Moscow Times September 9, 2000 And the Winner Is?
The Moscow Times has documented enough falsification in the March 26 presidential election to question the legitimacy of the vote. Yevgenia Borisova reports from Dagestan, Saratov, Tatarstan, Ingushetia, Bashkortostan and Moscow, and by telephone from Novosibirsk, Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kabardino-Balkariya and Mordovia. With additional reporting by Gary Peach from Kaliningrad, Nonna Chernyakova from Vladivostok and Mayerbeck Nunayev from Chechnya.
Abdulla Magomedov, a 42-year-old police officer and a father of three, was on duty guarding the entrance to a government building in Dagestan when two Volgas pulled up _ one black, the other white. Three men and a woman got out, flashed government ID cards to enter the building, and then reemerged carrying large sacks.
"I am supposed to control anything leaving the building," Magomedov recalled. "I checked what was in the bags. They were stuffed with ballots filled in for [Communist candidate Gennady] Zyuganov, with the seals and signs of polling stations _ I know how they look, I was an observer at the elections."
It was 11 a.m. on Sunday, April 16 _ three weeks after the March 26 election that had confirmed Vladimir Putin in office with 52.94 percent of the vote.
In the aftermath of that vote, two leading national opposition parties _ the Communists and Yabloko _ had alleged widespread elections fraud. Dagestan had been fingered for such fraud often enough that a commission from the State Duma had come to Makhachkala to investigate. And officer Magomedov had evidence of a deadly serious federal crime.
"I got very angry, and tried to take one of the bags from the woman, one of the four. But she told me, 'Do you really need to get involved in this?' And the men also told me not to interfere."
The four carried their bags of ballots a little ways off, with an uncertain Magomedov following. They took out the ballots and began to tear them up and then to burn them.
"I know ballots must not be destroyed. I protested, but they only threatened to have me sacked," Magomedov recounted in an interview on April 19, three days after the fact. He assumed they were destroying evidence to foil the Duma commission's investigation.
"I told them I would not leave it like this, that I was not going to shut up because I am a Communist and I voted for Zyuganov," Magomedov said.
The next day, he filed a complaint with the local Communist Party. The complaint was forwarded to the headquarters of Makhachkala's Kirovsky district _ the building Magomedov had been guarding _ but there has been no reply.
April was dry in Makhachkala, and on a visit later that month to the site of the fire indicated by Magomedov, The Moscow Times was able to collect the ashes of the ballots. The names of the candidates in the March 26 elections can be clearly seen.
"This is not right, what they did," said Magomedov. "They are just a mafia structure prepared to do whatever they want."
Magomedov says he is ready to testify in court to what he has seen. But he also worries: His colleagues have been telling him to shut up or risk losing his job _ and his monthly salary of 800 rubles ($28) is the only pay coming in to support his family of five.
Six Months of Testimony
In the six months since the elections, The Moscow Times has met dozens of ordinary people like Magomedov. Federal elections authorities, foreign observers and the criminal justice system have all been dismissive of fraud allegations like his _ admitting that fraud existed and lamenting it, but insisting it was insignificant (and apparently, punishing no one for it).
But fraud was far from insignificant. Given how close the vote was _ Putin won with just 52.94 percent, or by a slim margin of 2.2 million votes _ fraud and abuse of state power appear to have been decisive.
Consider:
oIn Dagestan alone, it is possible to definitively document about 88,000 votes stolen from other candidates and given to candidate Putin _ simply by comparing documentation at about 16 percent of the local precincts, or polling stations, to documentation at the national level. The cheating leaps out immediately.
And that is only in the minority of Dagestani voting precincts that were willing to provide election-day documentation. Other precincts _ where observers were kicked out or otherwise snubbed _ seem to have been engaged in, if anything, more extensive fraud.
A State Duma commission investigating Dagestan under Communist Deputy Alexander Saly has extrapolated from documented fraud to assert that about 700,000 votes in Dagestan must have been wrongly awarded to Putin. But the methodology, as laid out in an April 27 issue of Rossisskaya Gazeta, is highly questionable. And inexplicably, Saly's team has apparently only made intelligent use of about half of the hundreds of protocols it has collected. (A "protocol" is a certificate of a precinct's official vote tally.) Moreover, when Saly was asked to share copies of at least some of his findings with The Moscow Times, he agreed to show only some of the protocols, and joked that Zyuganov kept the rest in a folder with him.
A more conservative calculation by The Moscow Times _ one that assumes fraud in the precincts that would not give out protocols was no worse than it was in those that did _ settled on a figure of about 551,000 votes that were crudely falsified in this way.
