Over at Slate, Anne Applebaum wonders why the Russians bother to hold elections:
Why did anyone bother holding an election at all? Given that the inner circle of ex-KGB officers that controls the Kremlin also controls the country’s media, its legal system, its parliament, and its major companies, why do they need elections? Why didn’t Vladimir Putin just appoint Medvedev, or keep the presidency himself? The answer, I think, can lie only in the ruling clique’s fundamental insecurity, odd as that sounds. Though the denizens of the Kremlin do not, cannot, seriously fear Western military attack, they do still seem to fear Western-inspired popular discontent: public questioning of their personal wealth, public opposition to their power, political demonstrations of the sort that created the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. To stave off these things, they maintain the democratic rituals that give them a semblance of legitimacy.
And this need to create a Potemkin village of legitimacy, Applebaum says, also explains much of the rhetoric that we hear from Putin and other Russian leaders:
The need for legitimacy also helps explain the string of vitriolic, aggressive attacks on Western democracies that presaged yesterday’s election. In the past couple of years, Putin has also openly compared America to Nazi Germany, set up an institution designed to monitor America’s supposedly dubious democracy, and frequently accused both Americans and Western Europeans, especially the British, of hypocrisy and human-rights violations. This rhetoric serves several purposes, but above all it is designed to inoculate the Russian public against the example of more open societies. The message is simple: Russia is not merely a democracy, it is a better democracy than Western democracies.
(…)
In other words, communism was stable and safe, post-communism has been a disaster, and Putin’s regime has set the country on the right track again. The more Russians believe this, the less likely they are to want a truly open, genuinely entrepreneurial, authentically democratic society—at least until the oil runs out.
Or the world economy collapses and takes Russia along with it.
As I noted earlier today, there are at least some indications that the Russian people know that their “democratic” system is a big sham but they don’t seem very inclined to do anything about it right now. Putin’s strategy, it seems, is working.
Meanwhile an outside vote monitor came to the stunningly obvious conclusion that yesterday’s elections were not fair:
MOSCOW, March 3 — The head of the only major Western vote-monitoring group that sent a team to Russia to observe Sunday’s presidential election severely criticized the process Monday, and drew a furious rebuttal from the country’s Central Election Commission.
Officials in Washington and Western European capitals, meanwhile, expressed muted disappointment with the way the vote was conducted, but hope that the new presidency will bring a shift in ideas and better relations with their governments.
“We think there is not freedom in this election,” said Andreas Gross, after Dmitry Medvedev, President Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked successor, scored an officially tabulated win of more than 70 percent of the vote.
Gross, heading a delegation from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights organization, cited media bias and failure to register some candidates, among other shortcomings. In a statement, the group said the result reflected the “will of the electorate” but its “democratic potential was unfortunately not tapped.”
At least for the moment, it would seem that the Russian people don’t care that they being lied to. After the hope of the overthrow of Communism and the failure of the post-Communist period that is an unfortunate, but also unsurprising, attitude.
H/T: James Joyner
