Orientalizing post-Soviet politics?

[image source]

Andrew Wilson has an article out on openDemocracy that provides a taxonomy of post-Soviet political systems and where they stand in terms of their employment of "political technology."  The piece is interesting for its anecdotes, and I've always been a big fan of Andrew Wilson's work introducing Westerners to the concept of "political technology."  Some of the main ideas from his seminal 2005 book, Virtual Politics, are outlined in a shorter format in these remarks of his from a few years ago.

The questions that Wilson really seems to be asking with this new article - why do governments of states like Russia and Kazakhstan bother orchestrating falsely competitive elections? what is it about the political culture of certain post-Soviet states that has allowed them to more or less leave the pervasive use of "political technology" behind? are some of these countries destined to remain in some sort of political purgatory, having left behind the "hell" of an authoritarian one-party state but never reaching the "heaven" of the (ultimately unattainable) idealized, squeaky-clean, competitive political system extolled by classic democracy promoters? - are very good ones and have concrete policy applications in addressing Western approaches to other political systems now in transition in the Arab world and elsewhere, not to mention American budgets for the variety of activities that fall under the umbrella of "democracy promotion."

The clarity of the current article's thesis, though, suffers a bit from the author's implication that political dark arts and even practices as benign as the manufacturing of artificial campaign narratives are somehow unique to the post-Soviet space and are something that should be "gotten rid of" as these countries move toward some democratic ideal. 

Is it possible that Wilson believes what he calls the "highly developed industry of political manipulation" that exists in Russia and elsewhere in the region is not in many respects an imitation of our own political system with many more rough edges (and a much smaller price tag, at least when compared to American electoral politics)?  The ghost of Lee Atwater, along with generations of dirty tricksters (from both of America's august major political parties) - not to mention a fella named Breitbart - would beg to differ.

[image source - "history reveals that smear campaigns are as American as apple pie"]

I'm not proposing throwing in the towel and allowing moral relativist "whataboutism" to triumph by making us all shrug and say our systems are no better - because that's not the case.  However, I'm not sure how much we do for the cause of "democracy," however one defines it, by lumping in things like politicized judges, politicians advancing the causes of favored business interests, and advanced political campaigning - which has become a career track and educational specialty in its own right in the U.S. in recent years and includes what Americans call "dirty tricks" and Russians call "black PR" - with factors more uniquely present (one hopes) in the transitional, soft- or hard-authoritarian political systems that Wilson writes about - actual ballot-rigging, the use of law enforcement to muzzle political opponents and domination of the media space by the government.

I also take issue with Wilson's assessment that Moldova became one of the post-Soviet world's "serious potential democracies" only in 2009, but that's another story...

A thousand words

Assuming these photos are not the result of creative Photoshopping (and I have no reason to think they are), each provides a bit of wonderful, if somewhat dated, political commentary.

They are both by iruha, a photoblogger who lives in Elista, which by all accounts I've seen (particularly this one) is at least an interesting place to visit.

I found these masterpieces entered in an online photo contest sponsored by Samsung:

Author's caption: "This is our motherland"
This is a suitable epitaph for the erstwhile political party Rodina (Motherland),
which often seemed more concerned with stirring up ethnic tension than with
helping out Russians like the elderly woman foraging for food in this photo.

Author's caption: "Election campaign" ("предвыборная гонка")
The sign on the truck reads, "[2nd] of December - Everyone to the polls!"

On to the next episode

It's always hard to come back from a hiatus of a few weeks, especially in such eventful times. One builds up so many things to say which have remained unsaid for so long...

But happily others have had much to say about last Sunday's Duma elections - SiberianLight has a few posts with pretty-colored graphics; Moscow Rules gave his impressions from ground zero; Wally Shedd weighed in; PutinWatcher has had some interesting posts on the elections, including this one; Jesse Heath at Russia Monitor put up a valiant effort in the face of law school finals; Robert Amsterdam's blog had wall-to-wall coverage as usual; Veronica at Global Voices Online wrote a couple of roundup posts and posted a link on her own blog to a fantastic article that I hope to have time to translate; TOL's dedicated elections blogs covered events in English and in Russian [UPD - engrossed in that orgy of link love, I somehow neglected to mention the kingpin of Russian election coverage, Mr. Guillory]; and of course the izbircom LJ community had lots and lots of reports about what went down last Sunday at the polls.

Speaking of the ties that IzbirCom (that's the Central Electoral Commission, or TsIK) has to the blogosphere, it looks like the powers-that-be at TsIK have realized the power of the internet. The LiveJournal community represents TsIK's first attempt at a blog, although they don't seem to have put a link to the community anywhere on the main TsIK website. Here's what one member of the electoral commission had to say about the effort in an interview:

This electoral cycle is the first time that TsIK has set up a blog. Is this a faddish thing or a real instrument to increase voter turnout and popularize the institution of elections?

Fashion and popularization are inextricably connected, but to be more specific, we understand perfectly well that the Internet is a very important instrument for communicating and broadcasting information. Therefore, Russia's TsIK cannot ignore this method of communicating with and receiving feedback from the citizens of our country. We are of course interested in ensuring that active Internet users (first and foremost, the younger generation) know about the elections and in giving them a chance to state their position and to ask us questions, and in having the chance to search together with them for answers which are important to everyone.

