Teaching Comparative

What would Gorbachev do?

Is this any way to run a country? Or is the executive power Putin and his elite are assuming politics as usual? Is the Russian elite just more unified than those in Nigeria or Iran? What distinguishes this method of selecting a chief executive from the one used in the UK? or Mexico? Is the assumption that the people don't know different from the elite's assumptions in China?


The BBC news report that this article is based on, "This World: Putin's Palace," was broadcast on Thursday, 11 May, 2006. It might be online. Use Google to check.

Russia's 'managed democracy'

In less than two years, Vladimir Putin must relinquish the presidency of Russia, but who is in line for the job?

...After the fall of communism, in what was then the Soviet Union, this country rapidly became a chaotic, lawless and very dangerous place.

For most Russians, their new found "freedom and democracy" simply meant being much poorer and dying much younger.

When Vladimir Putin was appointed, and then elected, president, he promised a return to law and order.

It was music to the ears of the majority, even if some liberal democrats were nervous that it would herald a return to the authoritarianism of the old Soviet regimes.

Now six years later, everyone knows that Mr Putin should, constitutionally, relinquish the presidency in 2008.

But what will happen then? Who will become the next president?

Russia has no real history of dealing "democratically" with these questions.

There is no tradition of Western style presidential campaigns or even of really "credible" presidential elections...

[Putin aide] Dimitri Pescov... defends what he calls the "managed democracy" of Russia by claiming that there is no single model of democracy, so each country carves out its own style...

Pescov, meanwhile, is preparing for the biggest press conference in the world.

Mr Putin will face 1,000 journalists live on television for two hours of apparently unscripted questions.

The president is good at this kind of thing and Mr Pescov is clearly confident.

The real point of it, though, is to convince the Russian people that they can trust their president. Trust him to have all the facts at his fingertips and to be able to deal with whatever the Russian and the international press can throw at him.

And the reason they need to be confident of this?

Well, the Russians do not really know who to vote for and they expect their president to name his own successor.

They want Mr Putin to select the most "appropriate" candidate for the job.

And those who do believe in "managed democracy" - like Mr Pescov - want the electorate to feel confident enough to vote Putin's man into office...

As far as Pescov and the rest of the presidential administration are concerned, that is the best way to secure Russia's future...

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:24 PM