Since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, Russian politics has regained a Soviet-style inevitability. Putin has no serious challenger in the presidential ballot on 14th March. Even the perennial election stooges, the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and the ultra-nationalist court jester Vladimir Zhirinovsky, have decided to sit this one out.
The television networks are state-owned and muzzled, former intelligence and military officers are filling senior posts in all the regions, and the courts do the Kremlin's bidding - as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil billionaire, knows well. After last December's parliamentary election, the Duma is fully controlled by United Russia, a party with no ideology save for supporting the president. Also present but too small to have influence are the Communists, a shrinking and stagnant pool of Soviet reactionaries; Zhirinovsky's hideously misnamed Liberal Democratic party; and Motherland, a vaguely nationalist shell party created by the Kremlin three months before the election with the aim - which it fulfilled admirably - of seducing Communist voters. Russia's two liberal centre-right parties, the SPS (more market-oriented) and Yabloko (more social democratic), fell short of the 5 per cent vote needed to form parliamentary parties. With debate removed from the floor of the Duma, Soviet-style Kremlinology is the chief political sport again.
But this is not totalitarianism. Putin is wildly popular, while the opposition's political scores are declining by the day. Artyom and Sergei, my two closest Russian friends, are gay and prosperous. They should have been automatic supporters of SPS or Yabloko, but not only did they think those parties had nothing to offer them, they didn't even bother to vote. Last year, two American researchers, Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber, commissioned a survey and found that 30 per cent of Russians agree with the statement "Democracy is always preferable," but 34 per cent with "Authoritarian government is sometimes preferable." The other 36 per cent said they either didn't care or didn't know. A similar survey all across Africa a couple of years previously had found that on average 69 per cent of people agreed with the first statement and only 18 per cent with the second. A strong hand from above, it seems, suits the Russians.
Why? A popular explanation is that it is somehow inherent; after centuries of tsars and general secretaries, they long for strong leaders. But that rings hollow. "The late USSR was the heyday of democracy," says Archie Brown of Oxford University. "Within the party there were several embryonic parties. There was tremendous enthusiasm for the first contested elections in 1989." In 1991, mass protests, from students marching in the streets of Moscow to miners striking in the Urals heartland, helped tip the Soviet Union over the edge. The vote for Boris Yeltsin as Russia's first president was above all a vote against authoritarianism.
Eight countries that used to be in the Soviet bloc are already democratic enough to join the EU. What went wrong in Russia?
The historical argument has some weight. What some call the "useful past," a living memory of democratic rule, still existed in eastern Europe among the generation that lived before the Soviet annexations. The lands that formed the old empire of Kievan Rus never had a useful past. The country's size also makes it harder for a new culture to penetrate; the Baltic states, besides spending less time under Soviet rule, were also small enough to turn, politically, on a sixpence.
But the main answer is that after 13 years of what their leaders told them was democracy, Russians want no more of it. While in eastern Europe the communists were ejected, in Russia - as in most of the former Soviet Union - a new set of communists merely took over under a different name. Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, became a symbol of freedom when he climbed atop a tank outside the White House to face down the troops sent by Kremlin hardliners. But two years later, when relations with parliament were at a deadlock, he sent tanks to shell the same building. What followed was a new, "super-presidential" constitution that left the legislature with few powers.
Yeltsin's team then prescribed "shock therapy," designed to free the command economy as quickly as possible. Its first effect, as prices were liberalised and the exchange rate was freed, was to wipe out people's savings. Every citizen had been given privatisation vouchers worth 10,000 roubles, their stake in the state's assets which were to be sold off, but over the following couple of years, these devalued from half the cost of a car to the price of a few bottles of vodka. State firms ended up in the hands of their Soviet directors, usually for a tiny fraction of what they would be worth a few years later. Anybody who wanted to set up a new business found the bureaucracy, lack of credit and mafia networks almost insurmountable.
In the second step of privatisation, the infamous "loans for shares" scandal, the new rich became even richer. Their banks lent the government large sums to help it stave off collapse in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election. Their collateral was shares in the remaining big state firms. When the loans went bad, they acquired the firms. Khodorkovsky got his oil company Yukos this way, paying a little over $300m in 1995 for a firm whose market value last year peaked at over $40bn. They also acquired enormous influence and often top jobs in Yeltsin's regime, becoming the "oligarchs" who dominated both wealth and politics.
In 1998, the government defaulted again, this time on its treasury bills. The result was another economic catastrophe and savings wipeout as banks collapsed, and once again the people's perception was that the government and the oligarchs, the banks' owners, had colluded against them.
Putin was like a good cop who comes in to rescue the prisoner after nine years of mauling by the bad cop. Two things in particular made him popular. One, he distanced himself from the oligarchs. They could keep their wealth, he told them, but must stop playing politics. Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, two media barons who refused to co-operate, wound up in exile.
Putin's second achievement was to bring stability. It was political stability: instead of an old, drunken and obviously ill president who fired his governments on a whim, Russians got a young, athletic and sober one who never seemed to make an unnecessary move or say a superfluous word. And, more through luck than effort, it was economic stability too. The post-1998 recovery began to take effect as Putin began his term; a handful of relatively easy reforms have made life easier and given small businesses a jump-start; and high oil prices have pumped cash into the economy, fuelling a consumer boom that has started reaching even into small provincial cities.
