Putin intends to reassert control over all aspects of life, turning the country back into "an ultra bureaucratic state," where bureaucrats are answerable to no one but themselves, in the time-honored Soviet tradition.
Why should national borders limit an obsession with control, when the Kremlin desires dominance over the former Soviet republics? Komsomolskaya Pravda, a widely circulated newspaper closely connected to top officials, states the goal clearly: "to reinstitute a great empire feared by everyone in the world," just as the U.S.S.R. was.
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Why should a twice-sentenced criminal, current Ukraine Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, deserve such fierce support from Putin, who visited Ukraine on two occasions to publicly promote his presidential campaign? Because Yanukovych is easy to manipulate and control precisely because of his criminal record. His rival, Viktor Yushchenko, on the other hand, has proclaimed his intention to draw Ukraine closer to the European Union and NATO and would obviously resist the expansion of Kremlin-type politics into Ukraine. He would be difficult for "Big Brother" Russia to control.
Why do Russia's state-owned media relentlessly portray the democratically elected president Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia as an enemy of Russia while the Belarusan dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, comes across as a good friend (if a little bit out of his mind)? Because Saakashvili became a president as a result of popular revolution against a fatally corrupt bureaucracy. His first reforms have been aimed at broad change in administration, and a purge of old communist officials.
Saakashvili and Yushchenko are real threats to Putin -- leaders capable of inspiring democratic development beyond their borders, across the lands of the former U.S.S.R.
So, what is in the cards for us? If my reading of Russian politics is any good, we should expect much tougher policies coming from the Kremlin, both domestically and internationally, and a growing resistance to them in Russian society.
The former is already under way: A planned law on terrorism will allow for suspension of constitutional freedoms for as long as 60 days. As Ludmila Alekseeva, who leads the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights watchdog, says, "Russian authorities are taking precautions in case anything like the orange revolution in Kiev should come to Moscow."
A month ago, Mikhail Yuriev, chairman of the board of the Evrofinance group, a financial institution believed to be closely connected to the Kremlin's bureaucrats in epaulets, outlined the program for Russia. Two major goals lie ahead, he wrote in Komsomolskaya Pravda: The reconstitution of the Russian empire, and turning a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country into one nation, ethnically Russian and religiously Orthodox. "The interests of other nations should be of little concern to us," he said.
Both goals require a clear definition of "enemies of the state" (the euphemism widely used under Stalin). Such enemies are: those who speak in favor of negotiations to end the war in Chechnya; those who are receptive to the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as "to the teaching of the West as to how we should construct our politics and economics." Russia's enemies also include those who speak in favor of a professional army; and those who are against the teaching of the Russian Orthodox religion in public schools; those who are in favor of a free media; and those who are against the scapegoating of business. To put it bluntly, anyone who stands against the regime and its politics should be pronounced an enemy of the state.
Yuriev's article would not be worth mentioning if it didn't reflect the thinking that exists in the Kremlin, according to those who have access to it. Yet as frightening as this sounds, the idea beneath all those harsh proclamations is a simple one: to prepare public opinion for the forceful redistribution of property from those not completely loyal to the Kremlin to those who are. (Some hawks suggest a variant, taking all "non-Orthodox" companies -- owned by Jews and Muslims -- and giving them to those who belong to the religious and ethnic mainstream.)
How far this politics of property redistribution will go depends upon Putin himself: whether he will be willing to resist pressure from the bureaucrats in epaulets -- affiliated with the security forces -- or whether he chooses to submit to the interests of the corporation that groomed him, the KGB.
As for the possibility that political resistance will spread from Ukraine to Russia, the odds are harder to predict. Unlike Ukraine, Russia stretches along nine time zones, which makes it much harder to mobilize the nation around an alternative politician if all electronic media are in the hands of the state. New and restrictive laws on political parties, as well as new rules for parliamentary elections, don't make the task any easier.
Still, I feel restiveness among listeners of Echo Moskvy radio, where I have a Sunday political talk show. Middle-sized businesses wonder whether they will be seized next. Intellectuals are unhappy about restrictions imposed on the press. The abolition of many state services, the trimming of the old welfare state, which hit the poorest the hardest, the luxuries provided to state officials, has made many formerly fierce Putin supporters think again. Despite what Westerners may think, Russians are not averse to democracy; time and again polls show that a majority of Russians would like to live in what they call "a normal country," meaning European-type prosperity and democracy.
Clearly, change won't come from the outside. Russians should not expect any help from big or small brothers in the West. The task of making the country free is in our own hands. I need to believe we can do it.
Author's e-mail:
albats@post.harvard.edu
Yevgenia Albats is a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics, a Moscow-based university. She has a doctorate in government from Harvard University.