In other words: After a visit to Dagestan alone, it is possible to challenge almost a fourth of Putin's national margin of victory as highly questionable.
In other regions, the same sort of correcting-fluid falsification _ the clumsiest imaginable, where higher-level elections officials simply contradict the official reports of lower-level officials, and hope no one will notice _ can also be documented. In Saratov, Communist-collected protocols chronicle discrepancies in Putin's favor to the tune of 11,779 votes; in Kabardino-Balkariya involving 7,126 votes; and in Bashkortostan involving 1,497 votes. Again, protocols in these and other regions were notoriously difficult to obtain, meaning this sort of crude falsification could actually be much larger.
oIn Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, where all told Putin won 2.87 million of the 4.46 million votes cast, fraud was more carefully organized. Voters and observers report a precinct-by-precinct conspiracy to stuff ballot boxes in every manner imaginable. If in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkariya and Saratov higher-level officials rewrote lower-level results, in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan lower-level officials were already on board _ they produced the "correct" results the first time around.
In Tatarstan, one ballot-stuffing game was so prevalent that it was even given a name _ "the caterpillar" _ and its perpetrators even approached the Tatarstan president's spokesman on election day to ask him to help.
This more closed sort of vote-rigging is much harder to put an exact number on. But a conservative guess would be that fraud was on a scale of that of Dagestan, meaning hundreds of thousands of votes stolen for Putin in each republic.
oIn all of the above-named regions and also in Kursk, Mordovia, Kaliningrad and Nizhny Novgorod _ nine regions where Putin won a total of 6.96 million votes _ regional governors resorted to a vertical chain of bullying: Everyone from collective farm workers to college professors was forced to vote for Putin. Some critics have gone so far as to argue that on the eve of the 21st century, such bullying excluded villagers as a class from the democratic process.
The effect of this so-called "abuse of administrative resources" on the vote tally is impossible to quantify. But those who have studied it and who spoke to The Moscow Times said bullying shifted several million votes from other candidates to Putin. Nearly all observers argued that it was far more influential than, say, the crude falsifications seen in places like Dagestan and Tatarstan. (This article does not look at how the Kremlin's abuse of media power influenced the outcome of the election, although the relentlessly positive national coverage almost certainly added even millions more to Putin's vote).
oIn Chechnya, Putin officially won 191,039 votes _ or 50.63 percent _ from a population made up of families whose homes and lives have been destroyed by the war and rank-and-file soldiers dropped into the middle of a bloody and terrifying guerrilla war. In other words, refugee camps and conscripts supposedly voted en masse in favor of Putin.
Even otherwise timid international observers were not amused by this. They have refused to recognize results from Chechnya, which was under martial law on election day, and there were no observers there. With the exception of the federal government and the Central Elections Commission, almost no one sees the vote in Chechnya as legitimate.
oPerhaps the most startling discovery of our six-month investigation was one that emerged from the CEC web site: The official number of registered voters grew by 1.3 million in the three months between the Dec. 19 State Duma elections and the March 26 presidential elections _ and there is no good explanation as to why.
All potential voters are automatically registered by the state upon turning 18 years old. That's why the appearance of 1.3 million new voters in such a short period has left Russian and American demographers interviewed for this article baffled _ and troubled by the lame nature of explanations offered by the CEC and other federal authorities. An unofficial explanation is that these 1.3 million voters are mostly fictional _ "dead souls," to borrow a term from Nikolai Gogol's famous novel, summoned up from the imagination of corrupt elections officials. (See sidebar, page VII).
Crime But No Punishment
Voters have complained about fraud, but no one seems to be listening.
In small villages where it is possible for someone to poll his neighbors and determine how they all voted, dishonesty turns up easily. Some villages have written open letters to the president and to other higher authorities to protest their votes being "stolen," and The Moscow Times has obtained such letters.
In some cases, voters have testified to having the pens and ballots snatched out of their hands at the voting booth and filled in for them. In others, they have been bullied into voting for Putin with threats from local leaders that they will lose their jobs, or be denied state welfare support. Other voters recounted seeing elections officials adding "dead souls" to registration lists _ by listing children as adults, or listing people twice, or simply by adding names at random. In some cases, corrupt elections officials have added fictional floors to apartment buildings, and filled the resulting fictional apartments with fictional voters _ who as one cast their ballots for Putin.
