Nina Khrushcheva: Russia’s joke … and no-one’s laughing

THE only vote that matters in Russia’s 2012 presidential election is now in, and Vladimir Putin has cast it for himself. He will be returning as Russia’s president next year.

When the news broke – together with the news that the incumbent, Dmitri Medvedev, will step down to become Mr Putin’s prime minister – I wanted to scream “I told you so”. I have always been puzzled by the naïveté of analysts who believed that Mr Putin would never be so bold as to make a mockery of Russia’s electoral system by reclaiming the presidency.

Anyone who thought that things would be different was either delusional or ignorant of Russia. Mr Putin can’t help himself, just as he couldn’t help himself in 2004. Then a very popular leader – he restored to Russia its self-regard as a global power through deft use of the country’s control of a large share of the world’s supply of oil and gas at a time of limited availability – he would have won hands down. Yet he rigged those elections nonetheless: in the KGB tradition, people are simply too unpredictable to be left uncontrolled.

If many analysts were blithely unaware of the certainty of Mr Putin’s 2012 return, the Russian public certainly wasn’t. Culture never lies about politics. When Mr Putin installed his protégé, Mr Medvedev, as president in 2008, a joke made the rounds: It is 2025, and Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev, now elderly, are sitting in a restaurant. “Whose turn is it to pay?” Mr Putin asks. “Mine,” replies Mr Medvedev. “Remember, I just replaced you as president again.”

The only freedom Russians have left is to devise bitter jokes that tap the country’s rich stores of political pathology. If they could export them, they would be as rich as Germans.

In the absence of the rule of law and functioning state services, we Russians generally perceive ourselves as subordinate to the state rather than as citizens acting out our lives in a functioning, vibrant, and independent civil society. This de facto surrender creates a fertile environment for despotism.

The question today is not about the outcome of next year’s presidential election; that has already been determined. With the presidential term now extended to six years, we can expect an encore lasting up to 12 years – longer than Mr Putin’s original performance.

Now the delusional and ignorant want to believe that Mr Putin will become a reformer this time around. I remember a similar analysis in 2000, when experts tried to equate Mr Putin’s KGB background with US President George HW Bush’s years as director of the CIA.

Mr Putin, they argued, is an enlightened technocrat. But the only technique that Mr Putin appeared to have absorbed from his career as a spy was that of social control. That remains true today.

Still, looking beyond the 2012 elections might be worthwhile, because the economic, political, and social contexts have changed since 2004, when Mr Putin re-elected himself, and since 2008, when he pretended to be a democrat by promoting Mr Medvedev. Today, Russia’s rulers have never looked more arbitrary and illegitimate.

History also teaches us that, despite their inertia, Russians are capable of turning on their government, as they did in 1917 and 1991.

• Nina Khrushcheva, author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, teaches international affairs at the New School and is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York.