The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (8 page)

Nevertheless, the signs that Medvedev might actually harbor ideas at odds with Putin’s “power vertical” grew with time. And if there was one laboratory working to cultivate these ideas, it was the Institute of Contemporary Development, a liberal think tank that is said to have advised Medvedev. Medvedev served as the think tank’s chairman and is rumored to have backed the founding of the organization as an independent source of analysis for his administration. (Igor Yurgens, the director of the think tank, told
Newsweek
in 2009 that Medvedev had said
the Kremlin didn’t need “brown-nosers.”) A month before I arrived in Moscow,
the institute released a report that sent a jolt through the Russian political establishment. In essence, the authors called for rolling back almost every feature of Putin’s power structure. Among its proposals, the report recommended restoring the direct election of governors, creating a genuine multiparty democracy, abolishing the FSB (the successor to the KGB), and ending the state control of media.

If Medvedev had an independent streak, the researchers at this think tank may have been the ones feeding it. I went to meet with Evgeny Gontmakher, the institute’s deputy director and one of the report’s authors. I asked Gontmakher what was the purpose of the report. “
Our main goal is as a provocation,” he replied. “[The idea] is democracy—not imitation democracy. The reaction of Medvedev was very good. Unofficial, but very good.” The provocation, as Gontmakher explained, was directed very much at those who typically promote less pluralistic ideas. People like Gleb Pavlovsky.

By chance, I had actually raised this report with Pavlovsky when we met a few days earlier. I told Gontmakher what Pavlovsky told me: “It is a political fiction.” As soon as I mentioned it to Gontmakher, he laughed. “A propagandist. He is very clever, and he is right. It is a fiction, even science fiction.” But, as he explained, in the competition for Medvedev’s thinking, it didn’t matter. The report had scored a victory in influencing Medvedev, and it was at odds with the direction promoted by Pavlovsky, so naturally he was disparaging it. “Pavlovsky is a very dangerous person. [His ideas] are all manipulation. It’s all ideas about how to control TV, how to control our civil society. But this power vertical is not science fiction.”

The institute’s report had put forward a number of ideas for reform. So, I asked Gontmakher, what was the one reform that would do the most good? He didn’t hesitate. “The first step is to free TV. It will be an absolutely new atmosphere here. New faces. Open discussions. It will be a new beginning in our political history. That’s why Putin in the beginning closed TV. And he was right, from his position,” replied Gontmakher. “But to change TV takes one day. It only requires a decision from two people.”

Free TV. Not a change in election laws, not greater respect for human rights, not more genuine NGOs, not even a drop in the price of oil. It was a telling suggestion from this economist and political adviser. He would begin with freedom of speech over the airwaves. Russians already enjoy unfettered access to the Internet, and it had increasingly become a venue for political satire as well as the exposure of official wrongdoing. But even as the number of Russians online grows rapidly, as much as 80 percent of the country still gets its news and information from television. In Gontmakher’s view, ending the Kremlin’s ability to stifle the free flow of information, ideas, and conversation on that medium would be a good place to start.

A few months earlier Medvedev had momentarily made waves for a manifesto he published that was highly critical of the regime as it existed. I was told that the Institute of Contemporary Development had been behind this initiative as well. In many ways, this article, titled “Russia Forward,” had previewed many of the ideas in the report that had brought me to speak to Evgeny Gontmakher. But what stood out to me was how the president’s reformist ideas were received. Although
Russian politicos parsed the president’s words, Russian state television was unimpressed. That night the news focused on a visit Putin paid to factory workers south of Moscow. Medvedev’s manifesto—a proposal by a country’s president to effectively remake the political system—was buried at the bottom of the broadcast. Gontmakher might be right that the effect of freeing TV in an authoritarian system such as Russia’s could be powerful, perhaps immediately so. But I wasn’t sure if it was a decision to be made by two people—or one.

From the moment Dmitri Medvedev became president, one question loomed over Russia: Would Putin return? For four years, journalists and modern Kremlinologists parsed both men’s speeches, statements, and rare public disagreements for signs of Medvedev’s growing independence or Putin’s nostalgia for the executive suite. Putin remained coy. He told Larry King that he and Medvedev would consult each other and “come to a decision.” In September 2010, when Putin was asked about his future political plans at the Valdai group, a meeting of foreign academics and Russia experts,
he reminded those assembled that Franklin Roosevelt had served four terms as U.S. president. Speculation over who would step forward as United Russia’s candidate was confused by the fact that both men often acted as if they wanted the job.
Putin’s thirteen-hundred-mile drive across Siberia in a Russian Lada (which supposedly broke down at least twice) looked like the opening gambit of a political campaign. For his part, Medvedev repeatedly said he was open to the idea of a second term. As late as the summer of 2011, he told the
Financial Times
, “
Any leader who occupies a post such as president is simply obliged to want to run for [reelection].” It often seemed as if Medvedev were simply waiting for Putin to tell him if he could.

A year and a half before the decision would be announced, I asked Nemtsov, the opposition leader, who he thought would become president in 2012. “
I think the chance for Medvedev is 10 percent, and for Putin it is 90 percent,” he replied. When Medvedev became president in 2008, one of his early moves (with almost no public discussion) was to lengthen the presidential term of office from four to six years.
That meant that if Putin were to return, he could serve another twelve years as president. This fact seemed to concern Nemtsov most. “The worst scenario for Russia is if Putin comes back,” he said. “This is terrible. It means that he will run the country for twenty-five years [in total]. This is Mubarak No. 2.”

