Election
According to the official estimate, Putin scored 64 percent of the vote. Accoding to the independent observer Golos (Voice), the figure was just over 50 percent. A landslide by any other name, and this was on the cards before the last voter cast his ballot for a tenth time.
Both estimates agree that the communist Zyuganov finished second with about 17 percent, leaving every other candidate in the dust of single digits. So yet again the KGB and the Party have reenacted their perennial struggles for power. Yet again the KGB won, as it has done consistently since 1982, when its chairman Yuri Andropov took over the country and paved the way for his beloved apostle Gorbachev. Yet again the Russians went for the devil they know, rather than any cardboard angel waved by the opposition.
Putin’s re-elevation was never in doubt. Everybody knew he was running the country anyway, only having relinquished the actual office to Medvedev to avoid serving three consecutive terms. The National Leader acknowledged as much himself, when announcing his candidature a few months ago. Asked if he didn’t think this swap of offices looked a tad cynical, he replied with disarming honesty that the people mustn’t worry their pretty little heads about such trivia. He and Medvedev had had it all set up from the very beginning. Unimpressed with such candour, the opposition websites raged and raved, but the ordinary Russians just nodded. They expected nothing less, or nothing more.
Yesterday’s election boasted a 65 percent turnout, higher than we’ve known in Britain for quite some time. Having said that, we don’t use what the Russians call ‘carousel’ voting, with crowds of bribed citizens bussed from one polling station to another, voting each time. Yesterday some were shipped to Moscow from as far as 600 miles away, what with the polls in the capital having pointed at a worryingly even split of the vote.
Among other things, this points at the Russians’ ability to learn from the West, something Dostoyevsky described so eloquently in his Karamazovs. After all, the same technique was used to resounding success by Mayor Daley of Chicago who thereby delivered the swing state of Illinois to JFK in the 1960 election. The Mafia boss Sam Giancanna added a helping hand, thus showing how well the symbiosis of crime and politics could work. Lesson 1 learned, and I fully expect the Russians to learn a few others in the next couple of centuries, such as how to run an election in a different way or how to deposit money in a bank without first laundering it.
Carousel voting isn’t the only violation reported during yesterday’s elections. There are thousands of others (over 3,000 were reported shortly after the polls opened). Voters were bribed or threatened, observers beaten up, ballot boxes stuffed — all par for the course. Again the opposition politicians and journalists sputtered spittle, but even they stopped just short of claiming that without such tricks Putin would have lost. They may not know who Joseph de Maistre was but they all have heard his aphorism: every nation gets the government it deserves.
Runup
Beauty is best perceived from a distance, as the Russians say, and I happily watched last fortnight’s shenanigans from the comfort of my London flat. First came the rally at the Luzniki sports arena on 23 February, the Army Day. Dr Goebbels himself would have been proud of the spectacle: tens of thousands were brought to Luzniki, seduced by overtime pay at work and a promise of a good show. Beats working, any day.
Flags waved, crowds screamed themselves hoarse, but the highlight came from the National Leader himself. Suffocated by tears, he was still able to recite a few lines from the patriotic poem Borodino Lermontov wrote in the wake of the 1812 war against Napoleon. In my loose translation, ‘Boys, is it not Moscow behind us? So let’s die before Moscow as our grandfathers did! And to die we promised; and at Borodino the oath of loyalty we kept.’ Stirring stuff, that, but what does it actually mean in the context of a political campaign?
Simple. The opposition is the enemy, assailing, Napoleon-style, everything a real Russian holds sacred. Putin is that real Russian, the present-day answer to Field Marshal Kutuzov, and he demands loyalty in the face of the common enemy. And in case the implication got lost in the translation from 1812 to 2012, he then made it abundantly clear. ‘Don’t look to the other side of the hill [the West, in the lingo of Russia’s mean streets), don’t betray your motherland!’ he shouted, tears streaming down his face. What could be clearer than that? Anybody who opposes Putin is a traitor. And traitors, as he said in a different context, don’t live long.
Job done, election in the bag. By way of insurance, however, Putin put a finishing touch on his real-man image created by numerous photos of him half-naked galloping on a steed, him half-naked holding a rifle with telescopic sights, him showing off his prowess at martial arts, him clad in the uniform of the Russian special forces — in short, him being the strong leader making most Russians and a few of our own commentators swoon from excitement.
This time he was depicted playing ice hockey in full medieval-knight gear. For most Russians the game is shorthand for testosterone-fuelled masculinity. They all know the hockey song with its lyrics ‘Hockey is played by real men; a coward doesn’t play hockey.’ Putin is that real man. He’s not a coward. So how could he lose? He couldn’t. And he didn’t.
