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The Temptation of Vladimir Putin

Created: 03.11.2006 16:26 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:26 MSK

Deliya Melyanova
MosNews

Mark Antony:
“... You all did see that at the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition? ...”

Julius Caesar Act 3 Scene II


“I am grateful to the citizens who think that I can stay on and lead the country after my second term. But such a decision would undermine my inner certainty about what I was doing”

Vladimir Putin, conversation with journalists in a Shanghai hotel, Saturday June 17 2006 (Komsomolskaya Pravda daily newspaper).


“Despite the fact that I like my job, the constitution doesn’t allow me to run a third time in a row,”

Vladimir Putin, during a nationally televised question-and-answer session October 25 2006.

The “2008 question” increasingly being put to Vladimir Putin is important not only for because it will decide who will lead Russia until 2012, but also because of its symbolic significance. Will the constitution be changed?

This is a moment perhaps comparable to the time in 1993, when Boris Yeltsin forcibly dissolved the parliament and changed the constitution to give more powers to the president. Will Putin run for his third term as president, setting aside the constitution in favour of “stability”? So far he has refused, mildly deprecating, chiding the overeager reporters and citizens for their lack of respect for the constitution.

But how much are such refusals worth? Do they really mean what they say?

It seems to me they only bring the third term closer. If Vladimir Putin is so dutiful and anxious – surely that implies that he is the very person to continue to bear the “President’s burden”, the only man Russians can trust. He is turning into a kind of Platonic “philosopher-king”, or a Kipling-style “white man”, reluctantly forced to rule, caring, responsible, self-sacrificing. The Russian media embrace him as a celebrity and a symbol, but with a substratum of respect and even veneration. Exactly because he refuses it, he is the man to be trusted with any amount of power.

What with the insistent demands and commentary in the media, there is a feeling, unspoken for now, that a third term is inevitable. The only other option is a “successor”, undisguisedly chosen by the current president. Either way, in 2008 Russia will take another significant step away from democracy: it has effectively taken it already.

Some analysts say that the main driving force is coming from within Putin’s supporters and henchmen who wish to maintain the status quo. But polls show that as many as 60% of ordinary Russians also want Putin to remain president.

What is that support founded on? Firstly, it is admittedly clear that Russians are happy with what Putin has done. Living standards have at least stabilised. Russian foreign policy has become more assertive. The war in Chechnya has been officially concluded. But it is also true that the media has come under such control that Putin’s image is not subject to any disturbing impacts.

Psychologically speaking too, the reasons are profound, and resonate with practical considerations. Russian voters are politically immature, and have a strong predisposition to hope for a morally pure president to be their saviour. Most politicians are reviled of course, but there is always the chance of one miraculously different one. People therefore collude with the image of the philosopher-king with an astonishing readiness.

One gets the impression in Russia of a country anxious to stop itself “falling apart”. There is a feeling that it is on the edge of chaos, held together only by the “strength” of the central government. Russians are therefore afraid of self-determination and, as it were, a multivocal society, afraid of freedom, associating it with weakness and disintegration.

Restriction of freedom is of course the basis of all societies, but in Russia one senses an inordinate paranoia. It has an irrational quality: therefore it is allayed most effectively by symbolic increases of control. Such is the function of the administration’s catchphrase, the “vertical of power” – a sort of symbolic backbone to the otherwise disintegrating and disconnected state – and particular restrictions of civil and political rights.

Such may be the function of the President’s third term. One could regard it as a fatal, symbolic overstepping of the law, a license for arbitrary rule. Yet in Russia such protests are made by a tiny minority, and sound like empty words. On the contrary, a third term seems to provide the security that Russians desperately need.

How far Putin could or would in reality guarantee stability and safety is another matter.

The Temptation of Vladimir Putin (http://www.mosnews.com/column/2006/11/03/thirdterm.shtml)