Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

The Duma that was elected in 2007 exhibited another important defect: this was the absence of liberal parties, such as Yabloko and the Union of the Right Forces. The Kremlin wanted this anomaly to be “repaired” in the run-up to the Duma elections of December 2011. By the beginning of 2010 rumors were already emerging about a new initiative. In February 2010 Owen Matthews, the Moscow correspondent of Newsweek, wrote about “a new liberal pseudo-opposition party the Kremlin is rumored to be cooking up.”^[18] However, in the regional elections of March 13, 2011, suddenly another party popped up. It was the Patrioty Rossii (Patriots of Russia). Founded in 2005 by Gennady Semigin, a former member of the Communist Party, it had until then led a mainly dormant existence. The party, using the slogan “Patriotism is superior to Politics,” managed to win nearly 8 percent of the vote in Dagestan. Its program was left-wing, nationalist, and anti-Western.^[19] In a comment The Economist wrote: “Analysts say the party is another Kremlin product, tested now with a view to being deployed in the parliamentary election in December [2011]. . . . Its real purpose, it seems, is to act as a spoiler for the Communist Party and another party, Just Russia, which itself was originally created as a double for United Russia but has since become a genuine challenger. Engineering clone and fake opposition parties is one of the Kremlin’s favourite political ‘technologies.’”^[20] All this confirmed what Anna Politkovskaya had written in 2004: “There is a great fashion at the present for bogus political movements created by a directive of the Kremlin. We don’t want the West suspecting that we have a one-party system, that we lack pluralism and are relapsing into authoritarianism.”^[21]

Unequalled Election Fraud

A fake pluralist system cannot be maintained without massive election fraud. This fraud, however, must not transgress certain limits if it is to keep the pluralist system “credible.” On October 11, 2009, when local elections were held in seventy-five regions for seven thousand eligible posts, something unexpected happened. The strategy of the Kremlin’s “political technologists” of creating a fake two-party system seemed to be surpassed by a new reality: the total hegemony of United Russia, which obtained almost 80 percent of the votes. The other parties were completely marginalized in the local councils. The background to this new political fact was the greatest election fraud ever committed in post-Communist Russia. In the Moscow City Duma, for instance, United Russia got thirty-two out of thirty-five seats. However, exit polls by VTsIOM, the state-owned pollster, had predicted that support for United Russia in Moscow was only 45.5 percent. Strangely enough, the party got 66 percent of the vote.^[22] According to observers “the campaign was called one of the dirtiest ever in Russia. . . . Almost everywhere parties complained of the abuse of absentee ballots and the rather old fashioned abuse of ‘carousel’ voting, in which buses ferry volunteers from one polling station to the next to vote several times.”^[23] However, according to Novoe Vremya (New Times)—a weekly magazine critical of the Kremlin—the use of absentee ballots and the carousel system were only detskiye metody (children’s methods) of election fraud. They could change the results by only 5 to 7 percent. However, United Russia’s results were in many cases “improved” by up to 40 percent. The method used for this, wrote the weekly, was quite simple: it consisted in removing “troublesome observers” at the moment that the ballot boxes were opened and in presenting the “end results” directly.^[24] Ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev on this occasion abandoned his usually prudent and discrete attitude vis-à-vis the leadership in the Kremlin. In an interview in Novaya Gazeta, of which he is one of the owners, he said that “in the eyes of everybody, the elections have turned into a mockery of the people.”^[25]