Winter is Coming (29 page)

The most revealing moment in Ms. Rice’s comments came when the topic of Mr. Medvedev as the next president was first broached. The official transcript reads:

secretary rice
: Well, I guess, they’re still going to have an election in March. (Laughter.)

I’m sure everyone there had a good laugh about referring to Medvedev’s inevitable installation as president as an election. And, to be fair, our elections were laughable. But why wasn’t the next question to Rice, “So why is Russia still in the G7 if Russian elections are such a joke?” Or “Why has the Bush administration invested so much time, blood, and treasure in trying to build democracy in Iraq and elsewhere while virtually ignoring what Putin has done to the world’s largest oil-exporting nation, which also has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal?” Not that anyone advocated or expected Bush to invade Russia, of course, but a little consistency wasn’t too much to ask of a man who so actively promoted what he called the “US Freedom Agenda.”

A few days before the Rice interview,
Time
magazine named Putin its 2007 Person of the Year. They took obvious pains to explain that the award was “not an endorsement” and that it went to the person who made the most news “for better or for worse.” But the article nonetheless praised their selection for restoring his country to prominence in the international arena, dispelling “anarchy,” and recovering national pride. The magazine did express concern about his “troubling” record on human rights.

The exact same things could have been said about Adolf Hitler in 1938, when he took his turn as
Time’s
Man of the Year. “Fascism,”
Time
wrote then, “has discovered that freedom—of press, speech, assembly—is a potential danger to its own security.”

Again these words applied equally well to 2007’s winner. Most of the criticism leveled against Putin regarded “alleged” abuses or came directly from known critics. In my opinion this abdicates the journalist’s role to report the facts as facts. And consider the timing of this announcement, coming right after fixed parliamentary elections that crowned Mr. Putin’s steady record of eradicating democracy across Russia.

Of course the
Time
article was trumpeted by Kremlin propaganda as another endorsement of Putin and his policies. The focus was on the myth that Putin had built a “strong Russia,” when in fact he and his cronies had hollowed out the state from within.

On March 2, Medvedev’s coronation as the king of nothing was completed and the last remaining element of democracy in Russia, the transition of power, was destroyed. As expected, the election itself was a complete sham and the Kremlin didn’t even bother to cover its tracks. Opposition candidates were forced out of the race. The state-run media promoted Medvedev while either slandering or just not mentioning the other candidates. Several overenthusiastic precincts reported Medvedev receiving over 100 percent of the vote in the initial returns.

Medvedev’s 70 percent fell just short of Putin’s 71 percent in 2004, an additional indicator of who was really in charge, in case one was necessary. You may wonder why they bothered rigging the results when they already possessed so many unfair advantages. It was a designed display of loyalty by the regional politicians and bureaucrats to prove they could, and would, produce the results demanded by the Kremlin. This is not the way a democracy works, but it is very much the way a mafia works.

We in the Russian opposition waited anxiously to see what the rest of the world would say about Russia’s return to outright despotism. Now, at long last, surely the leaders of the free world would have harsh criticisms after they had allowed Russia to join the G7 and had treated Putin as a democratic equal. Of course they would be outraged at having been played for fools. Perhaps, we hoped, enough external pressure would mount over this scandalous transfer of power to help weaken the Kremlin’s stranglehold in Russia.

What happened instead could not have been more devastating. Western administrations lined up to applaud Medvedev on his outstanding victory, although most handed off this distasteful task to spokespeople. One or two statements managed to work in a few words about unpleasant “incidents” during the Russian election process.

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy showed no such qualms. He telephoned Medvedev to congratulate him and to invite him to France. (I take for granted that Putin’s long-term business partners Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhardt Schroder sent personal notes.) The West’s acceptance of Medvedev as a democratically elected leader was another turning point. The last hurdle to Putin retaining power forever had been cleared. It signaled that the United States and the European Union would play along with even the most absurd charade in order to avoid confrontation.

For the Russian opposition the Western reaction was a disaster. Our coalition of nationalists, leftists, and liberals had little in common beyond a belief in the power of the democratic process. With no access to mass media and under constant persecution, our members attempted to spread the word about the importance of these principles. In one stroke, the free world announced that democracy was a scam, a cover-up for business as usual, just like Putin and his allies always said it was.

Five months later, in what I called then the culmination of Putin’s feeling of impunity, Russian forces invaded neighboring Georgia in August when given the first hint of an excuse in South Ossetia. Putin had no reason to believe there was anything to fear over something as minor as punishing a neighboring nation led by his personal enemy, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili.

Putin was always good at reading other world leaders and, once again, he was right.

The world order has rules, but they are mostly based on the honor system and are infrequently tested. Putin has learned that the brutal methods of his KGB world are equally effective on the global stage. Violence returned on cue to the Caucasus, where Putin made his reputation as a strongman when he first came on the Russian political stage in 1999. Maybe it was a present for Medvedev. A war is always useful to build up a new Russian president’s domestic reputation.

The real catastrophe, the one that gave Putin the confidence to shed blood across an international border, took place on March 3, 2008, the day after the election. That was the date on which the international community of free nations had a chance to sound the alarm about the Putin dictatorship, a chance to send an unambiguous message that democracy mattered. No alarm sounded. The election wasn’t important. The world’s reaction was.

As the worst of the violence between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia wound down, I was reminded of a conversation I had had in 2005 in Moscow with a high-ranking European Union official. Russia was much freer then than it is today, but Putin’s onslaught against democratic rights was already picking up speed.