On September 24, 2011, at United Russia’s party congress, the speculation came to an end. Speaking to a packed hall of eleven thousand party members, Medvedev managed a slight smile when he said, “
I think it would be correct for the congress to support the candidacy of the party chairman, Vladimir Putin, to the post of president of the country.” The hall instantly filled with applause as the crowd rose to its feet. In the new arrangement, the two men would simply swap roles, with Putin returning to the presidency and Medvedev going to the prime minister’s office. When Putin walked to the podium to address the crowd, he paused and tapped the microphone. It appeared to be malfunctioning. Then, making light of it, he told the assembled party faithful it wasn’t necessary: “
Nothing can stop us. I have not lost my commander’s voice.” The election was six months away, but the matter appeared to be settled: Putin was back—if indeed he had ever left.

In retrospect, Medvedev’s years seemed to be destined to become a historical footnote, a bridge connecting one chapter of Putin’s rule to another. But what could Putin claim to be returning to do? When he first took office in 2000, he had promised Russians stability and certainty. He had promised Russian families that they would be able to plan for their children’s future “not one month at a time, but for years and decades.” But eleven years on, those promises rang hollow. Indeed, on the eve of the announcement of Putin’s return, an independent Russian poll indicated 75
percent of Russians still did not plan more than two years ahead, and 22 percent of Russians wanted to move abroad, a threefold increase from four years earlier and the highest percentage since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Although Putin remained more popular than any other political figure, his poll numbers had been in decline for months. Russians began to draw unflattering comparisons between Putin and the eighteen-year reign of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. (Two additional presidential terms would make Putin the longest-serving Russian ruler since Stalin.) The sentiment was probably best captured by
a Photoshopped image that quickly went viral on the Internet: it was of an aged Putin wearing one of Brezhnev’s old Soviet uniforms, the chest covered in military medals. Putin may have promised stability, but it increasingly felt like stagnation.

But in December 2011 the stasis that had long settled over Russian political life was unexpectedly shaken. On December 4, Russians cast ballots in the country’s Duma elections. As in recent contests, the vote was rigged. In the hours after the polls closed, videos of ballot stuffing, multiple voting, and other violations were posted on YouTube and spread quickly. However, unlike past elections, the Russian people were no longer mere spectators to the fraud. Tens of thousands of citizens poured out into Moscow’s streets for two massive antigovernment rallies before the month’s end, the largest protests in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like almost all of the popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in 2011, the movement lacked a clear leadership. It was, in some sense, a “power horizontal”—perhaps the perfect antidote to Putin’s carefully crafted “power vertical.”

The Kremlin advisers and members of United Russia I had spoken to had stressed the regime’s ability to manufacture stability and keep a close watch on public sentiment. But Putin and his team proved to have a tin ear. The gross manipulation of the Duma elections, following close on the heels of the brazen announcement that Putin intended to return to the presidency, had provoked an educated, middle-class public long considered apathetic. It is, in fact, a familiar pattern in authoritarian systems. Where the results are manufactured and the outcomes are largely predetermined, a regime’s officials will overreach or commit gaffes, sometimes extremely embarrassing ones, in an attempt to prolong their power. The danger for the regime is that these mistakes, when they are revealed, serve as sparks for greater opposition or protest to the legitimacy of the government’s rule. It was precisely this chain of causation—regime insecurity, a stolen election, and public outrage—that inspired the Green Movement to take to the streets in Iran in 2009 and helped stoke the fires that ultimately toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Indeed, stealing elections has been a trigger for the end of many dictatorships. Activists will tell you the reason is simple. The public often feels removed from the struggle between an opposition and a
regime, inclined to view both sides with suspicion. The contest seems ideological, separate from people’s daily concerns. But when the state has stolen your vote, the battle becomes far more personal. If the discontent is real, people who would never have been expected to demonstrate or march come out because they feel as though something personal has been stolen from them. Those are the moments that can transform a small opposition of rabble rousers into a national movement for change.

Putin had no intention of ceding power easily. In short order, the Kremlin began to demonstrate the skills which had long kept genuine political change at bay. Its response was crafted to create internal rifts within the opposition. Reviled regime figures were jettisoned. The Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov announced that he would challenge Putin at the upcoming presidential elections, a move many suspected was engineered by the Kremlin to persuade demonstrators that they had already achieved a partial victory.
In his first televised response to the protests, Putin even said he was “pleased” to see “young, active people formulating their opinions.” He tried to link his government to the new public mood, saying, “If this is the result of the Putin regime, then that’s good.”

Of course, the people were in the streets because of the “Putin regime”—but not because it had fostered a robust civil society. Indeed, it was quite the opposite. Putin had come to power promising Russians a return to stability. Twelve years later, it was his disregard for those same people that had sparked the country’s turmoil.

I
t wasn’t safe for Pu Zhiqiang to go home. Or, to be more precise, he could go home, but once there he might not be able to leave again. Over the previous forty-eight hours, Chinese authorities had detained more than a dozen lawyers and activists. More than eighty dissidents had been put under house arrest. Two lawyers simply disappeared. Pu, a well-known free speech attorney, was among the so-called rights lawyers who might be swept up in any regime crackdown. (He had been detained a few months earlier, shortly before the Chinese scholar and dissident Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize.) Pu wasn’t sure why he had not been targeted yet. But he had a guess: he had been away on a business trip for a week. He simply hadn’t been home. When I reached him, he was still in Shanghai and planning to return to Beijing in a few days. He gave me the name of a teahouse near his apartment where we could meet. I was supposed to meet him there on a Saturday evening. Just to be safe, he would land at Beijing Capital International Airport and go directly to the teahouse. Otherwise, our meeting might never happen. As Pu told me, “
Some leader will tell the secret police: ‘No, Mr. Pu cannot meet [anyone] tomorrow.’ ”