Understanding the March 26th Russian Election

Jeffrey Sommers

Russian democracy rode high in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. Glasnost created a genuine culture of citizen participation in political life. Sterile arguments remain over whether this was done to preserve communism or tear it down. Whatever the reasons, for a few bright shining years Russia possessed a vigorous democratic political dialogue putting that of the US, or many other Western democracies, to shame. No mere chance to “participate” in a coronation of political figures and their platforms well preened and screened by powerful special interests, Russia truly had a citizenry active in political life. It was an openness which defied the still existing KGB’s repressive internal surveillance apparatus. That criminal organization which bled the nation of resources and forced so many to live in fear could no longer stem the tide of participatory democracy unleashed as early as the mid 1980s. Indeed, it was hatred of the KGB that helped pull down the economic union among the Soviet republics and bloc. Had that economic union remained, or even been dissolved in a planned fashion over many years, then perhaps the utter ruin of East European economy could have been avoided. Instead, as former chief economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz (most likely pressured to resign by US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers) has remarked in the Nov/Dec issue of Challenge:

“...the facts, to say the least, are jarring. With only one exception [Poland], the countries under question have done more poorly since the transition to the market economy than before. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of these countries have yet to reach their 1989 gross domestic product (GDP) levels, meaning that, on average, these countries today are worse off than they were before the transition.” “But even bleaker are the statistics on poverty. For eighteen of the twenty-five countries [in East/Central Europe] for which we have data, poverty on average has increased from 4 percent to 45 percent of the population....They have managed to experience lower growth and greater inequality since the transition than before it began.”

The transition to poverty planned by the likes of Lawrence Summers, who when brought to Russia it was reported by Fulbright Scholar and Anthropologist Janine Wedel in her book Collision and Collusion that he spent his leisure time neurotically chiseling off a relief of Lenin embedded in the wall of his office--not because Summers had any legitimate aversion to authoritarianism under Lenin, but more likely because like a Stalinist, Summers wanted to airbrush an unpleasant fact from history. For Summers this unpleasant reminder was that once before people had revolted against an economic liberal utopia. Summers came bearing that economic liberal gift again. This time resulting in the consequences Stiglitz mentions above.

Yet, this was more than mere ideology at work; much more. The neoliberal project to dissolve the Soviet bloc economy put forth by Jeffrey Sachs as “necessary” for rebuilding East Europe worked very much to the advantage of capital. West Europe’s economy already suffering from overcapacity, found a useful area to dump its excess production. Moreover, with the collapse of East Europe’s economy their exports of industrial products to the West collapsed. Indeed, the raw materials and equipment which once went into the production of industrial products in East Europe now could be bought by the West at fire sale prices. In other words, East Europe was returned to its pre-1917 role as supplier of raw materials and consumer of Western products. A class of powerful oligarchs arose in Russia who cooperated with this regime and profited handsomely from it.

To be sure, this state of affairs could not continue under conditions of the rich political discourse opened up in the late 1980s. People in Russia began to rebel. In order to continue this program in the 1990s democracy had to be checked. In Russia this took the form of shutting down the elected Duma in 1993. Yeltsin’s forces bloodily suppressed the people’s representatives in an attack on the parliament which may have left as many as 1000 dead. After the slaughter these dissenting Duma members found themselves evicted from their apartments, a very serious punishment in the incredibly tight Moscow housing market.

Many intellectuals and Russia’s new rich supported this move. It secured their status as Russia’s new elite. In Orwellian fashion it was all spun as suppressing anti-democratic forces, and the world’s economic liberal elite nodded in approval. By 1996, Yeltsin had a firm grip on Russia’s media. A cocktail of almost total control of the media, of massive campaign spending, and what many commentators have argued was a jigger of election fraud, was served up to put together Yeltsin’s 1996 election victory.

This magician’s trick could not be duplicated again using the same ridiculous front figure in 2000. Central casting had to find a new figure to replace Yeltsin.

Vladimir Putin would do. He was a survivor. From the KGB to its renamed Yeltsin era incarnation, the FSB, he was fully versed in the panoply of dirty tricks and rules of intimidation of the Chekist. Launching the war on Chechnya was a reliable tactic for generating public support by diverting public attention away from internal problems. Remaining critics could be intimidated using both familiar and new techniques. By now there really no longer existed an opposition media. There was only one dissenting voice in Moscow: the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Routinely caring articles by left opposition intellectuals such as Boris Kagarlitsky, it was an irritant. It continued to ask the embarrassing question about FSB agents reportedly found at the scene of the Ryazan apartment bombing. As we recall, this bombing last fall was one of the pretexts used for launching the war against Chechnya.

As the March 26th election nears, Novaya Gazeta, as reported by the Voice of America, had its computers sabotaged on March 15th just as it was about to send the paper to press. This last of the opposition papers, which only appears once a week, was put on notice that dissent will not be tolerated. As the election nears what is clear is that that Russia’s oligarchs are securely in power (although with some squabling among themselves) and they have a capable agent in Putin of suppressing all dissent. He is also familiar with the usual nationalist ploys that can be put to use during times of trouble to generate public support.

Russia’s “transition” is now truly complete. The economy only serves Russia’s oligarchs, while the old repressive internal security apparatus in its new FSB incarnation has been placed back in charge, with the democracy of glasnost only a faded memory. Hopefully history will record that this project which served capital so well, while destroying a genuine flowering of democracy in East Europe, had its ideological cover provided by neoliberal intellectuals based in the elite universities and think tanks of the West.

Jeffrey Sommers World History Center Boston/Riga www.whc.neu.edu