Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy In The Post-Soviet World.(Book review)

• Author: Teichmann, Max
• Position: 143722964
• Pages: 66(7)

VIRTUAL POLITICS: FAKING DEMOCRACY IN THE POST-SOVIET WORLD By Andrew Wilson Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2005, pp. 332 and index.

Adviser to President: "Mr. President, I have good news for you, and bad news. The good news is that you have been re-elected. The bad news is that nobody voted for you."

(Russian joke)

This is a remarkable study of Russia in the post-Soviet world. It tells us how it happened that the Russian people, having been given the chance, it was said, of achieving political and social freedoms that they had never really possessed before, found themselves, fifteen years after the fall of Communism, struggling in the toils of a semidictatorship, presided over by ex-K.G.B. officer Vladimir Putin--a president who operates in an atmosphere of general corruption, probably worse than at any stage of the old Soviet Union, and with ever-rising inequalities and injustices.

Pari passu, Russia's society, i.e., the people, is in free-fall. I don't think many people ever dreamed that Russia would be facing utter catastrophe in the mid-term, when Gorbachev shook hands with Reagan, and when a new era for Russians was proclaimed.

This book is subtitled "Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World". In other words, the Russians never had a real chance to grasp, and hold on to, their new democracy long enough before the process of stealing their freedoms took off, and by now has snuffed out all hope, all optimism, on the part of ordinary Russians, and revived and magnified that deep corrosive cynicism which was there, just under the surface, during the time of Communism.

Wilson maintains that on the other hand, new actors actually did take power in Poland and Czechoslovakia--an electrician, a poet, with well-established resistance movements, so to speak, behind them. Also anti-Russian, and hence far more likely to be anti-Communist, for their Communist forces had been originally imposed, and guided, from outside. But in Russia, the changeover occurred within the upper echelons, as groups of apparatchiki "and successful party functionaries" became "the Opposition" in the last years of the Soviet Union.

One group, under Alexander Yakovlev, created a bloc to advance liberal, pro-Western ideas and parties. While another, under Yegor Ligachev, produced conservative and nationalist groups. These, supposedly, were the two opponents with radically different viewpoints and scenarios, who would, in time, become the two-party system. The Russian Communist Party would, in a sense, self-destruct, while the K.G.B. would fade away, losing all influence and credibility. This is what the Russian people were led to expect, and what the Western media, and hence the Western public, believed was occurring.

Whereas neither man pushed his ideas, the party was allowed to remain and operate, as a bogeyman. Vote for X, for he may have broken his promises, even be surrounded by corrupt followers--but it's a choice of the lesser of two evils, for would you want the Communists back in his place? That ploy worked for Yeltsin, the second time around, for a big Communist threat was beaten up--and partly created by the media. Yeltsin promised to mend his ways, and keep his promises, so ... most Russians still preferred him. (A remarkably limited choice, you might say.)

But the reality, meanwhile, was that a multitude of parties and candidates had sprung up, almost from nowhere, to confuse the public and every issue. Many of these were bogus--parties without members, parties without policies, funded by ... who knows? The fabrication of multiple parties, and candidates, eventually led to a law in the Ukraine, whereby every party had to lodge its programme. One submitted, as its programme, a document subsequently identified as a page from the Moscow telephone directory.

In reality, funding and facilities had gone to favoured "designer parties"--and most parties have been designed, increasingly by the public relations industry, there being very little grassroots stuff. The funding came from...