Cheap bread and used cars: As Russia's economic tailspin rips away one by one the flimsy protective myths of the ruling clique – national rebirth, orthodoxy, regional hegemony, patriotism, assertiveness abroad – we now see in stark relief the true, rather more prosaic, foundations of Putin's popularity in Russia.
As thousands of citizens called for the resignation of Putin and Medvedev for mishandling the economy, the BBC reported that “anti-government protests were unthinkable just a few months ago as the economy boomed with record high oil prices and as the Kremlin tightened its grip over almost all aspects of society”.
That's not quite true: Anti-government protests have taken place, just not for the sexy ‘liberty or death’ reasons that the media favours. For example, in December, almost the entire Russian far east was shut down by demonstrators after Putin slapped tariffs on importing used cars.
Let's look at a recent history of Russian riots:
There were no anti-government protests of this scale when Putin-Medvedev changed the constitution to expand their powers, or following the deaths of prominent human rights figures and journalists. No massive riots following the government's bungled operation in Beslan and Nord Ost; no marches in the streets after Kursk, only very limited show of force after Politkovskaya (confined almost exclusively to the intelligentsia).
So when did Russians take to the streets? Today, protesting mismanagement of the financial crisis; in December 2008, condemning Putin's moves to raise tariffs on used car imports; and in January 2005, during the so-called ‘Chintz Revolution’ (named for the sartorial preferences of the rioting babushkas) when Russian pensioners revolted against a government move to monetarise their benefits.
In fact, that was the first time that Putin's rule was existentially challenged: at news accounts wrote at the time, “Russian President Vladimir Putin is under mounting pressure to sack his government after the country's pensioners unexpectedly capitalised on the biggest outpouring of popular malcontent in his five years in power”.
Russian governments are brought down by a breaking point of misery, not dissent.
As Carnegie scholar Dmitri Trenin says in today's New York Times, "The present rulers know that they will not be toppled by Kasparov," Mr. Trenin said, referring to Garry K. Kasparov, the former chess champion whose political challenges to Mr. Putin can seem quixotic. "But if the working people of Russia decide that they have had enough, that will be the end of it. It happened to Gorbachev, and it almost happened to Yeltsin."
In fact, that New York times article by Cliff Levy was not a bad effort at situating the current crisis and pointing out that “the authorities remain unsure whether to address the country's financial troubles with a thaw or a crackdown”.
Moreover, it cites the provocative prediction from a Russian political scientist, Yevgeny Gontmacher, about a coming political crisis due to the economy. The thesis was all the more provocative for having been published last year, before the meltdown reached its current proportions, and is worth reading (at Robert Amsterdam's site).
The New York times report paints the situation in Russia as a breakdown of the peculiar social contract between Russia's authoritarian rentier state and its people:
Now the worldwide financial crisis is abruptly ending an oil-driven economic boom here, and the unspoken contract between Mr. Putin and his people is being thrown into doubt… Will Russians admire Mr. Putin as much when oil is at $40 a barrel as they did when it was at $140 a barrel?
And herein lies the truth about the Putin phenomenon that Kremlinologists were so obsessed with over the last decade: why is Putin so popular?
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Little has changed in the country between the early 2000s, when Putin's rating hovered around the 80% mark and today, when his political fate is in danger. Russia is still acting 'strong’ at home and abroad, Moscow is still glitzy and the common people are still poor, the government is amassing yet more power and Russian state capitalism is amassing ever more spoils, its ideology drifting as ever towards an Ayn Randian obnoxiousness.
The only things that have changed are the price of oil (down), the cost of used Japanese cars, and the cost of simple groceries (up): these modest facts turn out to have been the only thing separating in the Russian mind Putin the national saviour from Putin the national oppressor.
It's not rocket science.
Yet nor does admitting that Putin's popularity hinged on what the regime could deliver in material terms necessarily mean accepting the NY Times's rentier state narrative.
It's not that people were coopted into putting up with Putin's political and human rights authoritarianism to avoid biting the had that feeds them. Rather, the majority of the population just wasn't aware of the authoriarianism until it touched their own lives in a concrete way. For example, a crackdown on press freedoms acutely affects journalists, writers and consumers of elite media; they feel its effects first. But the man on the street, who never wrote anything for nor read anything in the quality papers, probably didn't even notice. His life hadnt changed at bit.
Now, lack of governmental responsiveness to popular wishes (democracy) and transparency are affecting common people in a very important way. They are not just angry that the government is mishandling the crisis, but also that there is no way for them to affect the course of its policies.
When Putin increased the quotas on imported cars, people in the far east of Russia who made their living repairing the clapped out Japanese cars, and those who relied on them to get to work or their businesses, faced ruin (poignantly, there was no corresponding increase on tarrifs of new foreign cars, so the rich could breathe freely). They realised that there was no way for them to influence the government to change its mind: no MP to write to, no media they could talk to and make their voices heard.
When they marched in the streets out of despair, and were arrested and beaten by cops, they were fighting for their livelihoods, yes. But they were also fighting for freedom against authoritarianism, authoritarianism finally made flesh for the average person.
Every idea, such as freedom of speech, has a basis, a representation, in reality. It is the popular demands for a realistic, meat and potatoes democracy that makes the current unrest so much more potent than the previous ‘pro-democracy’ demos, which were made up mostly of yuppie kids demanding a deracinated freedom, an idea of freedom only in the abstract, freedom for freedom's sake. Now is the turn of ordinary people to demand freedom, for survival's sake.
