#13 - JRL 8115 - JRL Home
From: Ira Straus (STRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004
Subject: The Meaning of the Western Media Attacks on the Elections

The upcoming re-election of Putin has got to be one of the most widely covered non-stories in recent history.

There is no drama in the election, since Putin's popularity makes his re-election a shoo-in; instead there are dark hints that there is something scandalous about his likely victory. It seems actually that the explanation is not scandalous at all: economic recovery and payment of arrears, and a sense of stabilization.

There is little procedural drama in the election, either: not much that is newly democratic in it, nor newly undemocratic in it. But in the large number of pieces on the election, almost all try to find signs of an anti-democratic turn. And impute such a turn when, as is usually the case, no real signs are found.

While there is some validity to many of the flaws pointed out in Russian electoral politics, the problems have been around for a long time; most of them are not evidence, as is usually implied, of a startling new anti-democratic turn.

In the Duma election, by contrast, there had indeed been a serious cause for complaint: it seemed that about 3% of the votes were wrongly counted (a massive alternative count effort demonstrated this pretty convincingly). This was less than the miscounting in several previous Russian elections, but it had consequences: it took away from Yabloko and possibly from SPS as well an otherwise 5% total vote and, with it, the right to a party distribution of seats in the Duma. However, the Western media and governments rarely even mentioned this one truly valid complaint. Instead they concentrated on a truckload of general complaints, most of them ill-founded or misconceived -- as shown in careful analyses by Leon Aron, Patrick Armstrong, and others -- and all of them irremediable after the fact.

Why is it that the evidence of miscounting -- the one specific complaint that really mattered for Western interests, and that at least in principle could have been remedied -- got the least attention from the West? It would seem that the operative concern was to give Russia as bad a report card as possible, and to talk as much as possible about how bad it was; not to estimate the situation accurately or do what could be done for Russian democracy.

In the present presidential election, there seems less, not more, cause for complaint than in the Duma election. The only drama in it was the brief Rybkin disappearance, and no evidence seems to have turned up to support his charges about that incident. Indeed, the charges seem so hard to sustain (harder probably than Aristide's against America) that the media have given them up for dead. We are left to wonder; and to regret the discrediting of Rybkin, a moderate, responsible, and even noble figure in the politics of the mid-1990s. He and his deputy in the Security Council, Boris Berezovsky, played an enormously constructive role in that period, despite the conspiracy theories directed against Berezovsky (and more recently directed by him).

I personally have ample cause to regret the apparent political demise of Rybkin. He had called consistently in the '90s for getting Russia into NATO as a constructive member: He refused to shut up about it when Primakov told him to do so. In this matter, as in his leadership style in the Duma and his approach toward Chechnya, he worked for mild and practical compromises. Thus his suggestion of joining NATO initially as a "political member"; he explained at a conference at the Higher School of Economics in 2002 that this was meant not as the last step but the first, leaving it for later to join the military structures of NATO. He recalled the arguments made at the time by the opponents of it -- that it would mean NATO and America in Central Asia and the Caucasus, something that many Russians feared as an encirclement, while many NATO people (and Vaclav Havel) said it would be too much for NATO to handle. Now the Americans and NATO were there anyway, he pointed out, and were needed for Russia's security; the difference was that they got there too late to do anything to prevent 9-11, and without a Russian seat on the NATO council to get a fair share of influence on their actions. Rybkin's proposal could have produced a genuine solution rather than the ersatz ones in the Founding Act that were adopted and made for renewed crises a year later. Rybkin symbolizes the path not taken.

But a symbol of the past is not news, and regret is not news analysis.

We can also regret the lack of public enthusiasm for the candidacy of Irina Khakamada. But given the facts known well in advance -- Putin's popularity, SPS's unpopularity, and the unwillingness even of SPS to endorse her -- the result was only to be anticipated. I personally can regret this, too: I remember well her passionate speech in St. Petersburg in the spring of 2002 about how NATO must take in Russia if NATO wants to remain relevant and fight terrorism seriously. And how I was the only other person on that panel to support her view; the other Westerner there gave an insulting speech about how Russians ought to take the correct view of things and be happy about NATO taking in the Baltics, while the other Russian speakers were too cautious to take a clear stance. She is a symbol of democratic idealism. But symbol, again, is not news, regret is not analysis. Nor cause for accusation.

All these "might have beens" are lamentations for the past. They have no real bearing on the election.

It is possible that a supporter of Glaziev would have more genuine cause for complaint. However, the Western media have not made much of this. Perhaps it is because just a few weeks ago the media were describing the rise of Glaziev as a dangerous sign of nationalist and anti-democratic trends in Russia. One would expect the media to be pleased that he is not making any more headway. But on this the media are suddenly mute.

The Western media have not managed to say anything about the fact that, for the first time, extremist and anti-Western candidates are not making any headway in a Russian presidential election. In previous elections, extreme anti-Westerners -- Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov -- mounted serious challenges, garnering tens of millions of votes. The West was terribly afraid, during every Russian election campaign in the 1990s, that the extremists would come to power. This time there is no such fear. The extremists are marginal. The reason for their marginality is the popularity of Putin; this persuaded the most prominent of the extremists to sit out the race.

A massive collective sigh of relief would be in order. Where is that sigh of relief? It is nowhere to be heard. It is, as Henry Hale might have said, the strange case of the cat that didn't bark. And it doesn't require a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the meaning of this clue.

It would be hard for me to dispute much of the following description of the media situation by pravda.ru:

"The closer the presidential elections date, the more critical stories on Russia are published... The main task of the new media campaign is making Vladimir Putin (who will probably be elected for the second term) not legitimate in the minds of Western audience... The Cold War images seem to be restored in the Western society. There are no positive articles about Russia in American and European media any more... The Times wrote that Russia is the country of "crime and corruption"... There is obvious connection between Western media increased criticism and Russian presidential elections: it is easy to find excuses for toughening policy to Russia if the public is convinced that political processes in Russia are not legitimate. Many Russian experts believe that moving Western politics into anti-Russian direction is inevitable." (Mikhail Chernov, "West against Russia", pravda.ru, March 12, 2004. JRL 8114)

Sadly, this critique, or meta-critique, contains more genuine analysis than most of the Western articles on the election. If its conclusion comes true and the West does turn more sharply against Russia on such a flimsy basis, this will probably do more damage to the cause of democracy in Russia than all the flaws that have been found in or imputed to the present election.