Vladimir Putin remains unrepentant.
At their first encounter several years ago, the American president “looked into the soul” of his Russian counterpart and he reportedly saw a good man. Last Thursday, in Bratislava, Slovakia, George W. Bush had occasion for another look-see, during a private meeting where Putin refused to yield on the issues raised by the US leader, including, as Bush put it, “the rule of law, protection of minorities, a free press and a viable opposition.”
Putin’s tart remarks at a news conference following the summit betrayed pique at Bush’s persistence that Russia commit itself to “fulfilling these universal principles,” and at the American president’s speech earlier, to thousands of enthusiastic Slovaks in Bratislava’s main town square, where he appeared to caution Putin not to meddle, as he had done in Ukraine, with the democratic advances made in Russia’s backyard regions.
So did Bush look into Putin’s soul again, during their summit meeting last week, and did he this time around see the same trustworthiness? If the answer is yes, well, then Bush clearly needs a second opinion on the matter.
Yet, the American president issued what appeared to be an endorsement of Putin when he lauded his “absolute support for democracy.”
“The problem, as Mr. Bush should know, is that nearly the opposite is true,” editorialized the Washington Post last Saturday. “The record shows that Mr. Putin has reversed Russia’s progress toward democracy in almost every respect.”
By rolling over at the summit, presumably to avoid a diplomatic blow-up with the prickly Putin, Bush appears to have ignored his own dictum in Brussels three days earlier, that “the United States and all European countries should place democratic reform at the heart of their dialogue with Russia.”
Since becoming president in 2000, Putin has headed an increasingly authoritarian regime that openly imposed more and more controls on the media, Parliament and the legal system. Some analysts compare today’s Russia, as Masha Lippman, a syndicated columnist, did in a recent piece, to that of the late Soviet Union on the eve of collapse “when the decaying communist system got progressively out of touch with reality, failed to respond to its accumulating problems and ended in meltdown.”
In Chechnya, where the conflict is defined by Russia’s Scorched Earth, Flatten Everything Policy, abductions, torture and destruction occur daily. Russian soldiers, abetted by their pro-Moscow local forces, continue to operate like criminal gangs, killing, robbing and sowing fear among Chechen civilians.
As for democracy, Russians clearly have a different set of understandings of what the term means.
There is indeed a media in the country, as in any pluralistic society, but journalists follow a script approved by the Kremlin. Elections take place, but candidates not favored by the government somehow always manage to be left by the wayside. Parliamentarians do meet and debate, but they do so to approve legislation demanded by the Kremlin. And, yes, the courts conduct trials, as do those in any country with an independent judicial system, but in Russia the prosecution almost never loses a case.
In fact, a climate of fear pervades the bench in Russia’s courtrooms, where independent-minded judges who acquit defendants whom they are not meant to acquit are stripped of their judgeship or targeted for harassment.
So there you have it — the illusion of democracy, but not the substance.
To be sure, Russian history is replete with regimes, from those headed by autocratic czars to communist commissars that scoffed at the idea of a social contract between the ruler and the ruled, checks and balances, accountability. The legacy left Russia by the previous generations of political elite is one of arbitrary rule and ruthless exercise of power. And that legacy runs deep in the Russian psyche, Russian culture and Russian socialization norms.
Eleven years ago, Boris Yeltsin destroyed what was effectively Russia’s very first freely elected Parliament in a well-publicized, violent confrontation and went on to write a new constitution that granted virtually absolute power to the Kremlin; and since coming to power five years ago, Putin further shrunk the authority of the legislature, imposed state control over the media, imprisoned those figures in civil society considered central to the health of the body politic, such as reformist intellectuals, independent editors and NGO activists, and beefed up the power of the security services — with each crackdown rationalized by the need to “fight terrorism.”
What is even more telling is the rush by regional governors and other bureaucrats to join the party in power, United Russia — a Kremlin creature — in order to curry favor with the Kremlin.
In an article called “demise of Democracy,” In These Times quotes Sergei Kolmakov, president of the independent Foundation for the Development of Parliamentarianism in Moscow, as saying: “As soon as bureaucrats see that a tightly centralized power system is returning into force, there is no doubt that they will rush to join the party in power. When the bureaucratic chain-of-command becomes consolidated into a single party, that party will dominate the state and the nation. People from all sectors of the elite will also want to join, to get closer to the sources of power.”
Given all this, and given Russia’s implacable path of totalitarianism throughout its modern history, there is a better chance of Martians embracing true democracy before Moscow’s ruling elite does.
It’s absurd to imagine that Russia, a Eurasian country long since set in its ways by its historical experience, cultural norms and political values, can enter into a true partnership, let alone competition, with the Euro-American world.
In only one sphere were Russians able at one time to surpass the West, and that was in world championship chess — which they never failed to constantly trumpet as proof of the “superiority” of their political system. That hegemony, however, held since World War II, was shattered at 5 p.m., Tuesday, July 11, 1972, when in a game dubbed “the ‘High Noon’ of chess,” the American Bobby Fisher trounced Boris Spaasky.
The expressionless, hard-faced apparatchik confronted the thoughtful, much younger champion of the free world — and lost, in the same manner, metaphor aside, that Marxist communism lost to Lockian liberalism not quite fifteen years ago.
No doubt President Bush had a lot of, well, soul-searching questions on his mind when he returned from his European trip last week. Looking into someone else’s soul, after all, can be a dicey business — as Woody Allen found out.
“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam,” the American film icon and wit quipped. “I looked into the soul of another boy.”
