As a member of a delegation of the Dutch Social-Democratic Party, I personally had
the opportunity to visit, on June 14, 1981, a polling station at the Alexanderplatz
in East-Berlin, during the elections of the Volkskammer, the parliament of the German Democratic Republic. I was able to observe how all
voters were given the “National Front” ballot paper and deposited it straight into
the ballot box. In a corner was a voting booth covered with white sheets, but nobody
entered it. On my question to the director of the polling station why nobody went
into the booth, he said that voters “were free to go in the booth, delete some names
on the list or even invalidate it.” When I said that entering the booth, “might, perhaps,
attract some unwelcome attention,” he went to a table and came back with a booklet.
It was the constitution of the German Democratic Republic. He leafed through the booklet,
then read aloud a paragraph that said that elections in the GDR were “free and secret.”
Next day the party paper Neues Deutschland published the results under the heading “Great Victory for the National Front.” In
total 99.86 percent of the electorate had voted for the National Front. East German
citizens told me the next day that entering the voting booth and deleting names would
diminish your chances of getting an apartment, a promotion, or a permit for traveling
abroad. Not one of my interlocutors had, himself or herself, ventured into the booth.
6.
Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 69–70.
7.
United Russia was formed in April 2001 from a merger between the Unity Party of Russia
and the Fatherland-All Russia Party, led by the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov.
8.
Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.
9.
“Gorbachev alarm at Soviet echoes,” BBC (March 6, 2009). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7927920.stm.
10.
“A Just Russia” was originally a merger of three parties: Rodina (Fatherland Party), Pensionery (Pensioners’ Party), and Zhizn (Russian Party of Life, led by Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Federation Council,
the Russian Upper House). The Rodina party, led by Dmitry Rogozin, was the most important of the three: it got 9 percent
of the votes in the legislative elections of 2003. Rodina was barred from the elections for the Moscow City Duma in 2005 for inciting racial
hatred after it had broadcasted ads with the slogan “clear our city of trash,” showing
a group of Caucasian people littering a park with watermelon rinds. Its xenophobic
tradition seems to have been taken over by its successor, A Just Russia, which was
accused by SOVA-Center, a Russian NGO, of having three anti-Semites on its list of
candidates for the State Duma. One of them, Yury Lopusov, a leader of the youth movement
Pobeda, quoted Hitler’s Mein Kampf in an interview published on the party’s website. (Cf. “‘Spravedlivaya Rossiya’ beret
antisemitov, rogozintsev i lubiteley ‘Mein Kampf,’’” (A Just Russia is welcoming anti-Semites,
Rogozin adepts and admirers of ‘Mein Kampf’), SOVA-Center (September 24, 2007). http://xeno.sova-center.ru/45A29F2/9DF6F26. In 2006 Dmitry Rogozin resigned as party leader of Rodina. His appointment in January
2008 to the important post of ambassador to NATO was a sign of his excellent relationship
with Putin.
11.
The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality in a country (0 = total equality
and 1 = total inequality) was on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union 0.29.
In 2006 it had risen to 0.41—which was above the average of the EU.
12.
The Moscow Times (October 30, 2006).
13.
Stuart D. Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession,” CRS Report for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2008), 2. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34392.pdf.
14.
Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession.”
15.
Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.
16.
Primakov, Le monde sans la Russie? À quoi conduit la myopie politique? 111. Primakov also criticized the fact that in the Federation Council “one could even
find individuals with a criminal past or present.”
