Start of a New Thaw

Ever since the 1960s, Russians have used weather conditions as metaphors for politics. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s rejection of the personality cult and mass repression under his predecessor, Josef Stalin, was referred to as “the thaw.”

Today, analysts use similar metaphors in predicting how the political reforms announced by President Dmitry Medvedev will play out, although those reforms have so far have brought few results.

? The dismal performance of Russia’s Olympic athletes has shown that in athletics as in other spheres you cannot buy success with money alone. This Olympics fiasco would not have been so painful were it not for the additional bad news coming in from other areas. We hear almost daily reports of corruption and crime in the police force, with no sign yet that any of the reforms that the Kremlin announced are bearing results. Unemployment continues to climb, and opposition groups are gaining momentum, successfully playing off the people’s discontent.

To make matters worse, United Russia lost ground in Sunday’s regional elections. One reason United Russia was still able to perform as well as it did is that voters couldn’t discern any differences between it and A Just Russia or the other Kremlin-friendly “opposition.” The latest elections revealed managed democracy’s secret weapon: You don’t always have to outright falsify elections results, like in the October elections. Sometimes, all it takes to get the similar results is to juggle the candidates and confuse the voters.

It was against this backdrop that a traffic accident on Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt on Feb. 25 turned into a political scandal. An armored Mercedes sedan carrying LUKoil vice president Anatoly Barkov slammed head-on into a Citroen carrying Vera Sidelnikova, 72, and her daughter-in-law Olga Alexandrina, 35. Both women were killed, while Barkov sustained minor injuries.

The police immediately announced that they had no evidence to suggest that Barkov was at fault. What should have been a standard accident investigation quickly turned into a scandal. Some people are calling for a boycott of LUKoil gas stations, and Russian rapper Noise MC’s song about Barkov going to hell quickly became a hit on the Internet. This is one of the rare cases in Russia in which civil society and public protest scored a victory against government abuse of power. Even Medvedev got involved in the case and ordered the interior minister to investigate the accident. The effectiveness of the president’s intervention will only become clear once the guilty parties are named and punished.

There was a similar case with Moscow’s Rechnik neighborhood, where several homes were demolished on the orders of Moscow authorities. Only after the houses were leveled did the federal authorities step in and declare that the actions of Moscow officials were illegal. Journalists compared that to the posthumous rehabilitation of the victims of Stalin’s terror.

For now, the general population continues living with uncertain hopes. We are probably seeing the start of a new “thaw,” and that is the best news we have had as spring begins to blossom.

But there is a worrisome flip side to this political “thaw.” If the country’s democratic movement continues to develop further, neither the authorities nor society are even remotely prepared for the consequences and responsibilities of living in a freer society.

Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.