Russia: The dismissive Mr Putin

Date: 28/02/04

More evidence of Russia's slide to autocracy

THE president fires the prime minister: it sounds like just another day in the Kremlin. Boris Yeltsin, after all, used to do it all the time. Yet Vladimir Putin's dismissal of Mikhail Kasyanov (and his entire government) this week was far from routine. For one thing, this was the first time he had done it since becoming president in 2000: Mr Kasyanov had served as prime minister for almost four years. More important, the sacking came just 19 days before Russia's presidential election on March 14th. In any normal democracy, it would surely have been more seemly for a candidate to wait until after winning the election before kicking out his prime minister.

Russia is, of course, far from being either normal or democratic. It has long been a certainty that Mr Putin would win re-election by a landslide. Largely because he has presided over a period of relative stability and economic growth, he remains hugely popular with Russian voters, with poll ratings touching 80%. No major opposition politician has chosen to stand against him. And this week, some of those who did stand were talking of pulling out, because the Kremlin's grip on the media and the electoral apparatus has made the campaign absurdly biased. The only conceivable bar to a triumphant victory for Mr Putin has been the constitutional requirement for a 50% turnout. It is hard to imagine that the Kremlin will allow itself to be tripped by that hurdle.

Mr Putin was entirely within his constitutional rights to dismiss the government, even if the timing was surprising. His dissatisfaction with Mr Kasyanov, the last big holdover from the Yeltsin era, had long been rumoured, especially as the prime minister was openly unhappy over the continuing imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest “oligarch” and ex-boss of Yukos, the country's biggest oil company. Indeed, the dismissal of Mr Kasyanov largely reflects the outcome of the power struggle inside the Kremlin that has been going on ever since the attack on Yukos began last summer, if not before. His departure marks the triumph, at least for now, of the anti-oligarch, former security-service camp (the so-called siloviki) around Mr Putin.

This camp is more interested in the realities of power than in any feeble notions of liberal democracy. Although Mr Putin has often seemed a stickler when it comes to respecting constitutional formalities, he and his advisers have become ever more blatant in their flouting of democracy's true substance. Several elections have been openly fiddled, notably in war-torn Chechnya, where the Russian army continues to disregard any niceties of human rights. Elsewhere, any opposition that has begun to emerge has been swiftly crushed, as the decision to go after Mr Khodorkovsky showed. Most of the media have been brought firmly under state control. The spirit of the electoral laws has been repeatedly broken.

The question is how much further a re-elected Mr Putin may move in the direction of autocracy. For instance, might he, or his now-emboldened henchmen among the siloviki, seek to increase the state's influence over business? Or will he concentrate instead on pursuing a much-needed economic and bureaucratic reform agenda? The answers will turn crucially on whom he chooses to take Mr Kasyanov's place. Kremlinologists are already canvassing the various names. If the new prime minister comes from within the siloviki camp, Russia after Mr Putin's re-election may become even more Soviet-looking.

Editorial argues that Russia is sliding into autocracy.