Putin Will Host G-8 In a Russia Under Ever Tighter Control
By Peter Finn Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, July 13, 2006; A01
MOSCOW -- Six years into the presidency of Vladimir Putin, who will host President Bush and other leaders of the industrial world at a summit this weekend, political freedom is severely constrained in Russia.
While tolerating dissent in some pockets of society, the state is relentlessly tightening its control in parliament, political parties, regional governments, courts, activist organizations and the mass media. And it is bringing strategic industries such as energy, aircraft and automobiles back under its control or delivering them into the hands of compliant tycoons.
Russia is a profoundly different place than the country that was the engine of the Soviet Union. Moscow and St. Petersburg are temples of consumerism. The economy is growing quickly -- 6.4 percent last year -- driven by billions of dollars in revenue from the vast reserves of oil and gas and other resources that stretch from Poland to the Sea of Japan across 11 time zones.
Putin enjoys approval ratings -- now at about 70 percent -- that any president would envy. But under his direction, the Kremlin has reined in much of the debate and discourse that characterized 1990s Russia. Its fear of political challenge is felt in every corner of Russian life.
As parliamentary elections approach in 2007 and a presidential vote the following year, there is little serious doubt about the outcome: victory by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and Putin's chosen successor, assured through control of major media outlets, new electoral laws and a stifling of both financing for and participation in opposition politics.
"They are building a fortress to protect their power," said Georgy Saratov, an official in the administration of former president Boris Yeltsin who now heads Indem, a private group that monitors corruption.
Western optimism about Russia's democratic growth has dissipated in the four years since Russia was awarded the 2006 chairmanship of the Group of Eight, a club of major industrialized nations that also includes the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Japan. The annual summit of its leaders will convene at a palace outside St. Petersburg.
Foreign governments have also expressed concern that Russia is increasingly using its vast, state-controlled energy resources as an instrument of coercion in foreign policy.
In January, a dispute with Ukraine led to temporary cuts of Russian natural gas supplies to that country and to Western Europe. Criticism followed that Russia was not a reliable partner, despite its stated desire to make "energy security" a key element of its G-8 agenda. The Russian government portrayed the matter as a simple pricing dispute with Ukraine, which it blamed for the cuts in supply farther west.
Critics also say Russia is using its sway against democratic governments in former Soviet republics on its periphery. It has cut off the sale of wine and other crucial export commodities from Georgia, which has a pro-Western government. And it has strengthened relations with Uzbekistan and its Soviet-style government.
Putin's system is often called a "managed democracy." Critics use the term to mean a drift toward authoritarianism under cover of law, while supporters depict the system as a period of state-building and stabilization that is a necessary prelude to an open society.
"We want to be a free nation among other free nations and cooperate with them according to fair rules," said Vladislav Surkov, Putin's deputy chief of staff, at a briefing for foreign reporters.
Supporters say Putin and his circle of advisers simply cannot yet trust the Russian people to make correct political choices. "The Kremlin is absolutely not ready to give power to any of the opposition parties," said Sergei Markov, a political consultant who works with the Putin administration. "They think if Russian people had absolute freedom of elections they would vote for a combination of nationalists and Communists."
Putin supporters say he inherited a chaotic, dysfunctional state embodied in the blustering, ineffective rule of his predecessor, Yeltsin. Putin is a transitional figure, they say, convinced of the necessity of creating strong state institutions backed by a maturing political culture.
Putin "thinks that economic growth will lead to improving standards of living, and this will create better conditions for developing a political culture, a culture of compromise, because it is very difficult for angry and hungry people to create stable democratic institutions," Markov said. Parties Undermined
Critics see not the development of a new politics, but currents from the past. Mikhail Delyagin, chairman of the Institute for Globalization Problems, cites a story from the era of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
"Our great poetess Anna Akhmatova, who was persecuted by the authorities, once came to a meeting of the Union of Writers," Delyagin said. "When she entered the room, everybody stood up and clapped. It was of course reported to Stalin. And he asked who organized the standing ovation. He could not even imagine that people could stand up and clap by themselves. And it is the same with our leaders; they cannot believe that people can do anything themselves."
Opposition parties sometimes find that the entire bureaucracy seems to be conspiring to block even their most basic operations.
