His remarks came hours after two top U.S. officials chided the former KGB colonel for the “level of authoritarianism creeping back” into Russian society, as Secretary of State Colin Powell put it Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week”.
But is Putin going to keep his promises? Probably not, says Boris Pustynstev, head of the human rights group Civic Monitoring. Pustynstev, a native of Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, says the world can expect the gulf between Putin’s words and Russian reality to further widen–at least when it comes to human rights issues. Describing the Russian president’s words as vintage Putin, Pustynstev–who held a four-hour meeting with Putin in the Kremlin to discuss human rights issues last December-told NEWSWEEK: “He says what his listeners want to hear.”
But ordinary Russians probably care little whether their leader pleases Western governments. Judging from Sunday’s election results–71 percent for Putin and 14 percent for his nearest rival, the Communist Nikolai Kharitonov–voters like what they hear from Putin and love the economic stability that high oil prices have enabled him to deliver. Each year of Putin’s first term featured GDP growth of at least 5 percent.
In the industrial city of Podolsk just south of Moscow, two women, who were picking their way through a maze of puddles after voting on Sunday afternoon, paused to talk about why they chose Putin and his message of stable growth. “I dream of an apartment,” said Gulya Silayeva, 35, a mother of two who lives in a nearby building with no running water and no indoor toilets. “They promised us a new apartment in two or three years. That’s why we voted for Putin.”
Podolsk, a city made famous by Vladimir Lenin’s residence here for several weeks in 1900, fared well during Putin’s first term in office as the 200,000 inhabitants started to receive their wages and pensions on time and even opened that icon of modest disposable income, a McDonald’s restaurant. “We don’t need any more radical fluctuations in the economy, we don’t need any more financial crises. We need some kind of hope in tomorrow,” said Alexei Stepanov, 24, a pro-Putin student studying management, as he manned a snack-laden table selling jumbo vodka shots for about 30 cents inside a Podolsk polling station.
Indeed, for Putin, the real challenge was less winning over the voters than getting them to go to the polls. Fears of a low turnout led the Kremlin to launch an intense pre-poll effort that included radio promotions offering free concert tickets to young voters who turned up to cast their ballots; giving elderly voters the chance to vote at home; threatening housing problems to university students who didn’t go to the polls and even invoking pleas from religious leaders. Voter turnout of less than 50 percent would have invalidated the election. In the end, 64 percent cast their votes.
The vast gulf between Putin’s 71 percent and the rest of the pack led to some occasionally astonishing spinning of the results by the president’s would-be challengers. “I told you a month ago that I expected just 1 percent,” liberal presidential candidate Irina Khakamada told supporters as she arrived at her campaign’s election night party at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Moscow. “So, getting over 3 percent is a big victory, especially when you take into account what kind of administrative resources were at work.”
As analysts picked over the election results Monday morning, parsing the difference between Khakamada’s 3.9 percent and national socialist Sergei Glazyev’s 4.1 percent, the head of a 340-strong contingent of European election observers criticized the process–especially Putin’s domination of state-controlled media. “Vibrant political discourse and meaningful pluralism were lacking,” Julian Peel Yates, head of the monitoring delegation, told the Interfax news agency. That meant that Russia “failed to meet important commitments regarding treatment by the state-controlled media on a non-discriminatory basis,” he said.
From the point of at least one analyst at a Moscow investment house, such criticisms are beside the point. “Despite all the talk about the terrible, authoritarian elections, the simple truth is that no other politician–even with free access to television–could challenge Putin,” says Steven Dashevsky, chief researcher at the ATON Capital Group. “The election result was driven by the outstanding job that Putin did with the economy. That is true in any country.”
In a country where 28 million people live below a poverty level set at $70 a month, exit polls showed that economic issues topped the agenda of most voters. Judging by Putin’s dramatic shakeup of his government earlier this month, the president understands the urgency of implementing real economic reform before the constitutionally-mandated end of his second term in 2008. Some Putin supporters, meanwhile, are already pining for a third term. “If he had another two terms, then he could really get something done,” says Larissa, a 72-year-old Moscow cleaner. “Then, he would have a chance to rebuild everything that had been destroyed before him.” Larissa worked at the campaign headquarters of Sergei Mironov, the pro-Putin speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament who ran as a putative candidate against the incumbent solely to ensure the election would not be invalidated if the real rivals dropped out. Such maneuvering sometimes lent the elections a feeling of farce. Putin’s consolidation of power, though, was anything but.
