Russia’s presidential election: How to check Vladimir Putin

Date: 13/03/04

What the West should be doing about Russia

HE MAY be loved at home, but he looks ever lonelier abroad. This weekend Vladimir Putin seems sure to be re-elected Russia's president by a landslide, not least because he has trampled down what feeble opposition there is. His second term has, in effect, already begun. But in the West, his erstwhile friends are turning more distant.

A year ago, the world's leaders were courting Mr Putin to support or oppose the war on Iraq. Last September America's George Bush, no less, fulsomely praised Russia's democracy and its respect for the rule of law. In November it was the turn of Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, presiding over a European Union-Russia summit, who spoke up for Mr Putin when journalists posed questions about the same issues. But by January the American secretary of state, Colin Powell, was berating the Russians for abusing these virtues. Last month the European Commission issued a stinging report on the breakdown of the bilateral relationship, with harsh words for the Russian side.

Poor Mr Putin; it is not even all his fault. Mr Bush needs to pacify the anti-Putinists at home, whom he had happily ignored before this election year. The European Union's enlargement on May 1st was bound to trigger disputes over such matters as tariffs and visa requirements - as well as bringing into the EU countries that have good historical reasons to be suspicious of Russia. Most of the disputes will surely be ironed out once May 1st has passed.

Yet the West is still right to fret over the direction Mr Putin's Russia is taking. Last December's parliamentary election delivered near-total control of the Duma and its committees to the pro-Putin United Russia party. Investigations and arrests of business magnates who have meddled in politics have shown that the rule of law tends to apply only when it suits the state. Nobody is fooled by claims that October's rigged election in strife-ridden Chechnya, installing Akhmad Kadyrov as its president, was a sign of “normalisation”, unless normalising means turning murderous anarchy into an institution. And the shrinking freedom of the press and the rising influence of the security services have gone too far to ignore.

The gap between optimists and pessimists over Russia, always big, is thus widening again. The pro-Putin argument is that he has brought stability, permitting an economic boom (albeit one that owes a lot to high oil prices and the recovery from the 1998 crash); that he is strengthening a state which was dangerously weak, allowing him to push reform faster; and that a huge and unmanageable country such as Russia cannot develop in a few years the democratic institutions that took the West a few centuries. Indeed, Russia is doing no worse than average among former Soviet countries, to say nothing of the developing world. Besides, Mr Putin is wildly popular at home. Why not cut him some slack?

The answer is that, even if Mr Putin proves a champion reformer in his second term, future leaders may be a lot worse, and he is creating a state in which their power risks being totally unchecked. This will make Russia not strong, as Mr Putin says he wants, but weak. And many existing problems that he has failed to tackle already pose threats to the West: the deterioration of the armed forces, the decaying nuclear arsenal, the spread of AIDS, home-grown terrorist networks, and human-rights disasters (Chechnya, above all) are sending streams of refugees abroad.

Put your money where your mouth is

So what to do? It is good that western leaders have stopped pretending that Russia is a free democracy. But nagging at summits counts for little. Russia does, however, want more concrete things, such as easier visas. Linking unrelated issues is a standard Russian negotiating tactic that can also be used in reverse. So the West should make concessions only in return for changes that make Russia more pluralist.

Second, the West could do more to encourage pluralism by giving direct help to Russian media and social organisations. The Russians dislike this sort of thing: last year, they booted out America's Peace Corps, and they have harassed foreign human-rights and environmental activists. The West could make acceptance of such programmes a condition for other concessions. America's spending on pro-democracy programmes is, proportionately, lower in Russia than it is in Georgia or Ukraine, where civil society flourishes by comparison. Since 2002, overall funding under America's Freedom Support Act has dropped steadily, and it will fall again next year. That is not surprising, given other distractions. Yet compared with the amounts being spent in Iraq, democracy programmes in Russia and other former Soviet countries are minuscule. Even a small increase could do much to give ordinary Russians a greater say in their future.

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