Putin triumphant
Rashed Rahman
Russian President Vladimir Putin has won a record fourth
term in the elections held on March 18, 2018 with 74 percent of the vote. This
is the preliminary official exit poll and the final figure could be higher. Predictably,
the opposition has alleged incidents of ballot stuffing and fraud, but these
have not found traction with the election authorities or the public. Apart from
Putin, there were seven other candidates in the running, with his most vocal
critic, Alexei Navalny, barred on legal grounds. The Kremlin had hoped for a
high turnout to provide greater legitimacy to Putin’s victory as Russia is
currently under attack from the west over allegations of responsibility for the
poisoning by a nerve agent of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in
Britain. This has coincided with fresh US sanctions over alleged Russian
interference in the election of President Donald Trump.
Counting from 1999 when he became prime minister under then
president Boris Yeltsin, Putin has been in power for two decades. During this
period he has oscillated between the two top positions of prime minister and
president, since the Russian Constitution does not allow more than two terms to
a president. The current victory therefore will see Putin serve out his fourth
term as president, punctuated by a middle stint as prime minister. Presidential
terms were increased from four to six years in 2012. While the final outcome of
the election was never in doubt given Putin’s 80 percent approval rating, the
turnout amongst 107 million voters of 60 percent lends weight and legitimacy to
his mandate till 2024. Putin will be 71 by then, and it is not beyond the
imagination that thoughts of the transition and a successor is likely to
exercise his mind and that of his colleagues to ensure the stability and
restored sense of national pride he has presided over after the disastrous Yeltsin
years prevails.
The west paints Putin as an autocrat presiding over a
corrupt system dominated by his cronies. But the west’s own role in bringing
about a brutal, unfettered loot sale of assets and wealth to the old communist
party nomenklatura and a new breed of
predatory emerging oligarchs under Yeltsin is glossed over, if it is mentioned
at all. In fact, over the last two decades, it cannot be a coincidence that
Putin’s actions against such oligarchs have aroused their hatred, political
opposition, and open seeking of western support against him.
Russia is not a country that has evolved a democratic system
a la the history of the west. It would be politic to remind ourselves of
Russia’s modern history. The Czarist Empire extended over more contiguous
territory than any other contemporary rival or country. Even after the collapse
and breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 into 15 countries, the remaining Russia
is still the largest country by area in the world. The huge Czarist Empire
expanded from Moscow from the sixteenth century to enfold through conquest not
only its European part, but the huge expanse to the east running through
Siberia all the way to the Pacific. It also succeeded in subjugating Central
Asia and tying it firmly to its apron strings. This gave the Czarist Empire a
unique character, not only in physical size but in the diversity of the peoples
and nations in its fold. Virtually all religions could be found in its
territories. Peoples and nations with diverse histories and stages of
development lived there, all the way from pastoral nomads to aspiring
capitalists and everything in between.
Capitalism developed late in the Czarist Empire, compared to
western Europe and even the US (the latter could be considered an extension of
the European system to the New World through settler colonialism). In fact
feudalism thrived and lingered under the Czars, so much so that serfdom was not
abolished until 1861. The reform effort of the nineteenth century, as often
happens in hidebound, ossified systems (cf. the Soviet Union in the late
twentieth century), began to feel the strains of the new forces being born in
its womb colliding with the antediluvian hangovers of the past. One of the
latter was the continuation of Czarist absolutism, supported on the pillars of
the court nobility and feudal landowning class. However, within the womb of
this medieval system were growing the seeds of the modern world, underpinned,
albeit relatively weakly, by the green shoots of capitalism. Many attempts at overthrowing
the Czarist system from within by rivals at the court, from without by a
panoply of populists, anarchists, peasant revolutionaries and others produced
great turmoil during the latter half of the 19th and early part of
the 20th century. This culminated finally in first the February 1917
Revolution in the midst of WWI that overthrew the monarchy and declared a
republic, later the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that ushered in communism.
Long after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
proclaimed by the Bolsheviks was established, went through the twists, turns,
bloodshed of the civil war (1918-22), the revolution’s architect and leader
Lenin’s passing away (1924), the penchant of all revolutions to consume their
own children being played out under Stalin (1924-38), the initial defeat turned
into triumphant victory over Hitler (1941-45), the devastating losses and
privations of WWII rooted the desire for peace above all else in the hearts of
the people of the USSR. That this desire gave rise to Khrushchev’s détente
policies has to be located in that context, whatever one’s views about that
thrust. Khrushchev did not survive the contradiction between détente and the
aggressive Cold War anti-communism of the west led by the US. His successors,
while clinging to the idea of a socialist world (largely the USSR and the
Eastern European communist bloc), and not always consistent support to third
world national liberation and revolutionary movements, imploded largely because
the adventure in Afghanistan finally took its toll of the by now creaky system,
which Gorbachev was trying to reform.
Communist old guard hardliners’ attempted coup against
Gorbachev, who much later confessed to have been swayed towards social
democracy, proved the last nail in the coffin of the USSR in 1991 and arguably
the 20th century edifice of worldwide communist revolution. While
the capitalist west exulted in its victory in the Cold War and dismantling of
the original home of the communist revolution, they saw in Gorbachev’s
successor Yeltsin the perfect buffoon allowing them to penetrate the Russian
economy for capitalism’s benefit (as part of the horizontal expansion of
capitalism worldwide, later dubbed globalisation). While the dismantling of the
old system overnight produced hunger and even starvation, the new breed of
oligarchs aligned with the west became Yeltsin’s abiding legacy.
Putin took over from Yeltsin when the west’s machinations
and the legacy of the post-Soviet past had reduced Russia to its knees. He was soon
to face the betrayal of then US President Ronald Reagan’s assurances to
Gorbachev while asking the latter to dismantle the Berlin Wall that the west
(NATO) would not expand eastwards into the former (now independent) territories
of the USSR or Eastern Europe. Today, NATO’s expansion eastwards is a fact.
Threatened in its ‘near abroad’ by a west ruthlessly committed to weakening and
keeping Russia on its knees, Putin pushed back. Hence the best laid plans of
the west vis-à-vis Georgia and Ukraine were blunted. During the engineered
Ukraine crisis, Putin took back Crimea, gifted to Ukraine during Khrushchev’s
period, much to the teeth gnashing of the west. Abroad, after the debacles in
Iraq and Libya, Russia drew a line in the sand in Syria and helped beat back
the western effort to remove one of the last anti-Israel bastions in the
region.
Putin’s push back to the US-led west’s desire to consolidate
a unipolar world under their hegemony is what has produced the vilification
campaign, personal against Putin, general against a recovered Russia. With all
the flaws that could be pointed to in Russia’s system today, the people love
and have rallied to Putin for recovering for them their just place in the sun
and in today’s increasingly complex and conflict-ridden world.
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