The Long, Slow Road to a Post-Putin Russia

Russia underwent several governmental upheavals in the last hundred years—from tsarism to communism, then on to capitalism—and the massive demonstrations in Moscow and other Russian cities this past weekend against election fraud have some international analysts speculating that the country is headed toward another. They see, in the masses of protesters, a resounding public rejection of autocrat Vladimir Putin and his party, United Russia, which has up until now held a de facto monopoly on national political power.

“It is clear that the current political system will now have to give way to a more pluralistic one in which the Kremlin and United Russia will have to compromise and build coalitions with the three other parties in the Duma,” wrote Nikolay Petrov, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholar in a December 6 Moscow Times commentary.

The dissenters are a new Russian polity in the making, in the view of Radio Free Europe correspondent Brian Whitmore. He noted the rise in the last decade of an entrepreneurial Russian middle class and the role that middle-class activists are playing, via Facebook and other social-networking sites, in organizing the dissent.

According to Whitmore, it’s the same pattern that engendered reform in then-authoritarian, now-democratic Chile, Taiwan, and South Korea: The economy grows, middle-class citizens see living standards improve, and they begin to aspire to continuing improvement, which includes greater rights and political freedoms.

“They (the Kremlin) may yet be able to shut down these protests and get back to business as usual. But the social forces driving this uprising are not going away anytime soon,” he wrote.

Putin will have to reckon with those forces next year when he runs for president. More demonstrations will be a given. A few riots are likely, as well. But where will it all lead? Will Putin fall from power, much like Egyptian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak did earlier this year?

Probably not. And there’s a good reason why: Russia is not Egypt.

Egypt’s revolution was the handiwork of well-connected young activist leaders and older, firmly entrenched opposition parties. The Muslim Brotherhood, a party that has been around for more than 90 years and proven itself credible, played a key leadership role. So did the nascent party of respected, internationally celebrated Egyptian activist Mohammad El-Baradei.

The Egyptians who overthrew Mubarak thus operated not on blind rage, but with a shared understanding that a better alternative was at hand, and with leaders that they trusted would guide them to it. And while those leaders did not all agree on specifics, they agreed on fundamentals—i.e., an Egypt that espouses Islam but rejects Islamic extremism.

Russia’s protest organizers are dedicated, but none can claim national standing, like El-Baradei can among his fellow Egyptians. And while there are political parties backing them up, those parties don’t agree on much of anything: They run the gamut from communist to liberal democrat to extreme right-wing nationalist.

More important, all of those parties are running up against a deep-seated cultural cynicism over politics in general. Too many Russians simply don’t trust politicians, period. Having lived through a communist revolution that promised them a worker’s paradise but did not deliver, and then a capitalist overhaul that promised them freedom and prosperity but did not deliver, should they place any faith in some new upstart party that promises to set things right?

Much of the would-be Russian electorate has decided “nyet.” No single opposition party draws enough votes anywhere near those of United Russia, and the poll numbers of most—including all the democratic-minded ones—are stuck in the single digits.

Moreover, they compete with such jaded voices as Garry Kasparov, chess master and anti-Putin activist, who went on record this fall urging Russians to boycott the upcoming December 4 elections because they would be “neither free nor fair.” Likewise, Russian journalist Dmitry Oreshkin, writing in Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, encouraged citizens to monitor a few polls, and only a few, just to show these elections for the sham that they really are.

The rage is there, but the leadership is not. And a movement without leadership can only go so far.

Make no mistake about it: Democratic alternatives to Putin are present in Russia, and they gained some ground in this election. But they will have to gain a lot more before they can make an impact, and that will take time: time for them to build relationships, to recruit volunteers, to establish track records of initiating legislation and withstanding United Russia blowback, and—above all—to earn Russian would-be voters’ trust.

“Probably the ingredients that produced the Arab Spring and several ‘velvet revolutions’ over the past decade are not yet present in Russia. The state has made mistakes, but is not so weak as to make it vulnerable to any home-grown Tahrir Square. The opposition has limited experience and is uncertain of its own popular appeal,” stated a December 10 editorial in British newspaper the Independent.

But the editorial did see a lining of hope: The protesters are there, and while they cannot yet take control of the state, they can at least record its abuses. They are documenting vote falsifications via Web media and recording with cameras the police who beat and abuse protesters. Russian officials may still act exploitatively, but the limelight of the world is on them, and it will not go back out.

“For all the differences between protests in Moscow and Cairo–and for that matter in New York and Oakland–some developments are the same. The most important of these is that state violence is now invariably recorded by mobile phone cameras and immediately publicised by YouTube in a way that was inconceivable 20 years ago,” the editorial stated. “The balance of power on the street has changed.”

Russia probably has a few years of Putinism left. But time will tell just how many. It may be fewer than Putin would like.