December 09, 2011

Moscow Spring?


Moscow Spring?

Quite often, Russian reality is best illuminated with a joke.

A couple of journalists are quizzing a candidate:

“Why do you want to get elected?”

“Just look what is going on in the corridors of power: officials are awash in debauchery, theft, corruption!”

“So you want to fight this?”

“Get serious,” the candidate replies, “I want to join in!”

In Russia’s recent elections, the Kremlin’s puppet party, United Russia, polled 49% of the popular vote, on a turnout of 60%. This means that less than 30% of Russia’s eligible voters are in favor of the status quo. More Russians did not vote at all than voted for United Russia.

“I didn’t vote,” one old friend in Moscow told me. “It would have been senseless.” This is the same friend who, in his 20s, went to the barricades to protest the 1991 coup attempt. “I’m too old for the barricades,” he said. “At our age, I’ll just take quiet and normal.”

But his pensioner parents did vote, and they, like a lot of Russians, voted Communist. Not out of any affinity for their platform, but as a protest vote, as a way to “sober up” the party in power.

Russians are fed up with corruption, with the growing gap between rich and poor – which now yawns wider in Russia than anywhere else in Europe.

“I think Russians felt a need to shake these guys up,” my friend said. “In many ways, this was a sobering election.”

A telling analogy in a country where the favored drink is vodka straight up, no ice.

Since the last Duma election in 2007, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has lost 15 million votes. In many regions, they lost half the votes they polled just four years ago. Most of these were picked up by the Communist Party – the only party whose growth can send a signal to the Powers That Be.

And that signal is hitting home. The Kremlin is summoning governors to Moscow, vowing the dismissal of loyalists who did not deliver the votes. Yet, the buck stops at the top, and the head of United Russia’s ticket in this election was none other than President Dmitry Medvedev.

This election’s clear message was that Russians are tired of the Putin-Medvedev power-sharing tandem; it is an embarrassing symbol of a rigged political system.

Now, Putin could definitely shake things up before his March 2012 re-re-election by booting out his loyal sidekick. But that hardly seems likely. After all, loyalty is the coin of the realm in Russia’s constitutional oligarchy, and Medvedev has been a very loyal sycophant.

Meanwhile, responding to widespread proof of voter fraud, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has called for a revote. “More and more people are starting to believe that the election results are not fair," Gorbachev said. "I believe that ignoring public opinion discredits the authorities and destabilizes the situation."

This from the former head of the USSR – a regime that regularly and systematically held sham elections to rubber-stamp legislatures.

Surely Gorby was joking.

[This commentary was originally broadcast on Vermont Public Radio on December 9, 2011. Listen to it here.]

Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
At the Circus (bilingual)

At the Circus (bilingual)

This wonderful novella by Alexander Kuprin tells the story of the wrestler Arbuzov and his battle against a renowned American wrestler. Rich in detail and characterization, At the Circus brims with excitement and life. You can smell the sawdust in the big top, see the vivid and colorful characters, sense the tension build as Arbuzov readies to face off against the American.
Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography

Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography

This astonishingly gripping autobiography by the founder of the Russian Women’s Death Battallion in World War I is an eye-opening documentary of life before, during and after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas

The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas

This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.  
The Latchkey Murders

The Latchkey Murders

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha, in which a serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow...
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
Jews in Service to the Tsar

Jews in Service to the Tsar

Benjamin Disraeli advised, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” With Jews in Service to the Tsar, Lev Berdnikov offers us 28 biographies spanning five centuries of Russian Jewish history, and each portrait opens a new window onto the history of Eastern Europe’s Jews, illuminating dark corners and challenging widely-held conceptions about the role of Jews in Russian history.
Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
White Magic

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Fish: A History of One Migration

Fish: A History of One Migration

This mesmerizing novel from one of Russia’s most important modern authors traces the life journey of a selfless Russian everywoman. In the wake of the Soviet breakup, inexorable forces drag Vera across the breadth of the Russian empire. Facing a relentless onslaught of human and social trials, she swims against the current of life, countering adversity and pain with compassion and hope, in many ways personifying Mother Russia’s torment and resilience amid the Soviet disintegration.
A Taste of Chekhov

A Taste of Chekhov

This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955