Would the world be a better place without Vladimir Putin? Perhaps. I personally think that if Russia were to have totally open and competitive elections tomorrow, the resulting government would not be an bunch of obsequious Western-looking ass kissers (like the gang who led the late and unlamented “Orange Revolution”), but a substantially less open and liberal, and substantially more anti-Western, bunch of nationalists, a group that would make the current gang in the Kremlin appear positively enlightened by comparison. However this (who would replace Putin if elections were held tomorrow??) is a pointless and stupid discussion to have because, as anyone with a passing engagement with reality can see, Putin and the current power structure aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
It took some serious effort for me to repress my sense of revulsion upon reading the latest claptrap from Time magazine which, distilled down to its most basic formulation, is: “Sure we’ve been predicting the immanent downfall of Vladimir Putin for the past decade…but this time we’re right! Boris Nemtsov told us so!”
Even on its own terms, the article is an absurd farce. Indeed after finishing it I found myself wondering if it was actually some sort of black PR meant to show Westerners what a ridiculous bunch of fools Russia’s liberal “opposition” really is and how, since it is opposed by such a feeble-minded batch of second-rate egotists and charlatans, the Kremlin’s hold on power is completely and entirely secure. Below (and apologies for the size of the quote, I thought it was worth presenting in full) is what seems to be the article’s main point:
The pivotal point came on Jan. 30, when an opposition rally in the western city of Kaliningrad attracted 10,000 people, an incredibly high turnout for Russia’s docile political culture, and likely the biggest protest for at least five years…For the opposition, this presents a great opportunity. Opposition leaders flew down from Moscow to have their turn at the podium during the late January protest. Alongside local activists, they called not only for lower taxes, more jobs and a new governor, but for an end to Putin’s reign. Nemtsov was the most prominent figure to speak. A popular governor of Nizhny Novgorod in the 1990s and a deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, he took the stage in a bomber jacket and jeans. “Moscow is sucking the money from the regions as if they were its colonies,” he said. “Until we oust this corrupt police state, we will never achieve a thing.” There was a swell of applause, and he finished his speech with a famous quote from Alexander Pushkin, the nation’s greatest poet. “Russia will waken from its slumber,” he shouted. “And on the ruins of despotism, our names shall be inscribed!” The crowd went wild. The government became the enemy.
A few weeks later at his office in a Stalin-era high-rise in Moscow, Nemtsov is still beaming. A new strategy had come out of Kaliningrad, he says, and he seems restless to enact it. “We have to monitor the overall environment very carefully. We have to spot where protests are flaring up, and we have to act on that,” he tells TIME. “At first it will be a mosaic. It will be fragmented…But eventually the whole country will catch on.”
The ultimate goal, Nemtsov says, is to organize a rally ten times the size of Kaliningrad in the center of the capital. And then what? “Well, after that we’ll have elections, and then we’ll see who wins and who loses. But the point is we have to get rid of Putin. He is dangerous,” Nemtsov says. “I think this year is going to be the year of anti-Putin protests.”
Completely eliding the fact that Boris Nemtsov is one of the least accurate political prognosticators in the entire planet, he would give Bill Kristol a real run for his money in a “Who can be wrong the most often?” contest and his prediction that “this year is going to be the year of anti-Putin protests” should cause nothing but calm in the halls of the Kremlin, in what fantastical dreamworld would a march of 100,000 people in the center of Moscow magically force the government to hold elections? And in what alternate reality would these elections, if for whatever reason the Kremlin actually agreed to hold them, magically become open and fair and free of all of the blatant fraud and ballot rigging that have characterized Russian elections for at least the past decade? Through what mechanisms, institutional or otherwise, does Nemtsov think that such a democratic revolution would play out? Would the protesters in Moscow emanate some magical “freedom aura” that would make the entire authoritarian, unwieldy, and corrupt state apparatus function in perfect unison as force for democracy? Or would they wish really hard that the ranks of the bureaucracy, who are largely beholden to Putin and who support him almost without reservation, would sit on their hands for several months while their fate was being decided? What about the police forces, what would happen to them, would they simply wilt in the face of a the shining moral example set by a few thousand teenagers and a bunch of glastnost’ retreads?
As we have seen in Tehran over the past six months, as long as the government remains willing to use force, large crowds of young people gathered in the street do absolutely nothing to force political change. Guns beat slogans, every time. What protest marches are very good at is creating political theater, good TV footage and an endless succession of Pulitzer-nominated photographs, and getting a lot of young people bludgeoned into bloody pulps. They are exceedingly bad at changing the nature of an authoritarian regime. It would be a much more pleasant world if “people power” and morality could always overcome violence. Alas, we do not live in such a world, and anyone who thinks that Putin and his regime would peacefully and quietly melt away after some paltry number of protesters (100,000 people in Moscow, a city of some 10.5 million people is not exactly an impressive figure) stood around in Triumfalnaya Ploshad is a raving lunatic. At the moment, Putin has a base of support in society that absolutely dwarfs the tiny and ill-organized ranks of liberals. Perhaps this will change in the near future, more likely it will not. But what is absolutely obvious to any objective observer is that a few small and scattered protests overwhelmingly centered on local economic issues are not going to overturn the Russian state.
The Time article is an especially silly exercise in day dreaming. Most of the time such wishful thinking is harmless and even enjoyable, but when the subject is a state with which we have to deal constructively in order to manage profoundly difficult international issues (Iran, nuclear proliferation, etc.) it is profoundly irresponsible and dangerous. Even now I can hear the calls emanating from the Weekly Standard’s editorial offices of “Don’t deal with Putin, his people will overthrow him! Any cooperation we offer will merely strengthen the hand of a collapsing regime!’ In fact, this will probably be the headline of Gary Kasparov’s next op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Regardless of who makes such an argument, it is nonsense. Regardless of what you think of them, Putin and his regime aren’t going anywhere for a very long time. Is this good or bad? It doesn’t matter, it just is. Maybe some day we can all stop acting like children and deal with Russia, and the world, as it is, and not sit around with our heads in the clouds fondly dreaming of a Russia where the only thing preventing a takeover by Western-oriented liberals is moral turpitude of the Kremlin.