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Moscow Times
January 31, 2005
A Product of Putin's System
By Nikolai Petrov

President Vladimir Putin has been let down again -- and in a big way. The president's approval rating has taken a hit, and the number of people unhappy with his job performance has doubled compared to the same time last year.

January 2005 will go down in history as the time when citizens driven to desperation engaged the regime from a position of power. We witnessed the overcoming of atomization and the appearance of a sense of unity and social responsibility. The recent protests revealed the potential power of Russian society and the weakness of the regime.

Not since the early 1990s had such a wave of protests been seen in this country. Thousands of pensioners took to the streets to protest the replacement of social benefits with cash payments. Before long, young people began to join in as well. Various political organizations attempted to ride this wave, from the National Bolsheviks and radical communist parties to Yabloko and two of the parties now represented in the State Duma, the Communist Party and Rodina. New organizations began to appear: the Union of Welfare Recipients in Voronezh, the Public Committee for the Defense of Citizens' Social Rights in Mordovia, and the Civil Resistance Council in St. Petersburg. After a while, the pro-Kremlin United Russia party began organizing large demonstrations in support of the government's welfare reform policy.

The government, at both the regional and federal levels, was caught by surprise and soon started to back down, partially restoring canceled benefits and increasing compensation. The Kremlin not only caved in on welfare reform, but also on reforms still in the planning stages, such as a reduction in the number of deferments from military service. Having made concessions to appease the crowds of irate seniors, the regime simply cannot allow the fire of protest to spread to young people, society's most volatile group.

What lessons can we learn from all this? And who let Putin down?

Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov? He only let Putin down in the sense that he didn't take the bullet for the president, skillfully slipping into the background instead.

How about Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov, the reformers in Fradkov's Cabinet? The idea behind the reform was correct. And they couldn't control every bureaucrat down the line.

The government did its homework. It prepared all right, just not for what actually happened. Late last year, a commission headed by Fradkov met weekly, and the governors had their say.

The Duma and the Federation Council? Lawmakers did what the Kremlin asked them to do by passing the government's welfare reforms. Sure, the work of parliament leaves much to be desired. But the Kremlin is to blame for forming a parliament full of loyal amateurs.

Should people like Vladislav Surkov in the presidential administration be blamed for insisting that political parties and governors were under control? Or the siloviki, who didn't nip protest in the bud? You have to remember that the police have also suffered from welfare reform. And using force in this situation would only have made matters worse.

The governors, who were forced to hurriedly rewrite budgets and revise laws, but who proved unable to deprive pensioners of their benefits? You may recall that the governors warned repeatedly that the reform wouldn't fly in its present form or in the time frame set by the Kremlin. And they bore the brunt of the backlash.

Political organizations like the Communist Party and the National Bolsheviks? But they didn't really instigate anything. They arrived late in the game.

The mass media and the global conspiracy against Russia aren't worth considering since they are routinely blamed for everything under the sun.

All of this suggests that no one in particular, and everyone involved, is guilty for the failure of welfare reform. The current sociopolitical crisis is systemic and very serious because it reveals the weakness of the entire political system. The rules of the game are set by the Kremlin, not the individual players. Welfare reform is an exception not because it was planned more poorly than other reforms, but because it directly affected millions of people and provoked an immediate response.

Putin let himself down. And what is happening now is the fair result of the policies implemented by the political machine that he built.

Nikolai Petrov is a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.