The more confidently the country moves along the path of democratic and political modernization laid out by President Dmitry Medvedev, the more frequently my thoughts return to the past.
Consider the March 14 regional elections. They brought to mind the State Duma elections of 1999, the last time the ruling and opposition parties used smear campaigns against each another. Since 1999, then-President Vladimir Putin’s power vertical kept all administrative resources under such tight control that rivalry in any form was eliminated from the start. During the October elections, the results were blatantly manipulated to boost United Russia.
As strange as it may seem, the revival of dirty political campaigns in March is a healthy sign of Russia’s gradual return to democracy. But the country has a long way to go.
One indication of how much work still needs to be done in the country is the appearance this month of video clips on YouTube that were intended to discredit the free press and the opposition. The apparent smear campaign was targeted at Mikhail Fishman, editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Newsweek; Ilya Yashin, a leader of the Solidarity movement; and Dmitry Oreshkin, a liberal analyst who is outspoken in his criticism of Putin.
The video clips depict people resembling Fishman, Yashin and Oreshkin bribing traffic cops, sniffing cocaine and visiting prostitutes. This pales in comparison with? the campaign to discredit former Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov in the 1990s, when video footage of someone resembling him having sex with two prostitutes was aired on ORT (now Channel One) and RTR (now Rossia).
And thanks to Yashin, my thoughts returned to the even more distant past. This happened when I listened to his recent debate with “tandemocracy” ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky on an Ekho Moskvy radio program discussing the results of the first two years of Medvedev’s presidency.
Pavlovsky, in his role as guardian of the official Kremlin line, argued that although the current political system is not perfect, it can be improved, and that Medvedev had made some progress in implementing reforms. Yashin shot back that Medvedev’s administration had already failed. The political system cannot be reformed, Yashin said, it can only be discarded and rebuilt from scratch.
Listening to this exchange, I could not help feeling that Pavlovsky was arguing with himself more than with Yashin — that is, with the Pavlovsky of 1985 who had just returned from exile during the beginning of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. During the mid- to late 1980s, Pavlovsky became one of the most avid proponents of glasnost and perestroika.
Since then, Russia has decreased considerably, losing its industrial and scientific potential as a result of political and economic reforms, and Pavlovsky himself has noticeably matured.
It will be interesting to see how Yashin’s ideology evolves in reaction to Russia’s current modernization drive.
Alexei Pankin is editor of WAN-IFRA-GIPP Magazine for publishing business professionals.