“What would it take,” I asked the official, “for Europe to stop treating Putin like a democrat? Maybe if all opposition parties are banned? Or what if they started shooting people in the street?”

He shrugged and replied that even in that case there would be little the EU could do, adding that “staying engaged will always be the best hope for the people of both Europe and Russia.” I expect the citizens of Georgia and Ukraine would disagree. Russia’s invasion of Georgia was the direct result of nearly a decade of this combination of helplessness and self-delusion in the West. Being left unpunished over Georgia invited Putin into Ukraine six years later.

In response to the Russian invasion of Georgia, the EU held its first emergency summit since the outbreak of the Iraq war. It quickly postponed meetings on the partnership agreement with Russia until the Kremlin moved its troops back to pre-August 7 positions. The EU statement, additionally weakened by a proud Silvio Berlusconi, included the phrase “We expect Russia to behave in a responsible manner, honoring all its commitments,” in addition to the evergreens “gravely concerned” and “strongly condemn.” How Putin and his billionaire and KGB buddies must have laughed at such quaint language.

On May 7, Dmitry Medvedev was sworn in as the president of Russia, behind closed doors. Putin was asked if he would, following tradition, hang a portrait of the new president on the wall of his office. Putin balked, but the joke going around had it that he would indeed have one: a portrait of Medvedev in the president’s office looking at a portrait of Putin. According to the Russian constitution, Medvedev was now the one in charge. But as there was never any actual evidence of his independence and authority, it was safe to assume that Medvedev still needed Putin’s permission to use the Kremlin lavatory. The real “smooth transition of power,” in the ironically perfect phrase of German chancellor Angela Merkel, was its move with Putin from the presidency to the prime ministry.

I’ve made well over a thousand international media appearances in the last ten years, nearly all of them to discuss Russia and Putin. Often a show’s producers will ask you in advance what title you prefer to be called on the air and what you’d like to appear next to your name on TV. Sometimes they do not ask. I have a long and complicated resume, so I’m used to hearing all sorts of things in these situations. It’s similar with the introductions I receive at my business and political lecture events. They are always kind and usually flattering, but often they contain all sorts of spurious information about me gleaned from a quick Google search. I often have to follow up with a quick set of corrections and joke that I’m always interested in these introductions because I learn so many new things!

“Garry Kasparov, Russian human rights activist and former world chess champion” shouldn’t be too hard, no? I am also chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and a senior visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School, where I regularly have lectures and seminars. I’m also very proud to be the chairman of the Kasparov Chess Foundation, a global education nonprofit, and of being a modestly popular author and speaker. But that is all too long to put on TV.

The one title I truly dislike is one I hear quite often: “Garry Kasparov, former Russian presidential candidate.” This is not only inaccurate, but it is misleading in a damaging way. Yes, the Other Russia and other opposition groups held internal primaries in order to put forward candidates in 2008 and I was a participant. Yes, we had online and in-person voting to select candidates and I was one of the winners. Yes, several of us attempted to register to become candidates and I was one of them. But was I really a candidate for president?

When people from democratic countries talk to me about polls, platforms, campaigns, and other normal elements of elections in a free country, I have to stop them short. None of those things ever really existed in Russia—not in 2008 and even less so now. In Russia the opposition isn’t trying to win elections; we’re trying to
have
elections. We had started out optimistically in 2004, hoping that Putin’s departure might open the door to a contested election. By 2007, after the crackdowns on the Marches of Dissent and our other activities grew worse and worse, we realized there was little hope of that. Until Putin and Medvedev made their little announcement on December 10 we weren’t sure exactly how the ax was going to fall, or when, but we knew it was very sharp and right over our heads.

Putin anointed Medvedev with what a Mexican friend called
“el dedazo
,” the endowing touch of a finger akin to the god of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel giving life to Adam. At that point the result of the election was no longer in question. The system could never allow anyone so designated to do anything other than win by a huge margin. It was also very clear that the Kremlin did not want the presidential ballot to be cluttered with too many names. The campaigns of the opposition candidates became a strange game of forcing the authorities to figure out different ways to disqualify us.

There was no shortage of hoops to jump through and the Central Election Commission (CEC), run by Putin’s henchman Vladimir Churov, was dedicated to making sure nobody but the approved candidates made it. The main obstacle was practically insurmountable on its face. An independent candidate had to collect 2 million signatures in just five weeks, and only 40,000 could be from a single region. So in Moscow, no matter how many you got, only 40,000 counted. So you needed signatures from fifty regions, minimum. Then, two weeks out of the five-week window was a general holiday. Lastly, when you came up with the signatures you could submit only 2.2 million, no more, and if 10 percent were disqualified for any reason you were out of the game.

Even to reach that stage would also turn out to be difficult. Each candidate was required to hold a nominating convention with at least five hundred supporters under one roof to sign a declaration with a representative of the Ministry of Justice there to observe in person. But as during my travels around the country, it turned out no venues in Moscow were willing to rent me a hall for this purpose. Well, that’s not completely true, since we did sign a contract for a hall for December 13 and even paid our fee up front. But two days before, we were informed that “for technical reasons the hall is not available on that date.” Of course on December 14 the very same hall was ready and waiting to host a nominating convention for the Kremlin’s new stooge candidate, Bogdanov.