Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, August 25, 2011

The early death of Russian democracy

There was a joke going around a decade ago. It took the Russians 75 years to prove that Communism didn't work. It only took them 10 years to prove that democracy didn't work either.

Kathy Lally and Will Englund published an analysis in The Washington Post looking at that second "experiment."

Russia, once almost a democracy

Twenty years ago… communist hard-liners staged a coup here, sending tanks rumbling to the Russian White House in an effort to preserve the Soviet Union. Instead they touched off a powerful expression of democracy.

Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president in Russia’s thousand years, galvanized the resistance when he climbed atop one of the tanks and called on citizens to defend the freedoms he had promised to deliver. They mounted the barricades, unarmed, willing to risk their lives for democracy. The coup leaders lost their nerve. A few months later, the Soviet Union was dead.

All these years later, so is democracy.

Today, Vladimir Putin presides over an authoritarian government… Occasional demonstrations in favor of democracy are small and largely ignored, except by the police…

[T]oday, elections are not fair, courts are not independent, political opposition is not tolerated and the reformers are widely blamed for what has gone wrong…

Today, Russia works on bribes, and Putin’s opponents call his United Russia party the party of crooks and thieves. People can say whatever they want to one another, unlike in Soviet times when they feared the secret police knocking in the middle of the night, but television is controlled and any opposition is publicly invisible…

Many Russians despair about their country, its prospects and their own, but they say little and do less…

Only a tiny percentage of the population takes part in civil society, about 1.5 or 2 percent, at the level of statistical error…

Gorbachev says Putin 'castrated' democracy in Russia

Mikhail Gorbachev has accused Vladimir Putin of "castrating" Russia's electoral system and said he should not seek re-election as president…

He told the BBC that in the last two decades the country should have got further along the road towards democracy.

He laid much of the blame on Mr Putin who, in the view of many, remains the real power in the land.

"Putin and his team are for stability but stability kills development and results in stagnation," Mr Gorbachev said.

"The electoral system we had was nothing remarkable but they have literally castrated it."

While president, Mr Putin drastically reformed the electoral system to effectively exclude independent candidates and smaller parties from parliament, and centralise control of the regions…

He said the next five or six years would be crucial and, if Russia missed this window and failed to modernise and become more democratic, it would forever lag behind…

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Labels: concepts, democratization, Russia, theory