Along with reimposing law and order, Putin pledged to return Russia to her former standing as a world power. Boris Yeltsin had viewed the dismantling of the Soviet empire as his greatest achievement, a liberation of independence-seeking republics that would allow Russia to re-join the global community of nations; but Putin described the demise of the USSR as ‘the biggest geo-political tragedy of the century’. He berated the West for humiliating Russia and for expanding NATO to Russia’s frontier. He would strive to offset domestic economic decline and his own falling poll numbers by foreign adventurism, including the annexation of Crimea and the fomenting of revolts in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere.
Putin would restore a semblance of economic stability, albeit with sluggish rates of growth and pitiably low income levels. But these modest successes were accompanied by the abandonment of the democratic reforms of the Yeltsin years. It was these reforms that had created the economic growth which, together with the rise in oil prices, allowed Putin to strengthen his hold on power. Having consolidated his position, however, he turned the clock back. Under Putin, the powers of parliament have been weakened and those of the president enhanced. Opposition parties suffer discrimination and harassment; they are excluded from the media; political rallies are broken up and protestors jailed. Freedom of the press has been restricted; the legislature, the courts and most of the media – including television news – are once again controlled by the Kremlin.
This is what Putin calls ‘managed democracy’. In reality, it is not democracy at all; Russia is governed by
The external wrappings of democracy are present: elections, parliament and so on, but the essence is absolutely different. In the Russian case, we are dealing with … the deliberate use of democratic institutions as Potemkin villages in order to conceal traditional power arrangements … The political regime that has consolidated itself resembles the ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ of Latin American regimes in the 1960s and 1970s. It has all the characteristics: personalised power, bureaucratisation of society, political exclusion of the populace … and an active role for the secret services (in Latin America it was the military).
For much of the early 2000s, Putin continued to call himself a democrat, while suggesting that the suppression of some civil liberties was justified by the need to restore state control. ‘Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history,’ he wrote. ‘For the first time in the past two or three hundred years, it is facing the real danger of sliding to the second, if not third, echelon of world states. We are running out of time to avoid this.’ Putin’s swagger on the international stage won him support from those Russians who yearned for a strong leader to restore national prestige after a decade of weakness. He pandered to nostalgia for the days of Soviet belligerence by reinstating the Soviet national anthem (albeit with new words) and military parades through Red Square with convoys of missiles and tanks and marching regiments shouting ‘Hurrah!’ to their president. Putin’s picture was hung in schoolrooms and public buildings. He acquired a taste for pomp and ceremony, making regal entrances along red carpets with trumpets blaring.
His personality cult has become reminiscent of that of Stalin. He now appears in military uniform at army and naval bases, piloting a fighter plane into Chechnya or standing beside a tank, tranquillising a Siberian tiger, driving a Formula One car, diving to recover antique treasures from the seabed, shooting a whale with a crossbow, scoring unopposed goals in ice-hockey games, even flying a microlight to guide migrating cranes on their journey to the south. When a photoshoot of the shirtless president boosted his standing among female voters, he was delighted; when it was co-opted with ribald comments by Russia’s gay websites, he was furious. The newspaper