And everywhere, local government can be found to have worked for Putin _ by leaning on factory directors, school principals, hospital administrators and farm chiefs, who in turn bullied their employees and others dependent on them. Those reluctant to vote "correctly" report being threatened with losing their jobs, being evicted or being denied their right to state support such as pensions. "Of course we were pressured from the top, and we pressured our people to vote for Putin," said one collective farm chief in an interview in Kazan, on condition of anonymity. "But it is forbidden to talk about it."
This and more is among the evidence assembled by The Moscow Times _ reporting that echoed in similar investigations carried out by the Communist Party, Yabloko, foreign observer missions and the Saly commission in the Duma.
The inescapable conclusion is that Putin would not have won outright on March 26 without cheating.
At the same time, those months of reporting indicate that the conventional wisdom of the time was correct: Putin was far and away the most popular candidate for president in the spring and summer of 2000. Had he won less than 50 percent of the March 26 vote, he most likely would have faced _ and easily defeated _ Communist leader Zyuganov in a runoff.
Tellingly, in every region visited by The Moscow Times, the same top Communist members who so indignantly laid out evidence of fraud in the first round all freely conceded Putin would have easily won in a second round anyway.
According to Saly, the Communist Party member who heads the Duma's commission to investigate elections fraud, about 440 lawsuits were filed in courts across the nation to contest fraud of one kind or another in the March 26 vote. Saly also said the nation's various elections commissions have received untold thousands of formal complaints.
But those who file such complaints say they get no satisfaction.
And those who appealed to the courts were often told to readdress their complaints to federal or regional prosecutors _ in other words, to complain to the executive branch ultimately headed by Putin, and not to the theoretically separate judicial branch. Prosecutors, in turn, often send such appeals back to the courts, or to elections officials _ in a never-ending game of go-nowhere football.
Such has been the experience of Ilyas Magomedov, an aide to a Communist State Duma deputy from Dagestan. Magomedov filed suit in two separate courts in Makhachkala alleging specific instances of fraud and violations in both the December 1999 Duma vote and the March 2000 presidential vote. In both cases the courts declined to hear the matter, sending Magomedov written orders to appeal instead to prosecutors. When he then appealed to Makhachkala's deputy prosecutor, he received written instructions to appeal to the courts.
Many others reported that they did not even bother to complain about fraud they witnessed because they saw it was hopelessly futile.
"Undoubtedly there was large-scale forgery here, but we did not prepare a complaint," said Dmitry Fomin, who campaigned for Grigory Yavlinsky in Tatarstan's Naberezhniye Chelny district. "For Tatarstan, the definition of a court is: Something that takes a lot of energy but provides a very equivocal result. Everything is under such tight control here that we expect better results from publications in the media than from court decisions."
See No Evil?
Federal elections law gives Russian and foreign organizations broad powers to observe all voting day activities, and observers are supposed to prevent the most crude abuses.
But observers were not everywhere. Communist and Yabloko party observers allege having seen, or heard of, massive fraud, to the tune of millions of votes. Zyuganov has claimed to have had 7 million votes stolen from him, quite a lot if Putin won by about 2 million _ but the evidence provided for such claims, while often troubling, is not complete.
Meanwhile, it's hard to know how seriously to take foreign observers. Consider the biggest, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which sent a team of about 400 people to observe both the 1999 Duma elections and then again three months later the presidential vote. As with other foreign observer groups, about a 10th of the OSCE teams were "long-term" observers with strong knowledge of Russia and Russian, who arrived months beforehand to take an in-depth look at the situation, while the other 380 or so were flown in late in the game to watch the voting day.
Edouard Brunner, head of the OSCE delegation, told The Moscow Times a week before the Duma vote that he expected "international observers will come up with a statement [after the Dec. 19 vote] that the elections were conducted in a democratic way." They did indeed (with the exception of the least well-known of the lot, the European Media Institute, which characterized the Duma vote as "sad" and a step back from democracy for Russia).
The short-term foreign observers usually include the top officials like Brunner _ and it is they who tend to set the tone of the crucial morning-after news conferences and press releases.
Following the presidential elections, long-term OSCE observers interviewed by The Moscow Times, on strict condition of anonymity, expressed disgust for the cheery tone of the day-after OSCE commentary _ and dissatisfaction that the more thorough, official OSCE report on the elections _ which was published two months later and was harsher and more informed _ got no attention.
"They make the OSCE's press statement on the elections before the long-term observers _ and it's the long-term observers who really know the story _ have actually given their reports," said one long-term OSCE observer. "They don't actually hear all the evidence before they write it _ and then what happens is, the longer report that the OSCE writes, which is sometimes more critical, its overall tone is set by the press statement.
