Digimon
10-31-2007, 08:04 PM
Ames tries to cast some light on the recent events in Russia. Deserves a read from those who are interested in Russian politics:
Something big is happening in the world of Russian power. And it ain't pretty.
Two weeks ago, Viktor Cherkesov, the don of one of the main siloviki clans, published an open letter in Kommersant. Reports in the English-language press focused on how unusual it was for a silovik to take his problems public in the Putin Era--particularly a silovik of Cherkesov's stature. As head of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, Cherkesov essentially runs a kind of FSB-2. And given the recent slew of high-profile arrests, along with Cherkesov's open letter, it looks as though FSB-2 is at war with FSB-1.
It's fitting that this war comes exactly 10 years after the outbreak of the Banker's War under Yeltsin, when the oligarchs divided into two mortal enemy camps in the fight over the last of Russia's unprivatized spoils. On one side of the Banker's War were Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky; and on the other side, the "baby billionaire" (to use the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt's own words) Vladimir Potanin and his men-in-power, the so-called "young reformers" headed by Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexander Kokh. When the Berezovsky-Gusinsky clan felt cheated out of the privatization of Russia's telecommunications giant Svyazinvest, they took their war to the media, which they largely controlled through television stations ORT and NTV, as well as to the Russian security services, which they used to drudge up damaging kompromat. The end result of the Banker's War was the end of the oligarchy itself. Within a year of their feud, they and the system that made them collapsed.
Cherkesov warned in his letter that this very same suicidal scenario is playing out all over again today: as we near the end of the halcyon Putin Era, the once seemingly monolithic siloviki have divided into two warring camps struggling over power and assets. In one camp is the Cherkesov Clan, FSB-2; in the other, the clan headed by the FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev and his Kremlin allies led by the Presidential Administration deputy and Rosneft chief Igor Sechin. "We must not allow scandals and infighting," Cherkesov wrote in Kommersant. "There can be no winners in this war... There is too much at stake." He argued that not only would both clans lose, but the system built up in Putin's reign, the "corporatism" which Cherkesov argued has saved Russia from chaos, would go down with it.
If the "corporatist" system collapses, then it's back to chaos, just as the Banker's War ended in 1998 with the financial collapse and end of "liberal reforms."
First, a little background. Viktor Cherkesov is an old Putin ally. He headed the FSB in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, when Putin was the deputy mayor. After Putin came to power in 2000, he named Cherkesov as the Kremlin envoy for Russia's northwest region (which includes Petersburg), making Cherkesov one of seven regional envoys whose job was to bring the Russian Federation back under Kremlin control in the "vertikalnaya vlast" or vertical power scheme. In the spring of 2003, Cherkesov was brought back to Moscow to head the newly formed Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency.
The name of the structure is misleading. The Anti-Narcotics Agency was really turned into a second FSB, having absorbed the personnel and equipment and assets of the massive, all-powerful Tax Police, with an estimated 40,000 employees. It was set up as a kind of Russian FBI, tasked to fight economic and organized crime as well as drug trafficking.
Putin's massive reorganization of the security ministries in March 2003 was misunderstood at the time. It was either scoffed at or, oddly enough, praised by liberals like Irina Khakamada and Grigory Yavlinsky, who "supported the changes as a step toward efficiency and a sign that Putin is making the drug problem a priority," according to the Moscow Times.
Putin's reason for the reshuffle became clear only a few months later, when he took down his rival, Yukos oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Formally, Yukos was destroyed with tax evasion charges; that explains why Putin needed to bring the Tax Police under his control, as it had surely been infiltrated by Yukos. With a new 40,000-strong, heavily armed agency under the control of Putin's ally Cherkesov, Putin had two insurmountable weapons to deploy against the increasingly powerful Khodorkovsky--the Anti-Narcotics Agency, and the FSB, which was (and is) also headed by another St. Petersburg ally of Putin's, Nikolai Patrushev.
Khodorkovsky was destroyed, but a new Monster was born, Putin's Monster: the all-powerful siloviki. They now provided Putin with the stability and control he needed to run the country. But there was no one to check their power--except each other.
The ostensible spark for the Spooks' War today is the strange and nasty criminal investigation into a furniture front company called Tri Kita. It's a paranoiac's dream, involving corruption at the very highest levels of the FSB, money laundering, weapons smuggling, and several high-profile hits (including the poisoning of Duma deputy and Novaya Gazeta reporter Yuri Shchekochikhin, whom I used to interview for his enlightened anti-drug-war views in the late 1990s). Cherkesov's Anti-Narcotics Agency was given the job of investigating the Tri Kita case; the suspects and their patrons are the FSB, right up to the top level. Perhaps most incredible has been Putin's own inability to get the Tri Kita investigation under control; over the course of his presidency, he's had to intervene several times to keep the case alive. At one point he complained that Moscow was too corrupt, so he moved the investigation to the Leningradskaya Oblast.
