Having served their jail sentences, the Pussy Rioters might have been expected to keep their heads down, but they failed to learn the lesson Putin had taught them and made an unscheduled appearance at the Sochi Olympics. Sochi was one of Putin’s many self-aggrandising projects – he had spent over $50 billion of taxpayers’ money to put on an international display of his success as Russia’s leader – so, in February 2014, it was a natural target for dissent. Wearing their trademark fluorescent balaclavas, Pussy Riot hardly had time to sing the first verse of ‘Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland’ before a detachment of Cossack militia started to lash them with horsewhips.
Successive reports by international monitoring organisations reveal how rapidly the electoral process in Russia has been undermined since Putin came to power. Despite the upheaval of the 1990s, observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) described Boris Yeltsin’s final set of parliamentary elections, in December 1999, as ‘competitive and pluralistic’, marking ‘significant progress for the consolidation of democracy in the Russian Federation’. Three years into the Putin era, the OSCE reported that the 2003 parliamentary vote ‘failed to meet many Council of Europe commitments for democratic elections’ and queried ‘Russia’s fundamental willingness to meet European and international standards for democratic elections’. The 2004 presidential election was marred by problems concerning the secrecy of the ballot and the biased role of the state-controlled media, with OSCE observers concluding that ‘a vibrant political discourse and meaningful pluralism were lacking’. For the 2007 parliamentary elections, in which the pro-Putin United Russia party secured a two-thirds majority, and the 2008 presidential race, won overwhelmingly by Vladimir Putin, there was no monitoring because European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights and OSCE observers were refused visas by the Kremlin. The Council of Europe called the 2008 poll ‘more of a plebiscite’, or a one-horse race, than a genuine exercise in democracy, because the Kremlin had disbarred Putin’s only credible challenger, the former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, who had been dismissed by Putin in 2004. In subsequent elections, the OSCE has noted the increasing move towards a one-party state – ‘the convergence of the State and the governing party’ – and the absence of genuine choice for voters.
In addition to manipulating the vote, Putin has subverted legal norms to ensure his continued hold on power. Article 81 of the Russian constitution stipulates that the same person cannot hold the office of president for more than two terms. Having come to the end of his second stint in the job in 2008, he declared that the rule actually meant two consecutive terms, so he would temporarily swap jobs with his compliant prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, before returning to the presidency in 2012. With his second set of consecutive terms due to end in 2024, Putin initially accepted that he would not be able to run for a fifth time, but later changed his mind. In July 2020 he rewrote the constitution and reset his term limit to zero, opening the way for him to appropriate two more presidential mandates and stay in the Kremlin until he is 83.
You will not be surprised to learn that the Russian people have discerned the truth behind the shenanigans and that electoral fraud figures high on the list of topics for the political jokes characteristic of our folk humour. My favourite is the story of the Kremlin lackey who rushes in to give Putin the results of the presidential election.
‘Mr President, I have good news and bad news,’ the lackey says.
‘What is the good news?’ Putin asks.
‘You won the election,’ comes the reply.
‘And what is the bad news?’
‘No one voted for you.’
CHAPTER 15
INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS
