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Moscow Times
May 17, 2004
Exposing a Kremlin Myth
By Yevgenia Albats
There is a growing trend in reports about Russia, both here and abroad, to explain President Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian regime as the product of the country's historically illiberal political culture. The Russian people, in this account, naturally prefer a paternalist, even repressive government to Western-style democracy. As one analyst with a foreign-owned Moscow financial institution put it in an op-ed widely circulated by the state media, Putin's regime is popular because it is "genuinely in line with what most Russians want."
This simplistic thesis is neither new nor accurate. Many a country has been pronounced unsuitable for democracy on the same basis only to prove the doubters wrong. West Germany, for example, emerged as one of Europe's leading democracies in the years after the fall of the Third Reich.
It should come as no surprise that many of the pro-Kremlin advocates of this view are members of the political and business elite. Preserving the status quo has obviously become a priority during Putin's presidency because it shields Kremlin cronyism from the unpredictable forces of democracy and market-based competition. The regime's near-total control of the mass media has silenced dissenting voices. All of this has created the perception that most experts believe Russian civilization is somehow inherently hostile to democracy.
But we need to address the question of cause and effect. Has the nation's preference for authoritarianism given rise to the Putin regime, or has Kremlin propaganda, aimed at suppressing political and economic opposition to the regime, been so successful in disseminating this myth that it has taken on the appearance of truth?
Consider two news items from last week. Moscow Human Rights Bureau director Alexander Brod estimated the number of skinheads in Russia at 50,000. Skinheads commit an average of 30 to 40 attacks a month "motivated by xenophobia and ethnic hatred," Brod said.
Fascists were around before Putin came to power, of course. Law enforcement has never been terribly eager to investigate or prosecute hate crimes, and often sympathizes with hard-line nationalist groups. But during perestroika and the Yeltsin years, openly xenophobic articles in the national press were almost unheard of. Politicians who advocated such views were marginalized. In the 1999 parliamentary election, the Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Russia's best-known nationalist, nearly failed to clear the 5-percent barrier for representation in the State Duma.
The situation has changed radically since then. The country's most popular newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, with a combined circulation of 28 million copies, regularly publishes chauvinistic articles. Similar, though better-camouflaged, material regularly appears on the state-controlled television stations. In order to drum up support for the war in Chechnya, the major TV stations portray Chechens as a backward nation of criminals. In news and entertainment programming, they drive home the image of ethnic Russians victimized by non-Russian villains.
As a result, the number of hate crimes has been growing annually by 30 percent in the last three to four years, according to the Moscow Human Rights Bureau. Reflecting this trend, Zhirinovsky's LDPR doubled its contingent in the Duma in last December's parliamentary election. On the whole, nationalists of various stripes occupy nearly half of the Duma's 450 seats.
Another item of note last week was Putin's praise of the Soviet Union's 10-year occupation of Afghanistan, which he compared to the current "anti-terrorist operation" in Chechnya. No mainstream politician has made this sort of statement since Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan 15 years ago. After all, some 10,000 Soviet soldiers died in that unjust war. Has Putin simply caught the wave of nostalgia for the Soviet era? Or is the current leadership, many of whom held key positions in the Soviet power structures 15 years ago as well, turning back the clock in order to eradicate the liberal ideas that sprang up in the meantime?
The answer is clear.
The public is generally poorly educated in democratic ideas. Public opinion is unstable and easily manipulated by the state. So when the Kremlin's propagandists spread the myth about Russia's cultural and historical rejection of democracy, people believe it.
We should not be so easily fooled.
Yevgenia Albats hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio on Sundays.