At the same time, however, he started concentrating his power - clamping down on the press, reducing the powers of regional governors, and swelling the ranks of the presidential administration, which is a sort of parallel government. Up to a point these measures make sense. Oligarch-controlled television stations were hardly free in the first place. Many governors ran their regions like private fiefs. And one way to tackle ministerial corruption was to create his own, trusted team. In fact, much of his first term can be read as a struggle to rid the government of Yeltsin's ex-cronies.
The final bit of democracy that Russians are unimpressed with is the party system. For most of the 1990s Russia's political spectrum was a primordial soup of parties. Voters couldn't keep track. Only three parties of any size have lasted for more than two elections: the dinosaur Communists, the nasty Liberal Democrats, and Yabloko.
Yabloko has never managed to define itself fully. Torn between supporting both Yeltsin's and Putin's reforms and opposing their excesses, such as the wars in Chechnya, and always led by one man, Grigory Yavlinsky, who has prevented anyone else from achieving prominence, it remains more of a political vehicle than a real party. As a result its support base has shifted from middle-class liberals to disgruntled left-wingers, putting it in direct, and fatal, competition with the Communists. It also got badly burned publicly by accepting much of its funding from oligarchs. SPS, meanwhile, has an even bigger problem: though it is "democratic" and "free-market" in theory, most Russians see it as a tool of the kleptocracy. Its leaders include the reformers who helped the mega-rich make their fortunes - chief among them Anatoly Chubais.
In short, Russians have seen no sign that well-being and democracy have anything to do with each other. And the fight has gone out of them. After two long wars in Chechnya, people have realised the futility of protest. Though polls show that most voters are unhappy with Putin's handling of the conflict, which continues to claim dozens of soldiers' lives each month, the demonstrations on Pushkin Square in Moscow are lucky if they gather 400 people. When issues gather serious support they are simply ignored. In 2000, environmental activists collected a 2.5m-signature petition for a referendum against the shipping of spent nuclear fuel into Russia. The authorities threw out 600,000 signatures on technicalities, just enough to bring the petition below the threshold for a referendum.
Could Russia have developed otherwise? Was it just an unlucky mixture of bad judgement and sorry circumstances? Unfortunately a successful transition had, and still has, several things working against it.
One often understated problem is deep in the soil. Russia has vast natural resources - oil, gas, diamonds, precious metals, and wood - which account for almost 80 per cent of its exports. Most resource-rich countries are a mess. Natural wealth naturally corrupts, and in Russia the connection is clear: the oil and metals companies were the crown jewels of the crooked privatisations, which sowed public mistrust of the government. At every stage reformers like Chubais could justify their actions: "shock therapy" was needed to create a market economy as fast as possible, and the "loans for shares" pact prevented victory for the Communists. But now it is payback time. The oligarchs' ill-gotten wealth is probably Russia's biggest political issue, and the power struggles between them and the government will continue to be at the heart of elections and policy disputes for years to come.
A second problem lies in the way the Soviet Union ended. Perestroika was a top-down reform. Mikhail Gorbachev allowed dissident organisations, but all were bent on either reforming communism or overthrowing it. There was no new ideology, and none were prepared to govern. By contrast, South Africa's ANC had an 82-year history before it won elections in 1994; Poland's and Czechoslovakia's opposition movements dated back to 1968; Mexico's National Action party, whose Vicente Fox became the first president after 71 years of one-party rule in 2000, was formed in 1939.
An even more sinister reason why Russians welcome Putin's strong rule appears in another survey by Mendelson and Gerber. They asked Russians whether they would choose Stalin for president if he were alive. On average, 12 per cent of the population definitely would and 14 per cent probably would; only 41 per cent definitely would not. Most disconcerting is that even among under-30s, 14 per cent would definitely or probably vote for Stalin. "Even educated Russians associate Stalin with order, not terror," says Mendelson.
Stalinism had another effect, writes Sam Charap, a Russia scholar at Oxford University. Its monopoly of truth created a "binary logic" - one was either for the system or against it, either wrong or right - which is "incompatible with a democratic political culture, which emphasises the importance of acceptance and compromise." That may help explain why Russia has no real political parties. It also suggests why those parties are now showing signs of relapsing into their Soviet mode of being purely anti-regime.
So what might cause democracy to grow? The Duma defeat might shock the liberal parties into regenerating. But at the time of writing, Yavlinsky and Yabloko are still in denial, and SPS is split. They will also simply have to wait. Putin owes much of his popularity to the good fortune of rising oil prices, which are estimated to contribute nearly half the economy's annual growth. Surveys also show that people tend to blame his government for things that go wrong while giving Putin himself the credit when things go right. But the chances are that the next Russian president will be selected from within the Kremlin circle; and quite possibly the next, and the next. Building a real political culture, in which things like transparency and pluralism matter to people, will take "about two generations," estimates Yuri Levada, the doyen of Russian sociologists. And it may have to start from the very bottom, not with political parties but with social organisations that can mobilise people around issues. The current opposition's problem is not to convince the voters that it is better than the regime, but to explain to them why it should exist at all.
