Russia: Putin crowned president after stage-managed election campaign
15 March 2004

The result was hardly a surprise. If anything the only shock was that Putin didn't win a higher share of the votes.

According to the first polls Putin won 66.5 per cent of the votes. The candidate nominated by the Communist Party Nikolai Charitonow got 14.7 per cent. The liberal candidate Kandidatin Chakamada and the "left" nationalist Sergej Glasjew are said to be close to Charitonow.

According to official sources around 60 per cent of the 109 million people strong electorate went to the polls which is enough to make the vote valid.

Of course the vote is a result of the "managed democracy" Putin has established since he took power from Yeltsin in 2000. This was shown, for example, by the enormous discrepancy in the time Putin appeared on TV compared with his rivals. The state-owned First Channel dedicated more than two hours and 38 minutes of its news coverage to Putin, while all the other candidates combined got 22 minutes.

Since the biggest threat to Putin's victory was a low turnout at the polls officials used any means possible to pressurise people to vote. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov had to admit to a recent scandal in the far-eastern region of Khabarovsk, where state-run hospitals refused to admit patients unless they had filled out absentee-ballot papers.

Other methods were used in Khabarovsk where two mobile-phone companies, DalTelekom and OAO MTS, sent all of their subscribers text messages reminding them to vote. College deans in some parts of the nation's far east declared Sunday a normal study day, so students remain closer to polling stations and don't go home for the weekend.

Soccer lovers had less to distract them from their civic duty: all premier-league matches scheduled for Sunday were cancelled. Another example: Dinamit FM, a local youth-oriented FM radio station in Moscow, gave away 20.000 tickets to its annual dance festival, "Bomb of the Year." Under one condition: only those who vote in Sunday's presidential election were eligible.

All this control over the media and other strata of the state apparatus demonstrates how much Putin has consolidated his bonapartist power. His party - United Russia - already won a clear majority in the parliamentary elections last December and he commands now a solid majority of the deputies in the Duma. This was also underlined by the recent re-composition of the governmental personal a few days before the presidential elections. He fired the last remnants of the old Yeltsin guard and installed fully loyal officials.

Another reflection of the massive rightward shift of official Russian politics is reflected in the alternative candidates. The Communist Party stopped criticising Putin but blamed only his advisers for their "bad influence" over him. Their political adherence to capitalism is also reflected in the fact that they built alliances with corrupt oligarchs - as the biggest capitalists are called in Russia - like oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky - who now sits in jail on tax evasion charges.

"Left" Nationalist Sergej Glasjew may call for nationalisation of some industries. But his campaign also criticises Putin for taking half-measures rather than rallying the nation with the cry of "Russia for the Russians!". As a solution to the long and exhausting Chechnya war they call for a "final solution to the Chechen problem" by which they mean the extermination of the Chechen people. As the left-wing academic Boris Kagarlitsky remarked pointedly: "Compared to these guys, Putin starts to look like a democrat."

There can be no doubt that there has been a massive decline in the class struggle in Russia. Strike figures are down and attempts to build independent workers' organisations like the union Zashita or a Workers' Party have largely failed.

However. only a fool could overlook the change in the direction of the wind. While youth were largely pro-market and supported the ideas of Western democracy only a few years ago, things are changing now. As a recent study published in the Moscow paper Profil (23 February 2004) remarked: "Russian leftists are rapidly getting younger. Students are replacing grandmothers at rallies."

Various left-wing organisations - often Marxist-Leninists in a Stalinist version - are growing and gaining influence among the universities and schools. They organised protest rallies before the elections and called for a boycott.

These forces are still small and politically confused. But they express a harbinger for the future - the growth of anti-capitalist sentiment among the youth. At some point the stability of Putin's rule will be shattered by an explosion of mass revolt of the workers and youth.


Now read: Putin in control after 2003 parliamentary elections