TsIK's effort at mastering the blogosphere is being trumpeted on the Vzglyad-, Kremlin- and Zaputina-affiliated "internet TV channel" parked at the posh "Russia.ru" domain, which has a very nicely produced video clip titled "Our Man in TsIK":

The clip (nestled in among other classic Russia.ru content - clips with titles like "Bondarchuk is for Putin," "30-year-olds are for Putin," "The Crisis ofLiberalism," "Day of the Jackal" (featuring Nemtsov) and "Nizhnii on the Rise") is shot in black-and-white, with one of the songs from the classic spy thriller "17 Moments of Spring" as part of the soundtrack.

Prominently featured in the nearly nine-minute video are two fairly widely read bloggers from the RuBlogosphere - Sholademi and Casualmente (who also has a friends-only journal here) - who are the "curators" or moderators of the electoral commission's LJ community. I can't help noticing, though perhaps it should be irrelevant, that neither of these bloggers is an ethnic Russian. The bloggers are shown helping TsIK Chairman Churov learn to surf the web, and it is suggested that they will have regular audiences with Churov and may have exclusive scoops for their readers.

The LJ community looks like a way for the authorities to demonstrate that they are attentive to potential complaints about the elections. On an LJ community, any blogger can sign up and post material (subject to the moderators' approval), and according to the izbircom community's profile, Churov and/or his colleagues read the postings there regularly.

And the nice publicity given to the bloggers involved looks like a kind way for the government to reward and encourage its helpers, sort of like the "Golden Hundred" rating of journalists on the Press-Ministry-sponsored Mediacratia website. I don't necessarily want to criticize the bloggers involved - after all, they really did provide a good vehicle for feedback - e.g., this open thread calling for reports of ballot-rigging - much of which was critical of the elections. However, it's another matter entirely whether the authorities cared to read that feedback, and it's certainly possible to see this foray onto the Internet as just another bit of legitimizing window-dressing for Putin's Plan.

I may have a few more retrospective posts about the Duma campaign when I get some more free time, although the issues may start to seem stale fairly quickly - lord knows I've stored up lots of interesting links over the past few weeks on issues like election observers, western-oriented "jackals," and the like.

The only thought I had when I saw the poll results - and I've read enough to know that it wasn't a unique reaction - was that the result for "Fair Russia" seemed awfully high for a party which had been hemorrhaging high-profile members for months before the elections.

For now, Russia is on to the next episode - the Presidential race (or whatever form of succession the next few months have in store) is already gathering steam, although even VVP expressed a sense of weariness about having to go through another round of elections.

Vertical of bureaucrats?

Vertical of Power (chairs)
[image source]

When I first saw Mikhail Khodorkovsky's missive about the importance of voting in the coming elections (the scanned letter, handwritten on school notebook paper, is worth checking out even if some might find MBKh's handwriting challenging in spots) on Ekho Moskvy's elections blog, I planned to translate it. Sean has beat me to it, and the letter has sparked a bit of a discussion at SRB.

But I wanted to focus on one of the things MBKh mentioned in his letter (my translation):

The bureaucracy, and today it in particular is our chief opponent, feels quite comfortable in an environment of social apathy. For the bureaucracy, this [environment] is a confirmation of their monopolistic right to rule the country as they see fit.

It is precisely the fact that citizens are prepared to entrust their choice, their fate, to a little-known bureaucrat that proves to them that it is unnecessary to take into account even minimally the opinion of the people.

Khodorkovsky's conclusion was that people should vote for any the less odious of the smaller parties. I wonder what he would be recommending if Russia still had the "against all" option on the ballot, as it has in previous election cycles.

Veronica at Neeka's Backlog ignited a comments clusterf*** (to use an ATL term, though I'm mildly ashamed to reveal that I read that blog regularly enough to know the local lingo) earlier this fall by declaring her intention to vote against all in the Ukrainian elections, so I guess some regard this as a cop-out option and one that concerned citizens should not take, but I think it is a good option to have on the ballot, and getting rid of it was of a piece with some of Putin's other reforms which strongly enhanced the "management" of Russian democracy. Actually, the Viitorul (Future) Institute's website, where I found the above image, has another poster which is applicable to one of Putin's more spectacular verticalizations of power in Russia:

Democracy without local autonomy is like a ladder without rungs
[image source]

But back to MBKh's focus on the bureaucracy as the rot at the core of the Putinist system. This seems to be one place where the opposition could gain some traction with the public - anyone who has confronted corrupt or indifferent bureaucrats in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter) knows that such experiences can leave very strong feelings. The Moscow Times had a series of a few articles about various sdownsides of overbureaucratization during this year's slow August news period, though they weren't focused on grass-roots anti-bureaucrat sentiment.

But that sentiment is certainly there - a FOM poll earlier this year found that 23% Russians rated "bureaucracy, arbitrary rule by officials" as an annoying problem, a higher percentage than were annoyed by "lack of money for food and other goods" or "bad roads." And if you add in the 14% who noted "the poor performance of housing and public services" and the 14% who noted "corruption in regional government and legal institutions" as annoying (respondents were allowed to name up to five problems), it's obvious that a fairly large number of people are unhappy with the services they get from their flush-with-cash government.

The government deals with this by using their near-monopoly on the broadcast media to periodically publicize demonstrative anti-corruption crusades and by passing periodic pension increases, and so far it seems to be working - I doubt that any of MBKh's non-loathsome small parties will clear the barrier to enter the Duma, especially since it was hiked up a couple of percentage points by Putin in his earlier reform of the electoral process.