| In most countries, presidential candidates tend to have
the same concerns.
How to formulate a program, raise money, get the voters' attention. But
Vladimir Bryntsalov, a millionaire businessman, has something else on his
mind. Campaigning for the job occupied by Vladimir Putin, he wants to make
sure that his "rival" doesn't take him too seriously. "I'm
not going to
criticize Putin and praise myself," says Bryntsalov. "The country
is on the
right track."
So why is he running? Mainly to air his own views, even if they're largely
identical to Putin's. About one thing he's perfectly clear: "Only
Putin can
be president." Once Bryntsalov has collected the obligatory 2 million
signatures needed to register his candidacy, he might drop out of the
race
altogether. "What's the point of wasting [the government's] money,"
he
points out, "taking free television time and just repeating what
Putin is
saying?"
Confused? Don't be. It's all part of another ignominious low to which
Russian democracy has sunk of late. These days Putin towers over the
political landscape so commandingly that the main challenge his aides
face
is ensuring that the upcoming presidential vote on March 14 doesn't look
as
if it's taking place in North Korea. The problem has been particularly
acute since December, when political parties allied with Putin swept the
board in parliamentary elections. As a result of that rout, some of
Russia's once assertive politicians have opted out of the contest
altogether. Political insiders say the Kremlin worries that an uncontested
election could cast doubts on Putin's claim to be a democratic leader-and
rob him of political cover for potentially unpalatable economic reforms.
Thus, some of his allies are trying to do him a favor by running against
him. In previous years both communists and pro-market liberals managed
to
do respectably in the presidential balloting. This time around the
communists have opted for a strategy of passive-aggressiveness, nominating
a second-tier candidate from an allied party as their candidate, while
the
two main liberal parties are boycotting the election altogether. Most
of
the contenders who are left-ranging from the bullet-headed bodyguard of
ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky to a former central-bank chief known
by the nickname "Mr. Inflation"-seem to be motivated primarily
by their
eagerness to please the incumbent. "[The candidates] don't want to
become
president," says Georgy Satarov, a former aide to Boris Yeltsin.
"They want
to take part in the presidential election. In Russia, these are different
things." Most, he says, are trying to generate official good will
by
conducting allegedly independent but actually tame campaigns.
One such, Sergei Glazyev, is a former communist who now belongs to the
nationalist Motherland party-widely regarded as a Kremlin stalking-horse
designed to undermine support for the "patriotic left," i.e.,
the archrival
communists. After last month's parliamentary elections, Motherland hurried
to join the pro-Putin bloc in the Duma. Small wonder, then, that Glazyev
has spent most of his campaign so far evading questions about the policy
differences between himself and the president. By the same token, Oleg
Malyshkin, the Zhirinovsky bodyguard, says his candidacy is a feature
of
his party's "constructive opposition" to the Kremlin-though
when asked
about the details, he's hard-pressed to say what he and his colleagues
oppose, and in practice Zhirinovsky's party almost always votes with the
government. Another candidate, Sergei Mironov, is a friend of Putin's
who
hails from the president's hometown of St. Petersburg and has never left
any doubt where his loyalties lie. "When a trusted leader goes into
battle,
he must not be left alone," Mironov announced at the beginning of
his
campaign. "One must stand beside him"-adding that he himself
would be
voting for Putin.
Happily, Russia remains a somewhat unpredictable place, and onlookers
were
startled last week when one of the contenders suddenly started behaving
like a real candidate. Irina Khakamada had already announced her decision
to throw her hat into the ring despite a resolution by her liberal party,
the Union of Right Forces, to refuse participation. That immediately
spawned speculation that she, too, had been co-opted by Putin and his
cronies-accusations she denies. "My challenge to Putin and his system
of
power is not a deal with the Kremlin," she says. She backed up those
words
with a searing indictment of Putin's handling of the hostage crisis in
a
Moscow theater in October 2002, saying that he ordered the storming of
the
theater despite indications that the Chechen hostage takers wanted to
negotiate (130 hostages died in the rescue attempt). Even more
dramatically, she called for an investigation of an earlier string of
terrorist attacks that helped propel Putin into power in 1999. (Some
members of the liberal opposition have alleged that the security services
might have been behind the attacks, rather than the Chechen terrorists
the
Kremlin fingered.) And Khakamada's defenders point out that most of the
media-and particularly Russia's two state-controlled TV networks-completely
ignored the press conference where she aired the allegations.
Khakamada's sally has inspired other critics to say that she may have
sold
out, not to the Kremlin but to exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has
used similar arguments to attack Putin. Still, there's no denying that
some
of the things she's saying sound almost like the basis for a genuine
campaign: "My main question would be, does Putin take personal
responsibility? Is he ready to answer for all that is happening in the
country? For terrorist acts. For an ineffective government. For the lack
of
a free press. For the fact that people, without rights, are manipulated
by
the state." Yet it's not at all clear that Khakamada will get the
chance to
make her run at the big prize. She has yet to acquire the 2 million
signatures she needs to register as a candidate. Ironically, if she
succeeds many Russians will simply take that as proof that she has friends
at the top.
All this tragicomic wrangling over the presidential nonelection obscures
a deeper problem. "There are no elections in Russia anymore, period,"
contends liberal politician Grigory
Yavlinsky, whose Yabloko party is boycotting the poll. "Over
the past four years Putin has destroyed all the autonomous elements in
Russian society." The day the liberal leader spoke, the pro-Putin
United Russia party, the landslide winner of the parliamentary elections,
took for itself the chairmanships of every single committee in the Duma,
leading Yavlinsky to speak of a "new one-party system." No doubt
Bryntsalov & Co. would call it democracy in action.
With Helen Womack
See also:
Presidential elections
2004
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