Date: 20 Nov 2005
From: Anna.S.Parachkevova.04@Alum.Dartmouth.ORG (Anna S. Parachkevova 04)
Subject: POLITICAL TAROT READING [jump to article]
I am a winner of the 2005 Phillips Foundation Gold Award for Journalism. Prior to winning the grant, I worked as a general assignment reporter for a newspaper in the Boston area. I graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004.
I am currently in Moscow, working on a book and writing about politics.
POLITICAL TAROT READING
By Anna Parachkevova
Who will be Russia's next president?
The question has occupied the minds of journalists and political analysts in Russia for quite a while. But this week, speculations exceeded the level of healthy guesswork and entered the realm of what can only be compared to political tarot reading.
Recently, President Vladimir Putin shuffled the deck of cards a bit, making a few additions and replacement here and there. The additions included promoting his chief of staff, Dmitry Medvedev, to first deputy prime minister, and appointing Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov a deputy prime minister.
While the cards show the same, the readings seem to vary. Some predict that Putin would eventually pick either Medvedev or Ivanov to replace Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov; a move which symbolizes Putin's choice of a presidential successor. Others claim that a third, so far unknown, contender will enter into the picture much closer to the elections in 2008. But is this the real story? There is something profoundly disturbing about a democratic media that resorts to so much guesswork and 'reading between the lines," while ignoring other equally, if not more important, issues.
A very important story NOT being written is that the current president certainly knows and understands that he can keep a pliant media focused on his Tarot Game for months. In the meantime, the elections in Chechyna grow closer, the Moscow Duma elections will come and go, setting the tone for the parliamentary elections in 2007 that will likely, but hopefully not, reveal an even weaker opposition, which will, once again, remain frozen out of the government.
Political tarot reading happens in every country, but in Russia such a trend can have dire consequences, given the country's dictatorship past whose legacy continues to loom over the country's present and to threaten its future. Russia is a young democracy that has had only one peaceful, democratic transfer of power in its long history. The patterns of how this government will transfer power over the next 100 years is being forged today. If the patterns that forms is one where the president can further toy with the media and people, who will be the winning card in the 2008 elections seems of little importance.
Sure, rumors and political intrigue are not alien to even the most democratic of societies. Take, for instance, speculations earlier this fall, about the possible resignation of US Vice President Dick Cheney in relation to the Plame-CIA spy link investigation. Such speculations proved to be bogus. But, now imagine that in addition to suggesting that Bush was planning to replace Cheney with Secretary of State Gondoleeza Rice, he was doing so in order groom her as the future president. Anyone in the United States would have considered such a suggestion preposterous and out of the question.
In Russia, such a suggestion is not only plausible, it is the reality. There is a difference in Russia between what is considered the official political process, used to facilitate the transition of power, and the unwritten one. Russian political analysts are, in fact, doing a pretty good job reading the signs. In this particular case, appointing a prime minister is considered to be the ticket to the presidency. Everyone who follows politics knows that. Given the unconventional and behind-the-scenes nature of Russian politics, who could blame Russian journalists and political analysts for resorting to so much guesswork? If the government does not give them anything more solid, then, they will use anything they can, even if it doesn't qualify as hard-core facts.
And, yet, the game is half about credulity and half about manipulation, and it takes both a dealer and a sucker.