The election of Vladimir Putin as president of Russia was expected. But it had nothing to do with democracy or free choice.
Putin and his supporters have used his domination of the media and their ability to coerce, bribe and control the electoral apparatus along with outright fraud to guarantee his victory. The Putin machine blocked genuine challengers from even registering as candidates. His staff and Kremlin appointees forced cultural figures into endorsing his candidacy with threats of blacklisting and cutting government support. Workers and teenagers from small towns across Russia were seduced with free trips and cash gifts and were brought to Moscow to cheer at his Potemkin rallies. Party emissaries created a black market for absentee ballots. It appears that government employees were forced to vote “in an organised way” in cabins equipped with webcams amid rumours that the ballots were marked and were being tracked. An army of corrupt officials seem to have falsified voter lists and poll counts. Thousands of paid “carousel voters” appear to have been bussed around polling stations, in order to vote for Putin again and again. Opposition activists documented thousands of violations and international observers were highly critical.
The Putin apparat could not have done otherwise. This election was his last stand. He knew that should he lose power and his misdeeds would be exposed—a trap every autocrat sets for himself. From my personal perspective the list of Kremlin crimes starts with the murder of my husband Alexander Litvinenko in London five years ago, in the first ever radiological terrorist attack on western soil. Other people would have other grievances.
Families of those killed in the apartment bombings in 1999 would demand investigation into allegations that the Russian secret services staged the blasts in order to provoke the war in Chechnya, which brought Putin to power. Chechen orphans would exhume mass graves of their parents and press for war crimes charges against those responsible. Freed political prisoners—most prominently Mikhail Khodorkovsky—would demand restitution for all those years they lost behind bars. And tens of thousands of people convicted of economic crimes on false charges would want back their businesses, which were expropriated to the benefit of corrupt government officials.
As a result of a rigged vote, Putin was saved from all of this. And yet this election left me with an unexpected elation, almost a sense of victory. Robbed of a fair vote, the Russian people expressed their indignation and disgust at Putin’s regime in another way. Notwithstanding sub-zero temperatures and venomous propaganda of the state-controlled media, tens of thousands took to the streets and expressed their views in no uncertain terms, the most popular slogans being “Russia without Putin!” and “Cheats and thieves!”
The crowds in the streets expressed the feelings of the educated class and the young generation, those who were able to resist pervasive brainwashing. Their protest was spontaneous—no one had organised or called the participants to action. It was a grassroots phenomenon, a sudden impulse born in living rooms and on social media sites. What everyone thought was a marginal view of a handful of dissidents and political émigrés in London suddenly became a dominant public notion, a commonplace: that Putin’s regime is little more than an organised crime racket.
This is what my husband had said all along, from the day in 1998 when he led a group of officers in the FSB, the Russian security service, to a press conference exposing corruption and criminal links in their agency, which Putin headed at the time. If this trend is not checked, they warned, the alliance between corrupt FSB officers and organised crime will become an unstoppable power, which will eventually hijack the state. In those days, gangsters allied with FSB colonels extorted protection money from small and medium businesses. Today many of the same people run the Russian government and some even head state companies, but their mode of operation has not changed: they pillage tens of billions of dollars’ worth of natural resource revenues.
Until the last days of his life my husband continued working against this evil; he helped western law enforcement agencies to arrest dozens of Russian crime bosses in Europe and expose their links to an inner circle in the Kremlin. For this he was killed. But he did not die in vain—I see the results of his work in the courageous and determined faces of young men and women protesting today in Moscow.
Remarkably, for the first time in history, the two traditional camps of Russian political thought—pro-western liberals and Slavophilic nationalists—have joined ranks in their opposition to the regime, viewing it as a kleptocratic dictatorship. This underscores the point that Putin has no ideology, nor a programme, and clings to power for the sake of power. Thus, the outside world should be less wary of taking a side in an internal conflict.
This confrontation is between the people and the government that has lost people’s trust. The west has been too slow in abandoning its dictator friends facing uprisings in the Arab world; it should not repeat the same mistake. Failing to act against Putin’s interests does not add to west’s credibility with Russians.
What will happen with Russia next? For now, Putin controls the government but he can no longer control people’s minds. He may resort to repression, the first signs of which can already be seen in the police action against demonstrators in Moscow. But this will not work. People will continue nonviolent protests and civil disobedience until he goes. Then he will face justice, and my husband will be honoured as a true Russian patriot who gave his life trying to stop the evil, which in March celebrated its pyrrhic victory in Moscow.
