Vladimir Putin will win another Russian presidential election this Sunday.
The agent of the former KGB, Soviet espionage, will keep the reins of the country in his hands until 2030. After the resignation of Boris Yeltsin in December 1999, Putin inherited 24 years and three months ago a nation distraught after the collapse of the USSR, but he imposed his law with an iron fist and became for some the model to follow in the face of the supposed decline of democracies.
It was a mirage.
The supposed guarantor of stability, the president obsessed with making history, the man to whom the Russians gave immense power in exchange for tranquility, surprised his own people with the bloody invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The “operation” did not go according to plan to the Kremlin's plans and their metastasis, which reaches schools, where they will be taught how to throw grenades and shoot rifles, threatens to escalate into a war against the West.
On December 31, 1999, Putin received from Yeltsin a nuclear power in crisis, but with freedoms and hopes that previous generations had not enjoyed.
And Putin declared the minute he began his first address to the nation that New Year's Eve: “I want to warn that any attempt to go beyond the framework of the Russian Constitution will be repressed.
Freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of the media, the right to property: these basic elements of a civilized society will be protected by the State.”
Barely six months later, his Prosecutor's Office took the owner of the country's only independent federal television, Vladimir Gusinski, into exile on accusations of tax evasion.
NTV, which investigated the attacks with which Putin as prime minister justified the second war in Chechnya in 1999, was acquired by the Kremlin's gas arm, Gazprom, whose first decision was to close the Russian version of the puppets, Kuklí, for its jokes. about the president.
“There was no democracy in the classical sense then, but we had a great chance of achieving it,” laments the president of the opposition Yabloko party, Nikolai Rybakov, in an office at the headquarters of this party in Moscow.
Hundreds of books surround him, many of them about Soviet repression and the thousands of victims of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya in the 1980s and 1990s.
Figures that today pale in comparison to the estimates of casualties in Ukraine.
Boris Yeltsin greets the departure of the Kremlin after announcing his resignation on New Year's Eve 1999 in the traditional presidential end-of-year message.
In the foreground, his successor, Vladimir Putin.Associated Press
“Many factors influenced this failure, both inside and outside Russia,” notes Rybakov.
In the Russian opposition, not only in Yabloko, they think that more could have been done when there was still room.
It is also true that the Kremlin responded harshly and it seems that the massive protests of the past decade never existed.
Rybakov maintains that there was “explicit support for Putin” in the West.
And he lists everything from the coup d'état of his mentor, Yeltsin, in 1993, to the deals made with the Kremlin oligarchy in all these years.
Even today, with the invasion of Ukraine present, money still flows to both sides, recalls the opposition leader.
“This path inevitably had to bring a person like Putin to power.
He could have had a different surname, but his policy would have been the same,” Rybakov concludes.
Exiled, imprisoned or dead
The first man who could have defeated Putin decided not to run in the 2000 elections. He was Alexander Lébed, the general who signed peace in the first Chechen war and who said that if they gave him a battalion with children of high officials he would stop any conflict.
Described as “Napoleon” in the West, he would die two years later when his helicopter crashed in an event whose official version some opponents do not believe.
Lébed was Putin's first great rival to disappear from the political scene.
Over the years, several figures critical of the Kremlin were publicly murdered: several journalists from the newspaper
Novaya Gazeta
lost their lives violently, including reporter Anna Politkovskaya at her home in central Moscow in 2006;
former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium in the United Kingdom in 2008;
and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, shot in front of the Kremlin in 2015, among others.
The latest sudden deaths that have reinforced Putin in power have been those of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in jail a month ago and that of the head of Wagner's mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, when his plane exploded two months after his failed rebellion. for the conduct of the war.
Putin ironically commented on that event, never officially clarified, and attributed it to a mixture of cocaine and grenades between Wagner's commanders on the private
jet
.
All of these deaths occurred while Germany was laying its Nord Stream gas pipeline to the Kremlin.