After its annual congress last December, the tiny Republican Party sent a report to the Justice Ministry noting, as required by law, who had been elected to leadership positions. The ministry refused to validate the congress, saying that some delegates may have been improperly chosen at the local level, according to a ministry official and Vladimir Ryzhkov, co-chairman of the small liberal grouping.
The party tried again in April with a new filing and again failed to obtain official approval. Next month, it heads to the courts.
In the meantime, the group has no valid officers. No one can take legally binding decisions on its behalf. New branches have not been registered for months, and a branch in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, was closed by the courts last month because signatures of party leaders from headquarters in Moscow were deemed invalid.
As more of its branches are invalidated, the party risks being locked out of parliamentary elections in 2007, because a party must have at least 50,000 members in at least half of Russia's regions to contest elections, according to a new law.
"What's happening to the Republican Party is just one example of how the authorities use their laws to restrict political activity," Ryzhkov said. "We are in full compliance, and they know it."
"Every time any party has legal problems, they start saying it's a political order," countered Aleksey Zhafyarov, an official at the Federal Registration Service at the Justice Ministry. "The rules are clear, and the norms were not followed. We are a legal body. We don't make political decisions." Stifling Dissent
Since the arrest and imprisonment on fraud charges of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a billionaire oilman who began to fund opposition groups, activists say it has been almost impossible to persuade business leaders to finance opposition parties or nongovernmental organizations whose work could be construed as political. The prime assets of Khodorkovsky's Yukos Oil Co. have passed into state hands.
"Businessmen say, 'We like you, we support you morally, but come back when you're in power,' " said Irina Khakamada, who challenged Putin for the presidency in 2004. "They're afraid."
Ryzhkov, 39, is a young and charismatic liberal untainted by the charges of corruption that dog other Kremlin opponents. "He has potential," said Saratov, head of the corruption monitoring group, "and that's why they fear him."
Ryzhkov said it has been years since he was allowed to express his views on state-controlled television, though he is regularly invited onto the state-run English-language channel Russia Today and is often asked by the Kremlin to speak at seminars with foreign experts. "I'm like export vodka," he joked. "You can drink me, but only abroad."
Garry Kasparov, the former chess master, is another figure excluded from national television channels, the most influential media here. Now head of United Civil Front, which promotes fair elections, he has been barnstorming the country. Local officials regularly try to prevent him from holding political meetings, he says.
The newspaper Kommersant recently asked Oleg Dobrodeyev, director of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Co., which includes one of the national channels, about the invisibility of political figures such as Ryzhkov and Kasparov. "They do not have any place in Russian politics," replied Dobrodeyev. "And as for Kasparov -- we have always been happy and will be happy to see him on our sports channel."
Putin professes frustration at all this. When he addressed members of the ruling United Russia party recently, he said that opposition politicians should be allowed a greater profile in public life. "Those of our colleagues who might be in the opposition today should be provided with a forum to express their opinions," Putin told the audience at a guesthouse outside Moscow.
The impending G-8 meeting has brought a heightened level of discussion between the Kremlin and its critics. Besides the rare news conference by Putin's aide, Surkov, for foreign reporters, Putin met with international activists from organizations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International at his dacha this month.
He told them he would consider joining a nongovernmental organization when he leaves the presidency in 2008, according to Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch, who attended the meeting.
The meeting followed an address to a gathering of nongovernmental organizations in Moscow. He assured his audience that "the law was designed to establish order in this area but not restrictions on this activity," Putin said. "I personally -- I will speak completely openly and honestly -- have only one concern. I will always speak and fight against foreign governments financing political activity in our country, just as our government should not finance political activity in other countries."
Many of the activists who attended remained skeptical and expressed fear that after the G-8 meeting, the sweet talk will end. "We'll add his words to our arsenal," said Yuri Dzhibladze, head of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights. "Russian human rights organizations are getting ready to defend themselves."
The normally secretive Kremlin continues with its charm offensive. Its emissaries concede that the country's political system is flawed, but they bristle at what they call Western arrogance and double standards.
Vice President Cheney's decision to criticize Russia in a speech in May and then praise developments in Kazakhstan while standing by a president who had just won 91 percent of the vote in a flawed election, especially rankled Putin supporters. The United States is willing to ignore problems in countries that satisfy the American appetite for energy resources, they said.
"If cannibals took power in Russia tomorrow, they'd still be recognized as a democratic government as long as they gave certain things to certain people," Surkov said. © 2006 The Washington Post Company