Read Online The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy by William J. Dobson - Free Book Online Page A

Moscow City Duma. On October 11, the day of the election, the forty-six-year-old politician cast his ballot in his home district, District 192. His family also went to District 192’s ballot office to castvotes for Yabloko. He had friends who did the same. Mitrokhin did not win the election. That wasn’t entirely surprising. What was surprising was the margin of defeat. “The electoral district where I voted showed that there were zero votes for Yabloko,” Mitrokhin told me. According to the election rolls, not a single person had voted for Mitrokhin’s party—not even Mitrokhin himself.
    I met with the opposition leader at his party headquarters in downtown Moscow. Mitrokhin is a bulldozer of a man, solid, stocky, with eyes set deep beneath a furrowed brow. He was elected Yabloko’s leader three years ago, and judging by even recent photographs, the experience has aged him. We talked about the difficulties of trying to operate in a political system so heavily stacked against the opposition. He agreed with Markov’s explanation, that the election rigging is probably the result of “bureaucratic competition.” And this competition, he noted, gives rise to an even stranger consequence. In Mitrokhin’s opinion, the voting in Putin’s own district is probably the cleanest in Russia. The stakes are just too high for someone to be caught red-handed. “It is very dangerous for them to falsify elections there,” he says. “There is always a chance that someone will detect such fraud.” It would be terribly embarrassing for tampering to occur in Putin’s own district, and after all his popularity is great enough that no one thinks—including Mitrokhin—that Putin needs to stack the deck to win. And in the prime minister’s district, Yabloko won nearly 20 percent of the vote. Given how hostile an environment it is for opposition parties, it’s not a bad showing. “These are the realities of authoritarian regimes,” he says. “If we had a democracy, we would have been in the parliament. We have to fight for survival.”
    The absurdity of having all of the opposition’s ballots disappear was another example of Markov’s self-winding hyper-bureaucratic loyalty. Amusingly, for all his defense of the system as it exists, Markov did admit that there was one downside to Russia’s lack of open, unfettered political competition: it was holding him back professionally. “I am personally extremely interested in political competition because I can talk on TV,” says Markov, immodestly. “My personal status is lower than it could be.” Even if he wouldn’t admit to the potential benefits of political competition for Russian society at large, the Kremlin insider sees no contradiction in his own personal desire for it.

Medvedev’s Brain
     
    Few people dared to expect much from Dmitri Medvedev. He was the dutiful aide who had been plucked from obscurity and made a president. Like Putin, he had never held elected office before becoming president. His name was rarely mentioned as one of those most likely to succeed Putin. It was suspected by many that whoever would follow Putin would be little more than a placeholder. The Russian constitution forbade Putin to serve three consecutive terms as president, so rather than revise the constitution, Putin simply required a reliable surrogate. If he wanted to return to the presidency, he could always do so. In this way, whoever the next president would likely be, he was just another plank in Putin’s democratic facade. It took less than twenty-four hours for that impression to gain credence. On December 11, 2007, the day after Russians learned that he was Putin’s choice for president,Medvedev went before television cameras and appealed to Putin to serve as his prime minister. “What is Putin’s main dream? To be in power up until the end, like everyone,” says Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader. “According to our constitution, we have just two terms. That is why he