Russian election was a farce
By Nicholas Hayes

One vote cast in this month's Russian presidential election best epitomized the state of democracy in that country.  Smiling before the television cameras at his polling station in Moscow, Sergei Mironov told Russia's television audiences that he made "the right choice" and voted for President Vladimir Putin.

So did more than 70 percent of the Russian voters, but what made Mironov's vote significant was that he was in theory an opposition candidate even though he had publicly declared his support for the president when he entered the race several months ago.

This was Russia's fourth presidential election since the end of the communist era.  The question that most troubled me in a visit to Moscow in the weeks preceding the election and now as I study its results is why Putin chose not to test himself in an honest campaign that he was sure to win and instead staged a farce.

Boris Kargalitsky, the director of Moscow's Institute of Globalization Studies, has a quick answer: "Putin wouldn't know how to run an honest campaign," Kargalitsky told me in an interview in his Moscow office.  He pointed out that Putin has only refined the electoral tactics that former President Boris Yeltsin rather crudely introduced in the 1996 election.

Putin's situation in this 2004 election, however, was radically different from what Yeltsin faced.  Yeltsin could not have won by an honest vote.  Putin would win by a landslide.  Putin worried not about the possibility of losing the election but about the possibility of an emerging genuine opposition.  As Kargalitsky put it, "It's absolutely important for him to destroy the opposition and make them look like mere clowns."

It was not too hard.  Even the Western press was taken aback by the campaign of Ivan Rybkin.  He politicized his mysterious disappearance in February from the public eye and re-appearance in Kiev as self-defense against threats by the Kremlin.  Most Russian observers concluded that Rybkin's disappearance was a matter for discussion between him and his wife and not a political issue.

Another candidate Oleg Malyshkin who also supported Putin had no qualification for office other than his job as the bodyguard for notorious clown fascist of Russian politics Vladimir Zhirnovsky.  The rest--the communist Nikolai Kharitonov, the nationalist Sergei Glazeyev, or the liberal Irina Khakamada--had at least a minimal following for their candidacies, but endured a campaign that routinely saw the cancellation of the meeting places for their rallies, the reluctance of television stations to air their commercials, and, above all else, the refusal of the president to campaign or debate.

It's now over and obvious that democracy under Putin means a system where there are elections but electability belongs exclusively to the president or his designated heir.

In the weeks preceeding the election a mysterious fire broke out in the night at one of Moscow's most popular restaurants of the city's beloved old street the Arbat.  As the place closed Sunday night, another fire broke out just outside the Kremlin walls burning to the ground the historic Manege.  Putin may have the Kremlin under his thumb, but something's burning in Moscow.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, 3/23/04