In fact, Russia held its soccer World Cup in 2018 just four years after the illegal annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in eastern Ukraine.
Many political leaders attended the parties.
Among others, French President Emmanuel Macron, who would be humiliated by Putin on February 7, 2022 when he went to Moscow to desperately try to get the Russian leader to renounce his attack on Ukraine.
And Putin sat down with him on a six-meter-long table.
The governor of Russia's Krasnoyarsk region, Alexander Lebed, gestures during a meeting with journalists in December 1998.Reuters
Ksenia Smolyakova, an analyst at the Riddle think tank, writes: “If we look back six years, it seems that the Russians lived in a different country.”
On the street, the euphoria was absolute for having shown the world with its championship that Russia was an open and modern country.
However, the Kremlin noticed that it was beginning to have problems.
The government's approval had sunk from 66% in 2014 to 33% in 2018, according to the Levada polling center, and Putin's image was also worsening.
“The euphoria over Crimea had disappeared by the 2018 elections,” says Smolyakova.
A similar phenomenon also occurred between the euphoria over the victory in the 2008 Georgia war and the massive protests over electoral fraud in the 2011 Russian legislative elections, from which the new opposition generation emerged.
The leaders of the dissidents are today in jail, exiled or dead.
“The authorities began to feel insecure.
In 2020 they changed the Constitution, poisoned Navalny and then arrested his network of followers,” says Smolyakova.
In the opinion of the Yabloko leader, the Kremlin has invented internal and external enemies to strengthen itself in power.
“So people think that the problems cannot be solved.
What bathrooms are we going to put in schools if they threaten to attack us?
People see it as obvious that money should be spent on weapons,” says Rybakov.
Change everything so that nothing changes
Putin has remained in power in these three decades of the century, repeating two contradictory messages: on the one hand, he suggested that he would soon leave the Kremlin because a leader should not be eternal, on the other, he stated that he should continue for the good of the nation because he believed indispensable.
“Seven years is too long.
You can go crazy if you work with absolute dedication for seven years,” candidate Putin said in February 2004, 20 years ago, hinting that he would leave power after his second and final term.
“He has told us that these are different, difficult times, but that at this moment he will be with the people and will run for office,” revealed two decades later, last December, the military with whom Putin leaked that he would run. for the fifth time.
Putin has changed and interpreted the laws as he pleases for 24 years to not let go of power.
Due to the two-term limitation established by the Russian Constitution, in 2008 he formed a tandem with his successor Dmitri Medvedev, who temporarily assumed the presidency that legislature.
And instead of repeating the trick in this year's elections, he organized a constitutional referendum in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, which reset his mandate and will allow him to extend his reign until 2036.
His perenniality as president has caused the pools of successors to expire again and again.
The West considered Medvedev Putin's liberal successor a decade ago, and today the vice president of the Security Council has been relegated to the speaker on Telegram for the biggest outbursts against the West — and this is a tough competition among Russian politicians.
Women leave flowers at the grave of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny at the Borisovskoye cemetery in Moscow, on March 1.STRINGER (REUTERS)
One of the successors with the best cards today is Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy head of the Presidency department and leader of the so-called “political bloc.”
“His group has been responsible for building the pseudo-ideology of the regime,” says Andrei Pertsev, correspondent for the independent Russian media
Meduza
.
“In addition, he has created the training network for bureaucrats, everyone will have some connection with him in the future, and he has known how to take advantage of the Internet, his son was named head of VKontakte (the Russian Facebook),” he adds.
Kiriyenko's mentor at the head of the “political bloc” and creator of the concept of “sovereign democracy (the modern version of “everything for the people, but without the people”), Vladislav Surkov, equated Putin with Emperor Octavian Augustus in a
Financial Times
interview
in 2021: “When he arrived, he preserved the formal institutions of the republic: there was a Senate, there was a tribunate of the plebs, but everyone obeyed him.
“He united the desires of the Republicans with those of the common people who wanted a direct dictatorship.”
