BORIS KAGARLITSKY, MOSCOW
TO STAY OR NOT TO STAY?
The other day I came across the first issue of the American magazine The Nation where one of the authors lamented that nothing special had happened during the week and there was little to write about. The paper was issued soon after President Lincoln had been shot dead.
Anyone who approaches Russia’s political life with such a critical assessment would lament too, not about the lack of remarkable events, though, but about the vulgarity of the news. The last two weeks Russia’s mass media have been chewing over the information about president Putin’s divorce and further inevitable marriage with the Olympic gymnast Alina Kabaeva.
Strictly speaking the rumor is not new, it has been circulating for over six months. What was new is the unexpected and massive interest of the media to the old odd noise. The situation is much as if everyone started telling each other an old joke and forcedly laughing altogether.
The rumor published in a tabloid was later picked up by the reputable radio station Ekho Moskvy, flooded the internet and ended as the keynote of the Putin-Berlusconi press-conference in Italy where Putin had a headache to laugh off the questions. Right away after the press-conference the tabloid that was the first to publish the rumor was shut down and its website was removed from the server. It is quite possible that the source was launched for that special publication.
Dirty tricks have become preferred method in the Russian politics. But what we are witnessing now means that the situation has come to a head.
The closer is Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration day, the more uncertain becomes Vladimir Putin’s destiny. And that sets the whole plot in motion. But Putin doesn’t seem to participate in it much – he has lost control over situation, while the bureaucracy is on the contrary getting more and more unbashful.
One group wants Putin to stay by all manner of means - as Prime Minister or leader of the United Russia party or whoever else. Putin struggles to leave but so far unsuccessfully. He headed the United Russia party but refused to become its member.
Mind you that the rumor about Putin marrying Kabaeva appeared right after information about his election as United Russia leader was made public. It is clear what both news imply – the first was intended to say that Putin is leaving politics, the second – that he is staying.
It is in France not in Russia that the President can leave his wife and marry a photo model in front of the whole nation. Though even for Sarkozy this might have negative fallout. Polls show that the French President enjoys less public support than he used to. The conservative part of the electorate felt offended – those were people who supported Sarko in the presidential election last year. The left electorate, those who don’t care about adultery and divorce, have never regarded Sarkozy as their candidate.
It is even worse with Putin. In Russia the “Sarkozy effect” gains momentum. Conservative electorate cannot think beyond Putin’s image of an impeccable person. Any President’s act proving that he is made of flesh and blood ruins that image. On the other hand, the old ladies in Russia’s regions don’t listen to Ekho Moskvy, don’t read tabloids and hardly know anything about the internet. Will they ever learn the marriage rumor? I hardly doubt it.
The political underpinning of the rumor now becomes even clearer. Putin is leaving (and will have all his time to spend with Kabaeva, if only he wants to). But what is more important, we know that the target audience of the news is a group of bureaucrats at all levels of power, who closely follow the developments in Moscow’s Kremlin and the White House making their guessing: he will stay, he will stay not…
But that guessing leads nowhere just as the analysis of news does. Nobody manages to figure out the real situation… even the incumbent President.
The bureaucrats are pulling him apart, baiting him with promises and even threatening him. They can be sweet as honey but they know how to attain their ends. The President goes with the stream and the river is wild.
The disaccord within the bureaucratic rows becomes more evident. Any further actions of the belligerent camps only complicate the situation that is more and more reminiscent of a battlefield covered with smoke screen thick enough to hide maneuvers of the allies and the adversaries altogether.
Purely out of the institutional inertness and fear to lose their posts, the Kremlin bureaucrats created premises for diarchy and political crisis. Just think of it, Russia is facing crisis despite the fact that the recession of the global economy hasn’t hit its economy yet, oil prices are high as ever and political opposition and social movement are weak.
But who knows how the situation evolves?
Boris Kagarlitsky is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements
April 30, 2008
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