Mikhail Ivanovich Putin
Yes, I know Putin’s name is Vladimir Vladimirovich. But in his circles, those formed by the intertwined strains of the KGB and the international underworld, a man doesn’t always go by the name his parents gave him. A moniker is de rigeur. Some code names are transparent: for example, Gen. Zolotov, head of Putin’s security, is known as ‘Generalissimo’. Others are less so, such as the one identifying the oil trader Timchenko as ‘Gangrene’, which wouldn’t be my first choice of a codename, but then I haven’t got one, so there.
Putin’s is a neutral ‘Mikhail Ivanovich’, which was revealed by the businessman Sergei Kolesnikov in a February interview to the Russian newspaper The New Times. The interviewer didn’t know why Putin would choose such an odd moniker, but I could venture a guess: he named himself after Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, the nominal president of the USSR under Stalin. Sometimes the National Leader also goes by the more straightforward ‘boss’ or ‘tsar’.
Kolesnikov was a partner in several businesses with intimate links to Putin, such as the Ozero (Lake) Cooperative and Rosinvest, a well-known conduit of money from Russia to various offshore accounts. At some point he fell foul of his partners, including the silent ones, and had to run for his life. Kolesnikov came out of Russia bearing not only his own testimony but also audio tapes of highly incriminating conversations, share certificates, bank transfer documents and other bits of evidence. In this country they would be sufficient for the CPO to indict Putin for money laundering, though not necessarily to obtain a conviction.
According to the paper, the evidence has been authenticated by Western media, including the FT. Kolesnikov stated that back in 2001 Putin instructed him and his partner Nikolai Shamalov to buy $203 million worth of medical equipment abroad. The money was to come from London’s own Roman Abramovich, but 35 percent was to go into various offshore accounts. Kolesnikov says that 35 financial institutions have been used for this purpose since then, but he names only two: Rolling International in the British Virgin Islands and Santal Trading in Panama.
According to him, the money would then be rerouted into the shares of various corporations, mostly in Liechtenstein where they widely use bearer stock certificates — no names please, we are Russians. The corporations (Kolesnikov specifically mentions London’s EM&PS Medical Supplies wholly owned by the Russians) would then pay dividends, up to $41 million at a time. It was with this money that a group of investors bought the controlling interest in Rosbank, which handles most transactions for Gazprom, the world’s largest exporter of gas.
Kolesnikov is in no doubt that Putin is the real owner of Rosbank, something Putin’s spokesmen deny. But then they would, wouldn’t they? This tallies neatly with the claim Stanislav Belkovsky, the Russian political scientist, made to the German magazine Die Welt. According to Belkovsky, Putin owns, among other interests, 4.5 percent of Gazprom as well as 50 percent of the oil-trading company Gunvor (the other 50 percent is owned by Timchenko, aka ‘Gangrene’). That, suggests Belakovsky, makes Putin one of the world’s richest men.
I have seen the documents quoted by The New Times, but obviously can’t verify their authenticity. That would be a task for the police. However, one could suggest that, if even 10 percent of the accusations were true, Putin should be in prison, not in the Kremlin. And in any case, such documents published in the runup to a campaign would scupper the chances of any Western politician, including the likes of Berlusconi and Chirac (who both, incidentally, attended Putin’s 55th birthday party in 2007 — I’m sure, if neither is in prison by then, they’ll be guests of honour at his 60th this year). In Russia, no one bats an eyelid. You don’t expect a chap like Putin to live on his salary, do you?
Aftermath
As I write, crowds of protesters are gathering in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. The losing candidate Mikhail ‘Single-Digit’ Prokhorov will be in attendance, all in a purely disinterested fashion of course. There will be speeches and diatribes galore, and more such events will be held all over Russia.
Some Western observers believe that public unrest will put an end to Putin’s tenure long before its legal expiry, but I doubt that. Much as I’d like to share this optimism, the National Leader is fully in command, and he knows how to combine coercion with bribery to nullify any serious opposition.
With the price of oil sky-high, he’ll have enough wherewithal at his disposal to increase the pensions a bit (not much of a commitment, considering that few Russians live to pensionable age) and the military spending a lot, thus confirming his muscular image. He has already mentioned $750 billion as the first tranche — this at a time when we can’t afford a single aircraft carrier to defend the Falklands or, for that matter, the planes to take off from a carrier even if we had one.
I pity the Russians; I fear for us. Interesting times lie ahead — personally, I’d welcome something considerably more dull.