Meet the New Boss
Presidential election in Moscow
by Michael Idov

 

No primaries, no TV debates, and no surprises might sound like a decent deal to the U.S. reader exhausted by the never-ending election season. To many Muscovites, however, the quiet coronation of Dmitry Medvedev over the course of one spring day felt even more interminable.

 Parts of this article, in a slightly different form, have originally appeared on The Plank, a politics blog affiliated with The New Republic, and in The New Republic itself (“The Hibernation,” 4/10/2008)

Whipping by one after another, hundreds of billboards along Moscow’s Leningradskoye thoroughfare trumpeted the big day. Their design was unvarying: a flat reminder that “March 2 is the Presidential Election” against the backdrop of the federal tricolor and the two-headed eagle. They didn’t appear to come from a specific party or a specific candidate. A jet-lagged foreigner on his way downtown from the Sheremetyevo airport would be forgiven for thinking that the eagle was running.

As it happened, the two-headed raptor was not a bad, if a bit too obvious, symbol of what was about to transpire: an orderly transfer of power from Vladimir Putin to Dmitry Medvedev, made possible solely by the assumption that Putin himself wouldn’t be going anywhere. For the first time since a few confusing months in 1991, when the fading Gorbachev overlapped with the ascendant Yeltsin, Russia was about to get a taste of biarchy.

Ever since Putin made his successor pick public, the question was not whether Medvedev would win; Moscow bookmakers didn’t even accept bets on the election’s outcome. They did an over-under on his getting 71 percent of the vote instead. The only question in the run-up to March 2 was turnout. In last December’s parliamentary elections here, the fudging of the returns was epidemic, but each district’s shenanigans had a tangible purpose: the higher the figures, the more delegates the local chapter of United Russia got to send to the Duma. This time, the goal was simply to avoid the embarrassment of broadcasting Russia’s electoral apathy to the world.

The methods have been fine-tuned, too: the focus shifted from outright ballot-stuffing to making people vote by any means necessary. In Novosibirsk, the authorities let loose with both the carrot (free bliny for everyone!) and the stick (politician Andrei Przhezdomsky alleged that a director of a factory there was holding all employees’ February salaries until they voted).

The head administrator of a Moscow hospital told me that he had been entrusted with making sure all doctors and all patients in his care voted–and voted “the right way.” In the provinces, the elections were being treated as a kind of forced holiday. In Kamchatka, folk dancers performed in front of the precinct. In Samara, people received football-style scarves for voting.

In another bid to drum up excitement, state TV covered the evening’s returns with a dash of American style: giant screens, set up at the Central Electoral Committee HQ, flashed figures and footage from the nation’s 6,000 precincts (and a few hundred makeshift polls abroad: I recall a shot of a few docile Israelis queued up in front of a large box). In lieu of any mystery about the winner, however, the networks were left to wring out whatever suspense they could from the turnout question. By 10 a.m., Channel One cut into a bio of Soviet-era fashion designer Vyacheslav Zaitsev (he’s met Pierre Cardin! Personally!) to announce that “16 percent of the electorate voted so far.” Gazprom-owned NTV ran similar turnout updates at the bottom of the screen. Following them was about as exciting as seeing one half of a sports score.

Among my friends, their friends, and friends of their friends (most, but not all, admittedly being what Mark Penn would call “latte-drinking” types), I failed to find a single person who voted. A few briefly considered pulling the lever for the Communists– the only semi-credible opposition–in a show of defiance, but in the end no one bothered to go through with it. (It was understandably hard to work up any enthusiasm for the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, on his fourth presidential campaign in a row). “Of all of my personal friends,” Andrei Vasiliev, the Kremlin-installed editor of the Kommersant daily, would tell me later in the evening, “Only one voted.” He took a theatrical beat. “Vladimir Putin.”

Many coped with Medvedev’s preordained victory via textbook Freudian transference, by developing a sporting obsession with the U.S. Democratic primaries. “We’re watching it like a Latin American soap opera,” explained Alexander Garros, the culture editor of Expert, a magazine that manages to be both a clone of The Economist and affiliated with the Kremlin. More than one liberal Muscovite wanted to know whether, and how, they could contribute to the Obama campaign.

At noon, there were perhaps eight voters milling about Precinct 2074, inside the bizarre, Pompidou-like headquarters of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Hours earlier, President Putin, the most comfortably walking lame duck in history, had voted there, dunking his ballot into a box rendered invisible by a simultaneous explosion of a hundred flashes. It looked, appropriately enough, as though the box itself became an orb of white-hot light–aglow with the will of the people, or something– as Putin made communion with it. Now the press was gone, and uniformed militia men plainly outnumbered the voters. Two gorgeous girls, their ennui Ghost World-grade, guarded a spread of free fish sandwiches meant to entice the electorate. It seemed a bit early in the day for smoked fish, but there wasn’t much choice.

I spent the rest of March 2 in the closest place Moscow had to an opposition HQ that night: a party at Mayak Café organized by a dissident web site called Grani.ru. Every notable Other Russian in the city was present. Mikhail Kasyanov, the former prime minister, chatted with Vladimir Ryzhkov, the former Duma speaker. (Both had wanted to run against Medvedev and were barred on technicalities.) Former TV star Viktor Shenderovich, now blacklisted from all but one network, milled about cracking jokes about Putin’s agents infiltrating the party. The atmosphere was that of a Khrushchev-era Soviet kitchen: chain-smoking men and women in cableknits heroically tittering about how screwed they are. Quite a few of the guests were old enough to have sat in those kitchens the first time around. For an opposition gathering with at least two major politicians in attendance, notably absent was anything resembling a plan of resistance. Nobody even bothered to make a speech. 

The organizers showed a satirical cartoon instead: it parodied “people’s letters to Putin” by drawing provincial Russians as obsequious naïfs with petty grievances. A woman moved through the crowd distributing plastic bags that said “I’m Taking No Part In This Farce,” made famous hours ago by Garry Kasparov, who toted one to a photo op in St. Petersburg. Then they showed the cartoon again.

At 9 p.m., the last polls closed. Everyone whipped out a mobile phone and checked the results: Medvedev in a landslide, shocker. A new round of unfunny jokes followed. (It’s 2026, and Putin says to Medvedev: “Wait, I forget, who am I this time, Prime Minister or President? Medvedev: “I think I’m Prime Minister. You’re President.” Putin: “Then fetch me a beer.”). The event’s official peg was the launch of a new opposition web site, Granitv.ru, which, activist Yulia Berezovskaya explained, was meant as a riposte to the lavishly funded pro-Putin site Russia.ru. That it was being launched on the night of the elections, and not, say, three months earlier, spoke volumes.

The opposition was not only disorganized and stunted–it had no candidate to offer up: the Armenian-Jewish Kasparov wasn’t it, and neither was the cerebral, uncharismatic Kasyanov.

“Our very way of life has to change before that person even has a chance to emerge,” said sculptor Lidia Gandlevsky when asked if there was anyone, anywhere, capable of outweighing a Putin endorsement. Many add that the last person capable of inspiring (and financing) a liberal movement was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, jailed since 2003 for entertaining that very notion.

By 1 a.m., the party was down to two journalists, a film star, the editor of Kommersant, and the owner of Mayak,all soused and singing folk songs. A mile or so away, on Red Square, a triumphant state-sponsored victory concert was winding down.

Staggering into the street, the dissidents could catch the faint thumping of an amplified bass drum and a diffused glow of the floodlights rising over the Kremlin. The election was over.