In Putin's first term, the investigation into the Tri Kita scandal resulted in a handful of corpses, a few high-level firings, and a quashed investigation. In the early part of this decade, the Tri Kita scandal was thought by many to be a proxy war between the remnants of the Yeltsin Family clan, and the rising silovik clan.
In 2006, Putin revived the Tri Kita case in earnest and realigned the balance of silovik-clan power. Perhaps Putin sensed that one silovik clan was getting too powerful, or perhaps he was acting on bugged conversations between Sechin and his ally, the powerful Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, which Cherkesov's people had allegedly recorded and handed to Putin. Ustinov was forced to resign, Sechin was brought down a notch, and while Patrushev was on summer vacation, his FSB and his allies in the Kremlin and the Interior Ministry were gutted by a slew of firings and reassignments. The purge took place shortly after Ustinov's son married Sechin's daughter, sealing what was thought to be an invincible alliance. You gotta assume that the firings and humiliations didn't go down too well with the FSB-1 clan. And it was bound to haunt both Cherkesov's clan, and Putin himself.
That was last year. Cut to 2007: it's the end of the Putin Era as we know it, and Cherkessov and his clan are feeling a little too fine. At the end of August, a key member of the Cherkesov clan, Vladimir Barsukov, is arrested in Petersburg. Barsukov reportedly headed the Tambov grupperovka which essentially controlled Petersburg in the 1990s. Russians will tell you that the story of Putin's ties to the Tambov grupperovka in the 90s is one of those stories that you just don't dare touch. When Putin assumed the presidency, most of the Tambov gang members were quietly eliminated in a kind of end-of-The-Godfather bloodbath, only without the opera soundtrack. Barsukov survived it and went legit. He is said to be close to the head of Putin's presidential security, Viktor Zolotov, who once protected Putin's mentor, former Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak--yes, the same Sobchak who fertilized Ksenia Sobchak.
The arrest of Barsukov was a huge shot over the Cherkesov Clan's bow, reminiscent perhaps of the way that Putin's attack on Khodorkovsky began with the secret arrest of Yukos' head of security, Alexei Pichugin, a few weeks before turning on the top oligarchs and the oil company.
After that, an intense power struggle ensued: an FSB officer was arrested by Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika (said to be aligned with Cherkasov) and charged in the Politkovskaya murder case, then subsequently released, in a humiliating slapdown for Chaika. A new Prime Minister, Viktor Zubkov, with long ties to Putin and long experience overseeing money-laundering investigations, took power. In September, the Prosecutor-General's office was formally stripped of many of its investigative powers, and 10,000 key employees, which were transferred to a new structure called the Investigative Committee, headed by Aleksandr Bastrykin, a former law school classmate of Putin's. Bastrykin allegedly is close to the Patrushev-Sechin clan, FSB-1, but as I'll argue, I have my doubts.
http://www.exile.ru/transient/274/the-clans.jpg (http://www.exile.ru/transient/274/the-clans.jpg)Click image to expand.
This month, five of Cherkesov's top people in the Anti-Narcotics Agency were taken down in mass public arrests, including his right-hand man, General Aleksandr Bulbov. This past Monday, Chaika's Prosecutor's Office demanded that Bulbov be released on technical grounnds, but the new Investigative Committee now trumps the power of the Prosecutor's Office. Meanwhile, kompromat reports are leaking to the media about Cherkesov's various business interests, including his lucrative ties to Semyon Vainshtok, the former head of Transneft, the oil and gas pipeline monopoly. Vainshtok was just replaced this week by Nikolai Tokarev, who served with Putin in the KGB in East Germany in the 1980s.
The Accounting Chamber, which monitors the federal government, has been rocked by a series of high-profile arrests over the past few weeks. The Chamber's head, former FSB chief Sergei Stepashin, responded by giving an interview in which he warned that those who were arresting his Accounting Chamber deputies today could be the ones arrested tomorrow. After the interview was published, Stepashin claimed that it was a fake and he'd never said a thing. The weirdness is accelerating with each day.
Putin hired his old mentor, the ass-kicker Viktor Zubkov, as his prime minister, and announced his Plan for staying in power by running for parliament on the United Russia ticket. Almost overnight, the Just Russia party, the Kremlin's long-held project to create a loyal left-opposition party, has collapsed.
What is happening?
I'll repeat: It's the End of the Putin Era as we know it. The struggle is on.
Here is how I see the current situation, from reading the various Russian reports and talking to people.
Putin had hoped or lulled himself into believing that he'd really set up the stable regime everyone thought Russia had become. The alleged stability had a kind of narcotic effect, convincing Putin's supporters that he'd done good, and his detractors that he'd gone Fascist or neo-Soviet. In fact, these two filters have led all of us to completely misunderstand what is really happening in Russia, and how potentially unstable the political power is, including Putin's own position.
