You can’t keep up with Putin: in one month he publishes six articles, each one the size of a full newspaper page! And combines this with his duties as the Prime Minister of an enormous country… A real Stakhanovite.

Just try to calculate how much it costs to house several teams of select lawyers, historians, political scientists and editors at state dachas for several months, and to make all of them work from morning to night, writing a number of versions of these pre-election articles… Yet another totally unnecessary spending from the national budget. Although mine is just a comment in passing for the lawyers, who in the near future, I hope, will have to work on “Putin’s case” at the Basmanny court.

I am unable to keep up with the teams of Putin’s scribes, and so below I will focus on three key articles, and comment on them:

1) The Izvestia article “Russia in focus — the challenges we must face”

It is unclear why Russia is focusing: it can’t be for the same reason that the chancellor Alexander Gorchakov asked it to focus one and a half centuries ago – the article takes its name from a dispatch by him. In the 1860s, the country needed to focus to ensure its rights to have a navy on the Black Sea. But what for does it need to focus today? To return Putin to the throne?

2) The Nezavisimaya Gazeta article “Russia: the national question”, a manifesto of imperial (anti-ethnic) nationalism

We have already analyzed this article partially in my previous essay.

and 3) the rather demagogically written “Democracy and the quality of our state” in Kommersant

I must say that from this article, I did not understand how the “quality” of a democratic state differs from democracy itself. Perhaps the Prime Minister is hinting that we don’t just need any old kind of democracy, but a special “quality” democracy, unlike any democracy anywhere else? We had already been told in “Russia: The national question” that “Russia is a unique civilization.” According to candidate Putin, all other democracies are a “farce and a competition to give groundless promises”, and examples of “democracy on demand” (what demand?) Is it fitting that we should imitate this outrage? No, it is not. So there will be no debates. Reading our "candidate's" articles should be enough for us.

Stanislav Govorukhin, who is in charge of Putin's election committee of the main claimant to the throne, explained that when Putin called the participants of the enormous civic protest on Bolotnaya Square “Bandar-logs”, he showed that he was an educated and even polite person — he could have simply called them monkeys. Especially since they are monkeys, for isn’t it monkey-like behavior to want honest elections and “Western-style democracy”?!

 

Filmmaker Stanislav Govorukhin has been plucked to lead Putin's campaign "show"

 

Perhaps Putin and Govorukhin know the secret of a “high quality” democracy, fundamentally different from the western “farce.” But, if they do, they are not sharing it with us, at least for now. And perhaps they are referring to Stanislav Surkov’s “sovereign democracy”, with Führer  in charge — or in Russian terms, a “national leader”. As Hitler once said: “I am not a dictator. I have only simplified democracy”.

 

 

The article about democracy sets out according to a scheme that we are very familiar with: first the unmasking of the “wild 90s”, and followed by praise for Putin’s years in power, the 2000s. In “the 90s, under the guise of building democracy, we got… a back-alley fight between clans.” But in the 2000s, “our civil society became incomparably more mature, active and responsible” — even though it consists of “Bandar-logs”.

And all of this is the result of the “battle between clans” being replaced with the supremacy of one clan — Putin’s clan. So does this mean that to nurture a “mature and responsible” civil society, this one-clan state system, if you can call it that, is sufficient? No, Putin is not saying this. On the contrary, borrowing the slogans of the “Bandar-logs” from Bolotnaya Square, he unexpectedly admits that “the quality of our state suffers from the wariness of Russian civil society to take part in it”. But why does it suffer? Because — and on to another slogan of the “Bandar-logs”! — there is a lack of political competition in civil society, and this, according to Putin's article, is the very “nerve of democracy, its driving force”.

But here the inconsistencies begin: it is unclear why a decade of one-clan rule was required, if in 2000 it was possible to begin the revival of the “nerve of democracy.” Why not deal with the shortcomings of the “wild 90s” using this “driving force” of statehood, which is the only one possible, as Putin unexpectedly discovered? Why, instead of maintaining political competition, did we need to strangle the independent press, establish a television monopoly and use it to ruin independent entrepreneurs, thus destroying political competition — the very “nerve of democracy”?

