
from Putin's elite to other sectors of society, the Russian people have
paid a heavy price for their new-found prosperity, both in terms of the
erosion of their political rights and the effective suspension of the
rule of law.
The parliamentary elections will take place on December 2, but the
result is a foregone conclusion. Putin's United Russia party will win 80
per cent of the vote and form the a government for the next four years.
It will then be for them to decide whether Putin should change the
constitution to allow him to stand for a third term in next spring's
presidential elections.
"It's a bit like going to a football match, and when you arrive at the
stadium the score has already been decided without the teams even having
to take to the pitch," explains Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of Yabloko
(Apple), one of the few truly independent political parties still
participating in the election campaign.
"Putin has the system so closely controlled that he is able to arrange
the result of a so-called democratic election weeks before that election
has even taken place."
Yavlinsky knows all about Putin's political skills, having stood against
him in the last presidential election four years ago. Yavlinsky's small
grass-roots organisation was no match for Putin's KGB organisational
skills. The president's supporters ensured that Yavlinsky's party won
less than five per cent of the national vote, which meant that it could
not even be represented in the Duma.
"It was very strange how we would win thousands of votes in the
provinces, but when they came to be counted in Moscow they had somehow
been reduced to just a few hundred," says Yavlinsky. "No wonder no one
stands a chance of defeating Putin in the coming elections."
Electoral fraud is allegedly just one of many ways the United Russia
party keeps its stranglehold over the state. On election day there are
an estimated 98,000 polling booths, and even though some are monitored
by independent observers, it is impossible to keep a check on all the
different votes, which are eventually sent to Moscow, where the
electoral commission, supervised by political appointees, announces the
result.
Another effective control mechanism is that the Kremlin dictates access
to state funding for political parties, and also how much airtime they
have on state-controlled television and coverage in the main
state-controlled newspapers.
In order to get funds and media exposure, a party must give the Kremlin
a firm assurance that it will not discuss controversial issues, such as
state corruption, or the way the ruling elite uses the courts to
intimidate its opponents. Once that assurance is forthcoming, the party
will receive money for its campaign and its candidates will be allowed
to appear on television.
But even then opposition parties are only allowed on television for the
month-long election campaign. For the rest of the time, the Kremlin
keeps a tight rein on who gets on television, with producers being given
regularly updated lists of who can appear.
The result is that on most nights, the main news topic is a eulogistic
account of Putin's latest activities, whether that be posing semi-naked
on a fishing expedition or travelling to Teheran to lecture the
Americans on the futility of launching military action against Iran.
With coverage like this, it is hardly surprising that Putin's approval
rating rarely dips below the 80 per cent mark.
As a former KGB officer under the Soviet system, Putin understands the
value of propaganda in indoctrinating the populace, and the stranglehold
he has over the media is equal to the control he exercises over the
economy. Economic prosperity and rigorous media control are a potent mix
when it comes to keeping a firm grip on power, and Putin has
demonstrated an aptitude for maintaining both.
There is, though, a dark underbelly to this resurgent Russian bear
which, despite the formidable powers at its disposal, remains highly
sensitive to criticism, whether from home or abroad.
The BBC's Russian FM service recently disappeared from the airwaves
after it ran a series of interviews with disaffected Russians who dared
to voice their criticism's of Putin's Russia. And far worse fates have
befallen those, such as the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who have
managed to evade the stranglehold the government has on media outlets to
publish highly critical articles on the regime's conduct.
It is just over a year since Politkovskaya was found dead at the bottom
of a Moscow lift shaft with three bullets pumped into her skull. The
official investigation into her death - carried out by yet another Putin
associate - has produced an interesting insight into how the regime's
critics are silenced.
Politkovskaya was as much a critic of Putin's authoritarianism as she
was of Moscow's disastrous involvement in Chechnya. Shortly before her
death, she wrote of his regime: "The shroud of darkness from which we
spent several Soviet decades trying to free ourselves is enveloping us
again."
But it was her trenchant criticism of the conduct of Moscow's military
campaign in Chechnya that provoked most controversy, and it now seems
likely that a group of Chechen warlords loyal to the Kremlin contracted
a gang of Moscow street criminals to murder her.
The poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London last year was seen by
many as another example of Moscow's heavy-handed response to
high-profile critics. But the state repression is more reminiscent of
the paranoia that characterised the Brezhnev era in the 1970s, when
refuseniks were carted off to lunatic asylums, rather than the
widespread killing during Stalin's Great Terror.
Indeed, there have recently been reports that some prominent critics of
the regime have also found themselves being committed to the state's
psychiatric care, although, to date, these have been rare instances and
there is no evidence to suggest the practice is widespread.
What is not in any doubt, however, is that Putin is the undisputed
master of all he surveys in Russia. The big question now is whether he
can summon the courage to give up all the power he has so carefully
accumulated over the past eight years.
Under the current constitution, Putin is obliged to leave office next
spring after two full presidential terms. It has been suggested that he
might be prepared to take the more junior position of prime minister in
the Russian parliament, so long as he can manoeuvre one his key allies
into the presidency.
Alternatively, he could get himself appointed to the energy giant
Gazprom, and add to the considerable fortune he has accumulated as
president.
But for these scenarios to work, Putin would ultimately have to answer
to the new Russian president - and Putin has not been good at taking
orders since he worked at the KGB.
Which is why most Russians believe that, once United Russia has secured
its predicted two thirds parliamentary majority, it will move quickly to
amend the constitution to allow their president to serve a third term.
So far as Putin is concerned, when it comes to being President of
Russia, you can't get enough of a good thing.