"Because the press statement is the official stamp of approval. That's what gets quoted in the newspapers ... That's what Putin's people carry around with them in their hand. Nobody will read the detailed report."
That detailed report, released May 19, is posted on the OSCE web site (www.osce.org/odihr/elecrep.htm). In it, the OSCE sticks to its initial finding that the elections were democratic and a step forward for Russia. But the report also cites anecdotal evidence from the long-term observers similar to stories heard repeatedly by The Moscow Times _ even as the report downplays the significance of the abuses it chronicles and goes into little detail.
The OSCE report states, for example, that in fully half of all polling stations visited by OSCE observers, "some of the cumbersome procedural requirements for the vote count were circumvented in order to expedite the process."
It also notes that the Communist Party observers in particular had documented "episodic violations that, in and of themselves, would not appear to be sufficient to alter the outcome," and then goes on to give a jargon-softened list:
"For example, sporadic instances of family voting, inclusion of deceased persons on voter lists, occasional denial of requests to receive copies of protocols, various abuses of administrative resources, improper influence of administrative authorities seen to be directing the work of polling station commissions, expulsion of individual observers from some sites, incidents of inequities regarding access to the mass media, distribution of campaign material during the 'silent period,' etc."
Why Did They Do It?
"Other allegations were more serious and deserve the full weight of investigation," the OSCE report continues. "They involved charges that protocols were falsified, in some instances by reversing or increasing the vote totals recorded for Putin over Zyuganov."
The report concludes that the OSCE observers "are not in a position to judge the validity of the complaints raised by the Communist Party and can draw no conclusions as to the proficiency and seriousness with which they were reviewed by competent election commissions or the courts."
Yet the OSCE did in effect reject the validity of those complaints _ when they endorsed the elections as free, fair and democratic. In similar cases, such as the fraud-tainted April re-election of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, Western observers complained until new elections were held. The winner, again Fujimori, today enjoys more legitimacy thanks to the exercise.
"Why did [Western observers] do it [endorse the Putin election as legitimate]? In obvious support for what they call Russian reforms," said Boris Kagarlitsky, a sociologist and political analyst with the Institute for Comparative Politics. "And of course in support for Putin as a reformer. It is a credit of trust to Putin and an extension of the support of the Chubais group," he added, referring to long-running Western support for Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russian privatization programs.
"Many of these organizations, they have as it were a political statement that they want to make before they go," said an OSCE long-term observer unhappy with the organization's soothing official findings. "I thought it was very, very ... totally cynical and unsatisfactory, and if I had been writing the press statement I'd have given it a different slant."
Who Gave the Orders?
Not one person of those interviewed over the six months since the election could offer compelling evidence that fraud was part of a national conspiracy organized on direct orders from anyone in the Kremlin.
But there is abundant evidence that in some of Russia's 89 regions, orders to falsify the vote came down directly and formally from the governors' offices _ in a nation where governors from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok all publicly embraced Putin's political vehicle Unity. And there are reasons to believe that Kremlin officials might have made clear, with not-always-subtle hints, that regional leaders were expected to deliver the Putin vote by hook or by crook.
Consider just the example of the 1995 Duma elections, when then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin angrily and publicly berated regional governors for not delivering the vote _ and even threatened to engineer the downfall of governors of regions where Our Home Is Russia did worst.
That the Putin team saw the apparatus of government as subordinate to their campaign needs is suggested by the composition of the team itself. According to the OSCE's final report on the March 26 vote, Putin campaign staff included, among many others, three deputy heads of the Kremlin administration; top Interior Ministry officials including the first deputy minister and deputy police chiefs across the nation; top Railways Ministry officials representing all of the country's major railroad routes; and top officials from the tax and agriculture ministries.
"[OSCE observers] in different regions encountered incidents where campaign materials for the acting president were found in offices of territorial election commissions," the OSCE report says, referring to the unit that oversees 20 to 30 polling stations. "Some territorial commissions acknowledged that they were instructed by the administration to pick up Putin campaign materials for distribution in their areas. Corroborating reports were submitted from territorial commissions as far distant from one another as [Vladivostok] and Kazan.
"In one instance, the chairwoman of a territorial commission acknowledged that one day earlier, she had received her first specific order regarding promoting the acting president's campaign. At that time she had been instructed to pick up campaign literature promoting his candidacy at the same time as she picked up the ballots for her territory."
Elections officials were also apparently bullied into making up results _ whether by adding "dead souls" to their count (see sidebar, page VII) or "correcting" official lower-level results to favor Putin.