Despite Massive Fraud, Putin Loses Seats
The consequences of Barack Obama’s miserably failed “reset” policy with Russia became horrifyingly clear last weekend. The Russian people did their part in fighting for American values, but America itself did not meet them halfway, and so an iron curtain came clanging down across Russia.
Last Sunday, Russians went to the polls in a parliamentary election that former parliament member Vladimir Ryzhkov predicted would be “the dirtiest in post-Soviet history.” As if to prove him right, in the days leading up to the vote Lilya Shibanova — leader of the country’s only independent polling place monitor, Golos — was arrested and her laptop confiscated. State-owned media also aired a vicious (and false) attack on her organization’s integrity. Also, one of Russia’s most independent and outspoken foreign correspondents, John Helmer, was summarily booted out of the country, and a full-scale crackdown was launched everywhere against Russian media.
Clearly, the Kremlin planned unprecedented ballot box stuffing and wanted to minimize the blowback.
The campaign tactics of United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s party of power, were truly shameless. They posted billboards which were exact copies of government efforts to encourage voter turnout, making it seem the party was state-endorsed. They infiltrated schools from first grade to colleges with ominous propaganda agents. They deluged the Internet with racist and sexist videos meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
When opposition activists tried to stage a concert in Ekaterinburg, the power went suddenly, mysteriously dead.
Election fraud is so commonplace in Russia that a leading Russian paper, Vedomosti, produced a lengthy analysis of all the ways it is carried out. The article scarcely raised an eyebrow.
So-called “president” Dmitri Medvedev stated:
Every adult citizen of our country has the right to come to the polling station and freely cast their vote for the political party of their choice.
It’s hard to square that comment with Medvedev’s actual policy, which has been to exclude parties led by all the major opposition figures (Boris Nemtsov, Ryzhkov, Garry Kasparov, Lyudmila Alexeeva) from registering for a place on the ballot. Medvedev has also refused to allow opposition parties access to the airwaves, and there are no major debates between leading representatives of United Russia and the opposition forces.
There was good reason for such desperate actions, though. For the first time — in the wake of his decision to declare himself president for life, and after being outed as an “enthusiastic womanizer and violent bully who beat his wife” — Vladimir Putin was humiliated by being loudly booed at a heavyweight fight. Later, the losing fighter exposed the horrific conditions of Russia’s health care system. United Russia’s support in polls has plummeted. A Twitter account mocking Medvedev has almost as many followers as he does.
Life on the street in Putin’s Russia gets worse by the day, and no amount of regime propaganda can change that reality.
More and more young Russians are declaring their intention to abandon their country, and are doing so. The Russian stock market, supposedly a safe haven because of Russian oil reserves, is down over 20% since the beginning of the year, and entry to the WTO looks to severely undermine Russia’s domestic manufacturing industry due to the lack of protective tariffs. The country faces a horrifying demographic crisis due to an almost complete breakdown in social policy. It recently faced yet another in a long string of embarrassing failures in its space program. There was even a humiliating electoral setback in occupied Ossetia. Everywhere you look, there is bad news for Putin and United Russia.
Was it also a campaign tactic that the Kremlin began aggressively supporting the anti-West dictatorships in Syria and Iran, siding with both rogue regimes against concerted Western efforts to sanction reckless nuclear weapons development and ruthless anti-democratic crackdowns? That’s unlikely, because Russia has been pursuing that same policy for years, though surely without any significant popular pushback. It’s certain, however, that the Kremlin’s actions both at home and abroad confirm the total failure of the Obama “reset.” The Kremlin has not moderated its anti-U.S. policies, nor has it become more willing to listen to criticism of its domestic crackdown. Instead, on the Obama watch, we are only seeing those problems worsen.
On the day of the election, United Russia did not let up. Its agents actively campaigned at polling places across the country in clear violation of election laws. Internet platforms from Live Journal to Golos to Voice of Moscow radio to the Moscow Times and Novaya Gazeta newspapers came under determined DDOS attacks. Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the Left Front political party, was arrested on the street without charges before he could engage in any political activity. Golos representatives were barred from access to the polling stations. And Putin even got the Highest Authority on his side, ordering Orthodox priests to fan out across Russia and lobby in support of votes for United Russia.
Exit polls showed United Russia losing its majority, having collected 45 to 48% of the votes. And they were accurate. The party did not win a majority of the popular vote, although because of the gap between itself and the second-place party, Russia’s Byzantine electoral system will allocate it just enough seats to hold sway with a bare majority. But the party will end up with a shocking one-third fewer seats than it had in the last parliament.
The Communist Party’s presence in parliament will nearly double. The Communists won a fifth of the total votes cast. There won’t be another legislative election in Russia until 2016, since members serve five-year terms.
