The Next Russian Election

Why do Russians bother to vote?

Russia will hold a presidential election in mid-March. And Vladimir Putin will win it, barring a fatal heart attack or the like. The recent death in prison (probably murder) of opposition leader Alexei Navalny exposes the brutality that perpetuates autocratic power in Moscow. So why even hold an election?

Freedom House (an NGO that surveys political rights and civil liberties) rates Russia as “not free”. Power is concentrated in the hands of one man. “With loyalist security forces, a subservient judiciary, a controlled media environment, and a legislature consisting of a ruling party and pliable opposition factions, the Kremlin manipulates elections and suppresses genuine dissent.”

“Russia has never experienced a democratic transfer of power between rival groups.” Freedom House 2023.

To try to understand this system, I recommend Richard Pipes’s Russia Under the Old Regime. It explains the history of Russia’s patrimonial state. It was first published in 1974 and takes us up to the end of the nineteenth century, but it delivers many light-bulb moments that illuminate the present.

Prior to 1900, no social or economic group in Russia “was able or willing to stand up to the crown and challenge its monopoly of political power [because] by effectively asserting its claim to all the territory of the realm as property and all its inhabitants as servants, the crown prevented the formation of independent wealth or power”. [i]

Russia didn’t have a history of constitutional and legal limitations, property rights and civil protections such as those developed in Britain and America, notably in the Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights, the US Constitution – and I might add the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi which limited the Queen’s government as against customary property rights.

When, in the interview with Tucker Carlson, Mr Putin gave a history lesson from the tenth century’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Kievan Rus and so on, he didn’t celebrate the tradition of Muscovite autocrats going back at least to Ivan IV “the Terrible” (1530–84). Stalin greatly admired Ivan IV and commissioned director Sergei Eisenstein to make the two-part biopic movie. Stalin complained to Eisenstein in person that he’d portrayed Ivan IV as too indecisive: “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. You can show he was cruel. But you must show why he needed to be cruel.” [ii]

Russia has a history of patrimonialism in which one man or woman in effect has ownership and control of everything and everyone, backed by powerful security and police agencies. Critics of Putin have compared him with Hitler, but it makes more sense to compare him with other Russian autocrats including Stalin. Putin’s authoritarian government is a reversion of sorts, including the revival of a powerful Orthodox Church.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed in 1922 and fell apart into its constituent republics in 1991. It was a one-party parliamentary state, run in effect by a dictator who was not formally the head of state. Stalin was ‘only’ the secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party, a role that initially had been ‘technical’ and held by Elena Stasova (who died in 1966, outliving Stalin). To understand Soviet government, we need to look at the Party apparatus, not just the formal constitutional structures.

If there was only one party, why did the Soviet Union have elections?

“The USSR looked on paper like a representative democracy – except that only one party was permitted, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) effectively ruled by determining policy, understood as ‘democratic centralism’. Given that there was a single party, one asks why people willingly voted for representatives to the Congress of Soviets. There was no alternative, and hence no conscientious consent. But competing parties were seen as factions undermining the state and dividing popular opinion. The claim that the Soviet state was ‘democratic’ relied on the conviction that ‘the party represented the people as a whole, and not merely an interest-group or social elite.’ [iii] The CPSU had begun as an underground movement, always in danger from the Tsarist police, and had gained power under wartime conditions. From the start, there was limited time and toleration for democratic debate. Once a decision was made, centralised control and party discipline were matters of survival, and factionalism was severely punished.” (From my book, How to Rule?, p. 210).

Voting for the only party in town signified loyalty and solidarity.

For a while in the 1990s under Yeltsin, there was hope in ‘the West’ that Russia would become a successful free-market economy with multi-party competitive elections – ‘just like us’. Attitudes in the Kremlin hardened around 2006–2008. Putin became alarmed at the possibility of Ukraine joining ‘the West’ (the EU and NATO), and his economic policy became more state-centred.

“Putin served as president for two terms until 2008. He was barred from a third consecutive term by the constitution, but, after handing over the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev, Putin was appointed prime minister and retained effective power. (Russia’s constitution stipulates that the president appoints the prime minister, or ‘chairman of the government’.) Putin was re-elected for a third presidential term in 2012 after Medvedev recommended him as their party’s candidate. He was returned for another six-year term in 2018. Putin later signed off constitutional amendments that allow him a further two six-year terms, until 2036, and a bill was passed granting all former presidents immunity from prosecution. After two decades in power, Putin had become dictator, more or less for life. He was responsible for the illegal seizure of Crimea in 2014 and invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In the face of declining popularity, the United Russia (UR) party nonetheless maintained a majority in the lower house, the Duma. In the 2021 election, UR won officially 50.9 percent of votes and hence 324 seats out of 450, but there was flagrant electoral fraud and suppression of opponents. Some districts reported close to 100 percent turnouts and close to 100 percent votes for UR; in other districts where results weren’t so unbelievable, support for UR had declined since 2016 [iv].”

“Russia’s government is a reversion to the patrimonial type, but this time with the trappings of a criminal syndicate: state enterprises are used to enrich Putin and his associates, the law enforcement agencies are involved in robbing businesses, and offshore accounts are used to hide assets and evade accountability. This is kleptocracy: a system of government that enables the ruling class and their cronies to steal with impunity. It’s often described as a Mafia state with Putin as boss of bosses [v].”

(The last two paragraphs are extracts from my recent book Government and Political Trust, pp. 143–46.)

Going by World Bank data, Russia’s GDP per capita rose in 2022, and growth is being driven by military-industrial production. Russians were still recovering from three years of recession following the sanctions imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. The sanctions imposed since 2022 do have some impact, so there’s less trade in USD and Euro, but China and India are buying energy from Russia. Russians on average may not be feeling much economic effect from the current invasion of Ukraine. But the adjustments made by their oil and gas companies may be contributing to a gradual decline in the reserve status of the US dollar.

Meanwhile in America, Trump used the death of Navalny as a comparison for his own persecution complex. And Biden called Putin “a crazy SOB”. Going by the interview with Carlson, however, Putin has better memory than Biden.

If Trump beats Biden in November, then Putin wins the trifecta. Americans are free to criticise all three of these rascals. But if you were living in Russia, would you be willing to put your freedom and even your life on the line to oppose Putin?

As an aside, the US purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, or less than 2 cents per acre. According to the treaty, Russians who chose to stay there (but not the indigenous people) became full US citizens. The indigenous people would nonetheless be subject to laws passed by the US without their consent. Gold was discovered in Alaska in 1896, so the Americans got the deal of the century.

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Notes

[i] Pipes, Richard. 1995. Russia Under the Old Regime (Second edition). London: Penguin. See p. 249.

[ii] Stalin, 1947, quoted in: Montefiore, Simon Sebag. 2003. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. See p. 558.

[iii] Overy, Richard. 2005. The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. London: Penguin, p. 59.

[iv] Matveev, Ilya & Ilya Budraitskis. 2021. ‘Kremlin in Decline?’ Sidecar, URL: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/kremlin-in-decline (accessed 29 September 2022).

[v] Åslund, Anders. 2019. Russia's Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press.