Not even Govorukhin can bring himself to say that the brutal rule of Putin’s clan, accompanied by siloviki abuse, mass thuggish raids, widespread corruption and, finally, the total demoralization of the country, has fostered a “mature and responsible” civil society in Russia. And especially not (the words of Putin himself) “the emergence of the middle class from the narrow world of building its own prosperity”. But if this didn’t help, then why was all of this brutality necessary?

Yes, the middle class really has emerged from a “narrow world.” However, it didn't come out of this world thanks to the one-clan state system, but in spite of it. It came out on to Bolotnaya Square to protest against Putin’s policies. So what grounds does Putin have, one asks, to ascribe the birth of civil society in post-Soviet Russia to the efforts of his one-clan regime? On what grounds does he say that this rebirth is “the results of our efforts. We worked towards this”? For it is obvious that over the course of 12 years (!) the abuse of power by Putin and his cronies worked against democracy. What’s more, they continue to work against it: is it any coincidence that Putin goes to Nizhny Tagil to meet with weapons manufacturers, and tells them that it is the working class, and not Internet “hamsters” who are the real backbone of Russia? Is it any coincidence that he brings public sector employees from the budget sphere from the small towns around Moscow to Poklonnaya Hill and Luzhniki stadium, and forces them to protest against the middle class?

Putin, as we can see, is quite obviously manoeuvring. It is also no coincidence that he made the unexpected admission that the one-clan state system of his own devising “lags behind the readiness of civil society to participate in it.” Finally, it is also no coincidence that he has tried to ascribe to himself and his regime the achievement of the middle class emerging “from the narrow world of building their own prosperity.” And it is certainly no coincidence that he has suddenly remembered that the “nerve of democracy is political competition.”

How can this "intellectual" manoeuvre by Putin be explained? On one hand, the Prime Minister understands full well that by setting the working class on the “hamsters” from Bolotnaya, he is essentially causing a split in the country. On another, the Russian Führer probably realizes that regardless of the outcome of the election, without bringing Bolotnaya square protesters on to his side, he will no longer be the national leader. And of course, it cannot be ruled out that here we are dealing with a rare case of political schizophrenia, and that there are in fact…

two Putins?

 

 

Judge for yourself:

•    While one Putin pleads allegiance to the Constitution, which is based on the principles of the separation of powers and the periodical changes of power, the other Putin has turned the State Duma into a sham, the justice system into a kangaroo court, and himself into the permanent national leader.

•    While one Putin promises that presidential elections will be completely fair, ordering, as proof, the transparent ballot boxes to be installed at polling booths, the other Putin, acting through the officials of the Central Election Committee that he has appointed himself, denies registration to any candidate who presents a danger to him. In other words, he makes the elections intentionally dishonest, long before voting begins.

•    While one Putin realizes that without political competition, the country can expect inevitable degradation, and that the time is running out “to jump into the last wagon of a departing train,” the other Putin floods the screens of the leading TV channels with so-called “documentaries” devoted to a single candidate. “Saving Russia”, “Bridge over an Abyss”, “Scoring a Penalty Goal”, “Russia from the first person”, “No Cuts”, “Cold politics” – all of these without exception are about him, about Putin. And if this is called competition, then what is a monopoly?

•    One Putin assures the public that “the main trend of the modern world is that society is becoming more complicated. The state should respond to this challenge... One important solution here is to develop self-regulating organizations.” The other Putin declares the same “self-regulating organizaitons” to be the agents of foreign spies, and persecutes them, when not outright banning them and closing them down.

•    One Putin agrees to governors’ elections (which he had abolished himself), thus recognizing the sovereignty of the people as the supreme authority. The other reserves the right to remove governors from their positions. In other words, he has the exclusive right toviolate the sovereignty of the people. Hypocritically he calls this “a balanced combination of decentralization and centralizaiton”.

But the most curious thing about this mysterious dual personality which can be seen in all of the literary and political activity by the candidate Putin is that  “his” articles are aimed primarily at the intelligentsia – it is unlikely that weapons manufacturers in Nizhny Tagil can get past more than one paragraph of such learned discussions, and they don’t read Vedomosti or Kommersant. But when the head of Putin’s election committee publicly repeats after Lenin that the boss’s audience is “the shit of the nation”, then the boss is not standing up for his audience. Who are these articles for, then?! And what are they written for? So that the Lord seeing the sinner called Vladimir Putin before Him may wonder: shall He judge this sinner by his deeds or… by his articles?