Both international and Russian poll observers proclaimed the election dirty and illegitimate. If United Russia did so badly despite overwhelming fraud in its favor, what would have happened if American pressure had forced Russia to allow real opposition parties onto the ballot and had guaranteed those parties access to media and an honest vote count? In that case, we might have seen a whole new chapter in Russian history being written.
Instead, what happened was that America failed to lead. Instead of confronting Putin, Obama gave him aid and comfort, helped him pretend that Dmitri Medvedev was a real president rather than a sham, and helped him sweep his anti-democratic crackdown under the carpet. When the people of Russia looked to America for a beacon light of democracy, they got the cold shoulder.
If Obama’s policy remains in place, Putin will repeat this atrocity again in a few months, this time for his own personal benefit, and Russia’s transformation to a neo-Soviet dictatorship will be complete. And let’s be clear about what that means: a proud KGB spy, who spent his whole life learning how to hate America, will be given power for life.
We will see continued Russian efforts to roil the Middle East, both to keep the price of oil on the rise and to foment terror against American targets around the world. We will see increasing trouble for the nations in post-Soviet space, like Ukraine and Georgia, and increasingly brutal repression for those who stand up for American values behind the new iron curtain.
My heart goes out to the Russian people. For hundreds of years now, whether led by the Tsars or Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, it has seemed that they, the ordinary people, always got the dirty end of the stick. I had such high hopes for them when they finally cast off the yoke of Communism under Gorbachev but they STILL seem to be under the thumb of people who suppress and exploit them. No one should have to endure so much for so long.
More neocon drivel. Does the author have one bit of evidence that explicit American support for the anti-Putin forces would have tipped the vote in their favor? Of course not.
And if we had supported the anti-Putin forces, what were we willing to do to back them up? Invade Russia?
That isn’t any kind of drivel at all.
I think perhaps what the author Kim Zigfeld intended here by mentioning United States influence during the election was something on the order of what we did in Greece and Italy when the well-organized Communist party was so threateningly successful there in the post World War II years.
Invasions weren’t required of Americans, but Greece and Italy were saved from becoming Soviet satellites.
Opinion about what we in America think was very, very different after WWII than now. Read translated current European world news on a daily basis, America is blamed and looked down upon in the overwhelming percentage of articles fed their pubic. It’s the same in Russia and it wouldn’t surprise me if Obama did give more than 2 cents worth of ‘influence’ for it to work in Putin’s favor.
The article is best I’ve read on the subject so far. I’ve lived this crap for 36 years. Spot on.
Of course oblammo would support Putin. . . . they both crawled out of the same pile of crap.
“what would have happened if American pressure had forced Russia to allow real opposition parties onto the ballot and had guaranteed those parties access to media and an honest vote count?”
I imagine America “forcing” Russia could have backfired into a nationalist outburst, making Putin’s slim win into a landslide.
Direct media support is very difficult nowadays as much of America’s propaganda machinery was in effect shut down after the Cold War. We need the USIA back and we need independent channels of information to be made available to democratic oppositions in Russia and elsewhere. We needed these ten years ago. Indeed, they should never have been shut down in the first place.
Let’s all not get to smug over Putin’s misfortune.
In the very last free national elections in Germany, Hitler’s Nazi party suffered a humiliating defeat. Hitler and his entire inner circle – along with all the other political parties in Germany – were convinced the Nazis were finished.
Of course, due to the vagaries of the parliamentary system, Hitler was INVITED
Let’s all not get to smug over Putin’s misfortune.
In the very last free national elections in Germany (1932 or thereabouts), Hitler’s Nazi party suffered a humiliating defeat. Hitler and his entire inner circle – along with all the other political parties in Germany – were convinced the Nazis were finished.
Of course, due to the vagaries of the parliamentary system, Hitler was INVITED by Hindenberg to help form a govt.
The rest is history.
As for the misfortune of the Russian people having lived for 500 years or more under a succession of tyrants, mass murderers, etc., well, one can only surmise that there is something dreadfully wrong with their culture; they are incapable of finding (historically)or choosing (present time) any leaders who really have the best interests of the ordinary citizen at heart.
Stalin and Lenin were just a continuation of the Czars, excepting they were far more adept at mass exterminations, and apparentlty if Putin is photographed wearing any sort of shirt, the photographer is executed.
In Russia the s^^t does really rise to the top, even when the citizens can vote for their leaders.
Of course, we here have Obama, so who the hell knows where we are heading in the USA.
How do you “choose” a leader if the elections are rigged anyway? Most Russian people oppose Putin and United Russia, yet the results are falcified
What must we do to “choose”? There’s nothing we can do. At this point, I wish someone invaded us and took power by force.
Why was official Washington so relatively silent? Remember where ‘the Little Father’ used to work? Down in the archives, there are some very interesting files. Who knows what they contain?
Everyone seems to be missing a very important point here:
Vladimir Putin is no longer a legitimate leader but an illegitimate ruler.
The Chekist state is over or it will have to find a new leader.