The New Cold War by Mark Mackinnon
Author:Mark Mackinnon [MacKinnon, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36992-5
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2007-08-18T16:00:00+00:00
The 2004 presidential elections were the first ones in which Alexander Yakovlev did not cast a vote. In a gesture full of portent, the man many considered the grandfather of Russian democracy forsook the right to vote that he had once been so insistent on, and went instead to a conference in Prague. “It was useless to vote. It was known beforehand who would win,” he said shortly before his death in 2005, his thick eyebrows knitting together in disgust over eyes that locked you in place with an intelligent, alert stare. “This was not an election. This is what we had for seventy years before.”
Despite Khakamada’s noble effort, the only drama of Russia’s third post-Soviet presidential election campaign was the firing of Putin’s long-serving prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov.
After the revolving-door governments of the Yeltsin years, Putin had made a point of sticking with Kasyanov and the deep-voiced economist’s cabinet for his entire first term in office. He had even tolerated occasional bursts of dissent from his prime minister, who was viewed as one of the last powerful holdovers from Yeltsin’s “Family.” Kasyanov had spoken out against the arrest of Khodorkovsky, warning that it would scare off foreign investors if it looked as if the law was a tool of the state. He had battled Putin in private over the storming of the theatre during the Nord-Ost hostage siege and over the cutoff of gas supplies to Belarus.
The siloviki, as the ex-KGB types who dominated Putin’s inner circle became known (the word translates roughly into “men of power”), had long agitated for Kasyanov’s dismissal. Surkov, Dmitry Medvedev and the influential defence minister Sergei Ivanov resented the residual influence of Yeltsin holdovers like Kasyanov and Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. When Voloshin—who had approved Khodorkovsky’s financing of opposition political parties—quit after the tycoon’s arrest, it left Kasyanov as the last key Kremlin figure with ties to the old regime.
Kasyanov eventually gave the siloviki the excuse to push him aside that they were looking for. Above all else, Putin demanded loyalty from his inner circle, and Kasyanov, in the run-up to the election, had entertained a pitch from Boris Nemtsov, who wanted him to run as the joint “democratic” presidential candidate against Putin. Confronted with evidence that Kasyanov might be conspiring against him, Putin summoned him to his office on February 24 and fired him and his entire cabinet, eventually replacing him with an unknown, unambitious technocrat named Mikhail Fradkov.10
Other than Kasyanov’s firing, the election campaign created little drama. Putin boycotted the televised debates, so few people watched and there was little for the candidates who did show up to argue about. What campaigning Putin’s opponents did manage did nothing to dent the president’s massive lead in the opinion polls.
On election day, March 14, 2004, I visited polling station after polling station—most of them set up in schools and libraries—and watched as voters unenthusiastically cast their ballots and then enthusiastically shopped for bargains in the mini-markets set up outside to draw voters.
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