Posts Tagged ‘masha gessen’
Invisible President
Dmitri Medvedev has entered his last week as president of Russia: on May 7, he will hand back the office to Vladimir Putin. Having served just one four-year term, he will be remembered as one of the country’s shortest-lived rulers. He will also be remembered as one of country’s shortest rulers. At no more than 5’3”, and with his propensity to wear huge Windsor knots, he often looks like a fourth-grader trying on daddy’s business suit.
What else will Russians remember of Medvedev? My guess is, nothing. People do not like to remember being made to look like fools, which is exactly what many Russians feel he did to them.
At the outset, Medvedev reached out to liberals and intellectuals. Weeks before his election, in February 2008, he had announced that his guiding principle was, “freedom is better than unfreedom.” People might have worried about a leader who found it necessary to turn this truism into a grand pronouncement, but, having been left out in the cold during the previous eight years of Putin’s reign, Russian liberals were eager to be engaged again. Over 40 people accepted invitations to join a newly constituted presidential council for human rights and civil society.
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The Man Without a Face: Six Questions for Masha Gessen
Vladimir Putin is emerging as an iconic figure for Russian politics in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he remains rather mysterious even at home, and widely misunderstood abroad. Now Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has completed a comprehensive and penetrating look at the experiences that shaped Putin and the character of his stewardship of Russia. I put six questions to Gessen about her new book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin:
1. Vladimir Putin has been elected once more as president of the Russian Federation, but this time observers say the outcome was marked by extreme fraud. How do you expect Putin to cope with a growing opposition that increasingly includes urban elites once close to him?
The smart thing to do would be to institute some reforms—this would pacify some of the protesters and possibly even effectively divide the movement. Outgoing president Dmitry Medvedev has indicated that he will introduce an electoral-reform package that would reverse some of the damage done in the Putin era, and he has indeed even formed a working group that includes at least one protest leader. So some optimists are hoping for a Gorbachev-style scenario, where the system slowly dismantles itself from the inside. I, however, hold out little hope for that. I think Putin will find it too difficult to resist his natural urge to punish the opposition and tighten the screws in the hopes of preventing further protest. And this, I think, will ultimately speed up his demise by consolidating and radicalizing the opposition.
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Violence Stoked Fear to Fuel Putin’s Rise to Power: Book Review
More than 300 hostages — half of them children — were killed in a Beslan schoolhouse in 2004, following a firefight between their Chechen captors and Russian troops. Ten days later, President Vladimir Putin announced a sweeping overhaul of Russia’s political system.
He declared that regional governors as well as the mayor of Moscow would be appointed by the president rather than elected. Members of the lower house of parliament would also be appointed. Political parties would have to re-register, making it all but impossible to get on a ballot without Kremlin approval.
The upshot of the changes was to undermine — if not obliterate — the quasi-functioning democracy that had taken root in Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, writes Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen in her engrossing and insightful book, “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” From then on, the president would be the only directly elected federal-level public official.
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What the Market Will Bear
A new survey by a Russian small and midsized business interest group claims that pressure from government officials seeking bribes has risen dramatically in the last several years. While corruption in Russian businesses gained the spotlight in recent years after the Hermitage affair and the death of Firestone Duncan lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in police custody, business owners claimed that corruption is a systemic problem that is particularly targeting small business in Russia today. In the past half-decade, the number of those who say that they regularly face extralegal government pressure has nearly quadrupled.
According to the research, which is conducted yearly by the Russian Union of Manufacturers and Entrepreneurs, the number of business owners who “regularly experience pressure from state establishments” has climbed to 36 percent of all the business owners polled in the anonymous survey. Those who have faced “at least one case” of pressure for bribes from the government stood at 36 percent, while those who responded that they had never encountered government interference dropped just below 50 percent. Those numbers show a significant jump from the first survey put out by the organization in 2006, with just 19 percent saying they faced regular pressure from government and 61 percent responding that they had never been targeted by corrupt officials.
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Russians await Putin’s fall
With Russians taking to the streets to protest the recent flawed parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suddenly ceased to be an inevitable leader. He may think that this spring he will be elected president — the job he held from 2000 to 2008 — and serve up to 12 more years in that office.
But I, like many Russians, think the regime will fall before the March election or soon after.
As Putin’s grasp on the country loosens, I wonder: What would Russia look like today if he had never come to power? And now, what might be in store for a post-Putin Russia?
Twelve and a half years ago, then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked Putin as his successor from a tiny pool of bureaucrats who had remained loyal to him when his popularity plummeted. If Yeltsin had picked someone else, it almost certainly would have been another little-known functionary. This person would probably have been, like Putin, afflicted with severe nostalgia for the Soviet past — when the country was feared, the trains ran on time and most people did not like to stand out from the crowd. But this hypothetical bureaucrat’s love of all things Soviet would probably have been more obvious to the West than Putin’s has been.
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Musicians Sound Out for Russian Prisoners
Members of the Kremerata Baltica string orchestra emerged on stage first, all dressed in black. Their leader, the violinist Gidon Kremer, took his place in front, wearing a white shirt and a long black vest, with his bespectacled profile to the audience, his knees slightly bent, looking like a forlorn fiddler.
They played something impossibly plaintive, a piece of music in which the sadness built interminably, it seemed. The orchestra took halting breaks followed by a note of even greater sadness. There would be no relief: The musicians seemed simply to stop at one point and take a bow.
“V & V,” for voice and violin, by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, where the taped voice belonged to a long-dead singer, was the opening piece in an unusual concert on Tuesday night that was organized in the geographical center of Europe, a few blocks from the European Court of Human Rights, to draw attention to the continuing struggle of two former oil magnates, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and Platon A. Lebedev, and, organizers said, other Russian political prisoners.
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