By Patricia H. Kushlis
Tampering with the ballot box can be hazardous to the health.
It’s bad enough that on September 24, Vladimir Putin cavalierly announced he would take over – yet again – as Russia’s President but the spark that brought tens of thousands of Russian protestors into the streets last Sunday for the largest anti-government demonstrations since 1991 were eye-witness reports and amateur videos of blatant election fraud filmed – and then Youtubed - by ordinary Russian citizens with camera phones and other video equipment during the previous week’s Russian parliamentary elections.
It was just twenty years ago that Russians had similarly taken to the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg to protest the hijacking of the Soviet government by three drunken clowns er Communist Party coup makers which, had they succeeded, could have sent the world back to the coldest times of the Cold War. That was the first popular Russian uprising filmed by western television – and it was made for CNN’s new 24/7 broadcast format. It was also viewed in Moscow in real time.
The lid went back on slowly but relentlessly eleven years ago – the Russian media that had been unchained by Gorbachev and freed by Yeltsin – was put under wraps by Putin ostensibly to stabilize and make the country secure again but in reality to reinstitute his one-party strong man rule – something a majority of Russians, according to the polls, seemed to crave.
This was not the first time Russia’s parliamentary elections had been rigged by the Putin government and the opposition muzzled. Similar tactics had been used in 2007. But public outrage at that time was invisible. Putin’s popularity then was reported to be an astronomical 80%. It had dropped to around 60% this year – lower by a good 20 percentage points – but still high enough for United Russia to expect to win a clear majority at the polls.
Ballot box stuffing and other electoral shenanigans, therefore, made no sense – unless the pollsters were lying or voters had lied to the pollsters. Yet no one’s made that claim.
The $10,000 question is: Why did the authorities think they needed to employ such unnecessary – and possibly - counterproductive tactics to keep power in the hands of the already powerful? Or maybe it wasn’t fear but rather arrogance and maybe it was election officials taking things into their own hands – just to be 128% certain that the results would turn out to please their boss in good old Soviet fashion. Or not.
Jolts to the Kremlin; jolts to the people
When United Russia came in with only 49.4% of the vote and claim to 53% of the seats – still enough to govern - the results clearly jolted the Kremlin. Likely even more so because of the vote rigging that had occurred which, if the real numbers had been reported, would have put Putin’s party in the minority. Did Putin and his cronies see this as a signal that his return to the Presidency next March in a supposedly ceremonial election to coronate the king once again might not turn out to be the planned cakewalk after all?
When the videos of blatant electoral fraud reached the Internet – the documentary photos also clearly jolted the Russian population or at least enough of them to join organized protests from Tomsk and Voronesh to Moscow and St. Petersburg on Sunday with more to come. Standing out in the bitter Russian winter for hours, after all, is no fun and games.
Although Russian economic growth had slowed since the world recession of 2007, Russians are still living far better than they did in 1991 and reports indicate that one-third of the population is now middle class. The demonstrators on Sunday were not primarily workers or peasants or even the intelligentsia. They were accountants, lawyers, security guards, bank clerks and clergy – yes, that’s right, they also included members of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Since the Russian Orthodox Church is incredibly good at sensing the direction of the political winds, the clerical hierarchy’s loud public objections to the Putin regime’s flaunting of free and fair elections laws speaks volumes. The fact that members of the clergy themselves personally saw and reported electoral tampering as it happened just helped to bring witness to support the church’s outcry.
Furthermore, the change in television reportage – from newscasts which had earlier in the week shown only cute, young and well clad pro-Putin demonstrators drumming and chanting his virtues to footage that ran Sunday’s demonstrations as straight news – may also be indicative of a change in the political climate. Since almost all Russian broadcast media is controlled by the government – another Putin innovation that takes the country back to the unsavory Soviet past for “stability’s sake” – one has to wonder whether Russian journalists had taken matters into their own hands to show the truth for a change or what. This had happened in Estonian media by 1988 – three years before the breakup of the Soviet Union. And yes, the change in broadcasting there then was, in fact, politically significant.
Or maybe state-controlled media had to carry the protests for credibility’s sake once the raw footage of the electoral farce had appeared on the Internet since Russians have taken to the Internet and the social media like ducks to water. Or maybe not. Journalists are people, too. They are part of the middle class and the ones I’ve known dislike electoral fraud as much as anyone else.
As the results rolled in not to Putin’s liking, his initial response was to blame Hillary Clinton and the US State Department for interfering in Russian domestic affairs. Similar ant-American charges were repeated by the hardline Russian Ambassador to NATO at a pro-Putin rally on Tuesday. Oh my gosh, as if the Obama administration – trying to extricate the war weary country from foreign misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan – couldn’t wait to pounce on a weak Russia next. I don’t think so.
In fact, the US government did help fund Russian pro-democracy groups to the tune of about $9 million this past year according to Michael McFaul, a long-time Soviet/Russian analyst and soon to be US Ambassador to Russia, in recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But please understand, this kind of support has been going on for over twenty years. Yet this is the first time, I’ve ever seen the State Department accused of successfully changing the outcome of an election in someone else’s country. Now really. State?
I never realized that a bureaucracy with fewer employees than the US military has in its bands – and with far too many of them still tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan - could have been so effective. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is the democratization money would have been awarded on contract to NGOs who used it to train and equip Russian electoral observers who would have been recruited through Russian civil society NGOs. It also would have helped finance American election monitors who worked for the OSCE or possibly the National Democratic Institute or IRI. Election monitors are there to see – and report back – vote fraud. They are the eyes and ears of fair and free elections.
Besides, it’s not as if the US had a dog – as James Baker once mistakenly claimed about Yugoslavia – in the Russian parliamentary race or, for that matter, the upcoming presidential race.
Or if the US did, it’s hard to imagine that the favored dog would have been any of the four parties allowed to compete by Putin. It’s also not as if the US was the only foreign entity to engage in democracy building in the Russia or elsewhere. The pan-European OSCE – which by the way was originally a Soviet brainchild – has also been heavily involved in promoting free and fair elections. Much of the OSCE’s election monitoring financial support comes from Western European governments.
No, put that silly thought aside. Let’s face it, Hillary, with the snap of a finger, could not have induced tens of thousands of Russians to brave the cold to join demonstrations demanding free and fair elections. At the very most the State Department would have helped finance the training of some of the Russian election observers – but what the monitors reported and didn’t report was ultimately of their own making. Just as the Soviet Union’s financial support for the American Communist Party over the years didn’t have much of an effect on US politics.
Had the December 4, 2011 Russian parliamentary elections been conducted honestly there would have been nothing for them to film or report. Obviously, they weren’t. Just check YouTube.
Also highly recommended: Mitchell Polman's December 16 "What Monitoring Its Election Taught Me About Russia's Desire for Democracy" in The New Republic.