The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep by David Satter

Author:David Satter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300211429
Publisher: Yale University Press

5

A System Under Threat

The system created under Putin was oppressive but not overbearing. It demanded participation in or tolerance for corruption, but this was seen by many Russians as a minor compromise more than compensated for by the improvement in their material circumstances.

Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s longtime protégé, was elected president in 2008. In this way, Putin ostensibly respected the Constitution, which limited the president to two consecutive terms in office. Medvedev immediately made Putin his prime minister, and power in Russia never really changed hands. Putin loyalists occupied 95 percent of the positions in Medvedev’s government, and Putin continued to be the real source of power. Mikhail Delyagin, the director of the Institute of Globalization, commented that Medvedev “is not capable of running anything, even his own secretariat. Putin chose the most reliable way to stay in power—the complete incompetence of his successor.”1

For a time, Putin and Medvedev pretended to compete. Putin advocated “stable, calm development.” Medvedev, in apparent response, said, “It is wrong for us to orient ourselves only to calm and measured growth. This … can conceal a banal stagnation.”2 He called Russia’s raw material wealth a “narcotic” and denounced the country’s corruption and “legal nihilism.”3 But he took no steps to deal with these problems. His statements were intended to sound presidential, but their only effect was to give false encouragement to liberals who hoped for a positive evolution.

Medvedev made one change in the Putin system during his four years as president: he succeeded in increasing the president’s term from four years to six. The stability of the Putin system, however, could not last forever. The longer the regime held on to power, the more corrupt it became and the more contemptuous of limits, which put it increasingly at odds with the population. The Russian economic boom, in turn, could not go on forever. In 2008, the growth rate declined sharply as a result of the world economic crisis. It recovered in 2009 but did not return to its previous level. Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, wrote in Novaya Gazeta in September 2011, “A poor society that was tired of upheavals was ready to turn a blind eye to administrative caprice and the war in Chechnya, corruption and growing social inequality not to mention sham democracy and electoral sleight of hand. The overwhelming mass of people, including the poorest, believed that the increase in wealth would continue for a long time to come.”4

The economic crisis undermined this confidence. Suddenly there were doubts about the future and a loss of faith in the authorities’ ability to lead. The process that led to the political awakening of the population, however, began not with the economic situation but when Russians realized that Putin intended to remain in power for life.

In 2011, Putin started to give unmistakable signs that he intended to take back the presidency. He again became the object of fawning attention on state television, riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and sitting at a piano singing the 1950s hit “Blueberry Hill.

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