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

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

This is the work that made Chekhov, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.
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 Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.
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.
Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
Woe From Wit (bilingual)

Woe From Wit (bilingual)

One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
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. 
Survival Russian

Survival Russian

Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.
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.

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