Vladimir Putin's victory in the Duma elections on Sunday was widely foreseen,
but the result has been grudgingly received in the West. The official
election-observing worthies wagged their fingers: there were rumours of
ballot-stuffing, or of intimidation in workplaces, and they complained that
the Russian media had presented an almost uniformly glowing report of the
Government for weeks before the elections. No doubt there are elements of
truth in this.
A Russian electorate is still rather a strange animal, a hybrid of old and
new. In the old Soviet days, elections were an excuse for a party - an event
in some provincial, dead place. Little old ladies turned out in great
numbers, and voted fairly resolutely for the one-party candidate who was
offering the tea and cakes (and music, generally heavily amplified). The
same still happens, and there was also, again from Soviet times, an element
of the rotten borough about the election: people will vote for the boss or
his candidate, much as vast estate-owners used to do in England.
But there is also a new feature in Russian political life, the emergence of a
real public opinion, and no amount of criticism will sweep that away.
President Putin is popular, and from a Russian perspective, you can easily
see why. Indeed, the outcome of his recent election more than slightly
resembles General de Gaulle's success in 1958.
Russia, like the France of that era, is emerging from a crisis that could have
been deadly. In 1958 France was torn apart by the foul Algerian war. It was
attended by savagery of lesser degree but in the same class as we have seen
over the past decade or so in Chechnya. The Government collapsed; de Gaulle
took over; a referendum on the new constitution gave him 80 per cent of the
vote, and the political parties he patronised took two thirds of it. This is
not very different from the figures attached to Mr Putin's success, and even
the figure for turnout - again, more than three fifths — do him some credit,
because one chief feature of elections held in “newly emerging democracies”
has been profound apathy.
The background to this is that Mr Putin has been doing well in defiance of a
historic trend that, if continued, might have broken up Russia altogether.
Nowadays all of Russia's graphs are moving up. This includes two vital
matters. The first is the birth rate. Under communism, or at any rate in its
last three decades, the birth rate went down and down; abortion was a
gruesome epidemic, as contraception was primitive, yet women would rather go
to the abortion clinics than bring children into that Soviet world. Now the
birth rate is again at replacement level; a vote of confidence in the
future.
There is another important pointer. Russia has lost its empire, but it is
still a country with a great many minorities, chiefly Turco-Tatar peoples.
It is a measure of something that they do not support separatist-nationalist
parties, with or without some Islamic connection: they too have firmly
followed Mr Putin. He seems, in other words, to have found some modus
vivendi and somewhere like Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, nowadays is
quite a prosperous place.
It's not hard to understand President Putin's popularity. Russia is, in parts,
booming, and not just because of oil prices. It is making things, and in
well-run towns like Archangel there is a level of wealth that is quite new.
Even a Tory MP observing the elections, angry at being cold-shouldered,
interspersed his criticism of Mr Putin with the remark that some of the
housing estates he had seen might have been in Surrey.
His victory also reflects a will on the part of Russians never to have to go
through the horrors of the Chechen war ever again. Remember the Moscow
theatre siege, and the gassing of the audience? Or the Beslan schoolchildren
massacred in their own urine? That these things are in the past is to Mr
Putin's credit, and so they deserve to be.
More generally, the Russians feel at last that someone is standing up for
them. In the days of Boris Yeltsin, their Government seemed to be clownish —
but, as Arthur Koestler remarked, “the face of a clown, seen close to, can
seem sinister”. It was an era when huge amounts of corrupt money went
abroad, when Russian living standards became dismal, when anyone who could,
emigrated. The country was treated with scant regard by foreigners —and
there has been much resentment that the British gave asylum to characters
whom the Russians saw as criminal.
Worse, Russians sensed that there was an American strategy to take over much
of the old Soviet Union, with bases in Central Asia, oil interests extending
towards the Caspian, Poland and Georgia (where the police wear Turkish
uniforms) being turned into Nato agencies. If in the lands of the old USSR,
as for instance in Ukraine, governments resisted these things, there was a
machine to topple them: demonstrations in the street, pro-Western
non-governmental organisations brandishing this or that ostensibly
impeccable cause, while profiteers waited in the wings for the cheap
privatisations that would follow “democratisation”. There were the “Rose”
and “Orange” revolutions, complete, in Kiev, with bearded
Euro-parliamentarians skulking in tents in the main square as if they were
about to be charged by Cossacks. It was farce, but rather sinister farce,
and all in Russia's backyard.
The same Western diplomats and NGOs have groomed their own people in Moscow —
some of them unquestionably decent and serious, but all of them, in the eyes
of public opinion, agents of the West, of a potential “Cabbage Revolution”.
Vladimir Putin has saved Russia from the turmoil of Ukraine or Georgia. As
with de Gaulle, he has not been popular with many journalists (of whom de
Gaulle incidentally imprisoned 300). As with de Gaulle, he has proved that
he can, in foreign affairs, be difficult, even a pain in the neck. But if
Russians see him as the best hope, they should be understood.
Norman Stone's most recent book is World War One: A Short History
