Russia's managed democracy
This topic has been nearly beaten to death by journalists. Luke Harding of The Guardian (UK) does a better job than many of explaining things, and thus this article is probably worth your students' time. It might serve well as the basis for a review activity.Academic consideration of topics like this generally take a longer view than news reports. It will be interesting in a few years to read what scholars write about this period (2005-2008).
Back to the future with Putin
"After four years as a member of St Petersburg's legislative assembly, Sergei Gulyaev is packing up... Last month Mr Gulyaev failed to win re-election to the city's assembly...
"But the end of Mr Gulyaev's political career had little to do with the voters. Last December he and two colleagues voted against a decision by Vladimir Putin to reappoint a staunch loyalist as St Petersburg's governor. Forty-seven other deputies voted in favour.
"The Kremlin's revenge was swift. Before the election, the city's electoral commission kicked Mr Gulyaev and his liberal Yabloko party off the ballot paper...
"Liberal voters in St Petersburg were left with nobody to vote for...
"Seven years after ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin took over as president from an enfeebled Boris Yeltsin, Russia has gone back, critics say, to the classic authoritarian model of the state that flourished under the tsarists and the communists.
"The accidental anarchy of the Yeltsin era.. In this new era, critics of the president mysteriously fail to appear on television; courts eagerly anticipate the Kremlin's wishes; the killers of troublesome journalists are rarely, if ever, caught.
"Russia's tiny opposition compares Putin's Russia to Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union in the mid-1970s...
"Mr Putin abolished elections for provincial governors... He also imposed Moscow's control over local budgets...
"Russia's old mixed constituency and list system has been replaced by a list-only system, making it impossible for popular independent local candidates to stand again as MPs. The hurdle for parties to win seats in the duma has gone up from 5 to 7% of the overall national vote. With fewer Russians voting, the minimum 25% turnout rule has disappeared.
"Moreover, the Kremlin has invented a social democrat-style 'opposition' party called A Just Russia...
"The sum effect of these changes will be to kill off Russia's few genuinely independent political actors..
"[Vladimir Ryzhkov, an MP in Russia's duma whose Republican Party was recently disbanded by a supreme court ruling] says, 'Almost all the results of perestroika and democratisation have been killed.'..."But there are growing signs that the Kremlin's attempts to micro-manage the elections and ensure the smooth transition of power... are not going quite as well as they might.
"The trouble started in St Petersburg... [where] protesters included representatives from all Russia's main opposition parties, Yabloka, Garry Kasparov's United Civil Front, the National Bolsheviks, and the Popular Democratic Union. But they also included hundreds of locals, fed up with rising prices, corruption and the lack of real electoral choice.
"It was the largest anti-Putin demonstration ever...
"Next week further anti-Kremlin demonstrations are planned in Moscow and St Petersburg...
"Russia's state-run television channels have reported none of this. Since 2001, the Kremlin has enjoyed a monopoly on state-run television, the main source of information about society for 85% of Russians... [While] most publications take a pro-Kremlin line, Russia has four relatively independent newspapers...
"The government, meanwhile, dismisses western accusations that Russia is backsliding on democracy as a 'misperception'...
"Most political observers believe the Kremlin regime is impregnable, especially when world gas and oil prices remain high. They also point out that Mr Putin enjoys broad support...
See the Our Campaigns web site for details on the Russian presidential race.
Labels: elections, politics, Russia
posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:44 AM
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