Revanchism towards the United States
One of the big reasons why a large part of Russians support the war against Ukraine is to have stood up to NATO and, in particular, the United States.
The issue is not so much to condemn invasions like the one in Iraq in 2003, but to put Russia on the same level as the world police and divide up its spheres of influence.
It wasn't always like this.
In 2000, Putin told then-NATO Secretary General George Robertson that he wanted to join the Atlantic Alliance, according to the latter.
Similarly, after 9/11 Putin supported the US campaign in Afghanistan.
However, George W. Bush's anti-missile shield and Russia's own aggressiveness towards the former Soviet republics led Putin to deliver his famous Munich speech in 2007, where he accused Washington of establishing a unipolar international regime.
Those clashes, as well as the Kremlin's rejection of globalization and some human values, gradually shaped state ideology to the point that the Russian president enshrined last year in his foreign policy documents that Russia is “a Civilization-State.” only one” that opposes the United States.
There are different interpretations about Putin's motives for invading Ukraine.
According to Intigam Mamedov, an expert on Eastern Europe and researcher at Northumbria University, the attack was a combination of factors, including two important elements.
On the one hand, the transition of power in international relations.
“Russia, as a power dissatisfied with its position, tries to take advantage of every opportunity to increase its power against the dominant power (the United States),” says Mamedov.
On the other hand, “the narrative of a clash of civilizations in Russia is being promoted.
It is no longer a small military operation, as in February 2022, but rather a confrontation to protect one's identity,” adds the expert.
Stalin's veneration
“After the special military operation, socialism!” proclaims a pamphlet from the Russian Communist Party.
Loyal to the Kremlin, he assures that Putin is doing “a good job” and has restored old traditions such as “the parades of athletes of Stalinism.”
in Red Square.
“There was no de-Stalinization,” laments the president of Yábloko.
“The fact that the State did not reflect on Stalin's regime of terror has contributed enormously to the current situation.
If you can kill thousands of citizens, what is not allowed? Rybakov denounces.
The opposition politician highlights that for decades the motto of the veterans on Victory Day was “not to repeat” a new war, but today, in the Kremlin's militaristic parades, the Russians boast with “we can repeat.”
“Even Soviet films portrayed the horror of war, they did not embellish it like now,” he adds.
Russian President Vladimir Putin greets the then Deputy Prime Minister and presidential candidate, Dmitri Medvedev, after his speech in the Moscow Kremlin, on February 28, 2008. ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/POOL (EFE)
Oleg Lukín, Diachrony researcher and analyst for
The World Order
, states by phone that the Kremlin “has not only reinterpreted history, but also takes over the symbols and establishes what and how each ritual should be, to separate those it considers 'theirs' of those who are suspected of siding with the West, of being Russophobes."
Lukín cites, among other examples, the Immortal March, which was born as a spontaneous parade through the street with photos of grandparents who lived through World War II, but the Kremlin later took over the tribute.
However, and despite his ability to mobilize, Lukin considers that the current repression is “a sign of the Kremlin's weakness” in the face of an important part of the dissatisfied population.
The inspiration in the USSR has also been a return to puritanism that borders on crime.
If in Soviet times the phrase “There is no sex in the Soviet Union,” uttered in a television program in 1986, went viral, in Putin's current Russia the same taboo covers more and more spheres of private life.
A few days ago a professor at a Volgograd University was fired for sending a video to his colleagues showing his cacti.
Someone in charge saw phallic figures in them, and was immediately fired.
It might seem like an anecdote if it were not preceded by many other incidents of “misbehavior” and massive police raids on private parties, both LGBTI and heterosexual, since the leak in December of photos from another evening of celebrities in underwear in Moscow.
Political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya warns: “The case of cacti is very striking.
She demonstrates that it is no longer just a matter of the authorities' rejection of 'non-traditional values', but of everything they consider depravity.
“This issue already affects a much broader sector of the population,” she denounces.
In Putin's police Russia, private life is already a matter of state.
Follow all the international information on
and
X
, or in
our weekly newsletter
.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_