13.04.2005
Putin’s promise
The world must hold the Russian leader to his pledge to quit in 2008
Even in 2000, there was a hint of menace in Vladimir Putin’s promise to establish a «dictatorship of the law» in Russia. It was hard to conceive of any acceptable sort of dictatorship in the heartland of the former Soviet Union,especially if it was to be run by an unknown former Soviet spy. But so flagrant had been the general contempt for all laws under Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor, that Mr Putin was given the benefit of the doubt. He was elected President and went on to enjoy one of the longest political honeymoons in recent memory.
Five years on, the honeymoon is over and Mr Putin is preoccupied with how his time in power might end. Yesterday he assured an audience in Hannover that he would honour the Russian Constitution and step down in 2008, whether or not he ran for a non-consecutive third term in 2012. The assurance was welcome. Unfortunately, the world has learnt that no promise from Mr Putin about enforcing Russia’s laws, much less obeying them himself, can be taken for granted. There are many reasons to hope that he keeps this one, but just as many to fear he will not.
Mr Putin’s tenure, as judged by his fellow Russians, has been far from disastrous. Thanks to consistently high oil prices, but also to his own brutal yet popular early policies on Che- chnya, and public sector wages and pensions (which rose and were paid on time), he would have won re-election easily last year even if he had not muzzled those news outlets that dared to criticise him. But more recent developments, chief among them the Kremlin’s war on Yukos and its bungled efforts to sway the Ukrainian presidential election, have shown him to have both poor judgment and contempt for due process.
The Kremlin’s vendetta against Russia’s independent media was explicable, if not forgivable, as a function of vanity and naivety. There is no such charitable explanation for the effective renationalisation of Yukos, once the country’s most profitable oil giant, by a regime that increasingly resembles the old Soviet kleptocracy. Mr Putin has sought to lure back nervous foreign investors, saying tax arrears allegedly owed by privatised companies should be collected for the past three years, not ten. But the Yukos affair has already wreaked havoc with the Russian economy, quadrupling capital flight last year alone and undermining long-term confidence in the country.
Mr Putin and his advisers are understandably troubled by the recent revolutions in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and by Russia’s continuing loss of influence. Mr Putin is not interested in a loss of influence himself and the most likely scenario in 2008 is a choice between a carefully orchestrated election to install a pliant successor to defend his name and interests, and a constitution amended to guarantee him a third term. Neither choice is good, but the first is better than the second, which is being advanced by toadying acolytes who claim the alternative is the disintegration of Russia. The greater risk is the hijacking of the Constitution to keep a reckless leader in power.
The Times
http://www.chechentimes.org/en/press/?id=28057