There has been factional infighting all along, between various silovik clans, oligarch clans, and, to a lesser degree, Western interests. The infighting has been kept under control until recently by Putin's undisputed power, which he wielded to try to ensure some measure of balance. However, just as the Banker's War of 1997 showed, competing clans are never happy with their share of the "balance." As this autumn election season loomed, the two silovik clans' internecine war started breaking out, Putin, who may have wanted to step down from power and retire from glory, understood that things were potentially slipping out of his control as the clans battled for position and worked to weaken the other. Given Russian history, and given the high scary-factor of the two silovik clans, Putin should have every reason to worry about how badly he's going to sleep once he leaves the Kremlin. If power passed to one or the other clan, then London or Siberia or the untraceable-poison intensive care ward are all serious possibilities. The people poised to take power after Putin are pretty much guaranteed to make a lot of his detractors miss him.
It seems to me that Putin's recent moves--appointing Zubkov, setting up the new Investigative Committee, announcing his plan to head up the United Russia ticket, appointing his own man to run the Transneft pipelines (remember, it was over pipelines that Khodorkovsky and Putin went to war)--are all designed to ensure his power. It's hard to tell to what degree he is controlling the takedown of the Cherkesov clan or the Patrushev-Sechin clan, or if he even can control their battle. The fact that the two sides have taken their war to the media suggests that they're less afraid of upsetting their master than they used to be.
In short, Putin is already weakened. That's why he's scrambling to strengthen his position and weaken the other clans. Every move he makes from here on out is fraught with danger. If he runs for parliament, appoints his man Zubkov as president, and then becomes the prime minister of a new parliamentary republic--basically following the playbook of Khodorkovsky's plan to take power--then he'll subject himself to the uncertainty of whethor or not the new president will really hand over power to Prime Minister Putin. There could be a long tug-of-war and new factions will very likely emerge. He might get some of the power, but not all of it. Jealousies, greed, ambition, and the general mess of transition all mean that Putin could find himself locked in a serious and dangerous battle, if he already isn't in it.
His other option is the Kazakhstan Scenario. This year, Kazakhstan's dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev passed laws allowing him to remain in office for life, quashed what little remains of the opposition, and then held elections which turned his parliament into a single-party rubber-stamp committee. He managed this all with the West's collusion: when Nazarbayev announced legislation making him president for life this past May, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called it "a step in the right direction," leading to outrage among Kazakhstan's beleaguered pro-democracy movement. When the rigged elections this summer gave him a one-party parliament, the OSCE hailed it as "welcome progress." Kazakhstan has for the past couple of years been the darling of **** Cheney and the neocons. Even self-described Russophobe Kim Zigfeld wrote a suspiciously placed article praising Kazakhstan's leap forward into Western democracy.
In other words, if Putin wants to be a democrat, he should change the constitution, stay in office for life, and make the United Russia party the only party in the Duma. That's what Nazarbayev advised Putin this past summer. "Worked for me!"
But if Putin does change the constitution to stay in power, then in many ways, his situation is even more precarious. If he was able to leave office next March and retire, he'd leave as perhaps the most popular leader in Russian history, with a turnaround win-loss record that would rival Bill Parcells'. If he stays in office, particularly now that he's overseeing and managing the silovik feud, he's going to make a lot of enemies fast. And history shows that if you stay in power past your legal date, you become increasingly authoritarian, increasingly isolated--and increasingly targeted. And it usually ends with exile or extradition. Or a bonfire.
What this means is that whatever's coming next is going to be ugly. We're all going to look back at the Putin Era as some kind of mythical Happy Days, Russia's version of the Ike Era.
It's the End of the Putin Era as We Know It...do you feel fine?
Something big is happening in the world of Russian power. And it ain't pretty.
Two weeks ago, Viktor Cherkesov, the don of one of the main siloviki clans, published an open letter in Kommersant. Reports in the English-language press focused on how unusual it was for a silovik to take his problems public in the Putin Era--particularly a silovik of Cherkesov's stature. As head of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, Cherkesov essentially runs a kind of FSB-2. And given the recent slew of high-profile arrests, along with Cherkesov's open letter, it looks as though FSB-2 is at war with FSB-1.
It's fitting that this war comes exactly 10 years after the outbreak of the Banker's War under Yeltsin, when the oligarchs divided into two mortal enemy camps in the fight over the last of Russia's unprivatized spoils. On one side of the Banker's War were Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky; and on the other side, the "baby billionaire" (to use the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt's own words) Vladimir Potanin and his men-in-power, the so-called "young reformers" headed by Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexander Kokh. When the Berezovsky-Gusinsky clan felt cheated out of the privatization of Russia's telecommunications giant Svyazinvest, they took their war to the media, which they largely controlled through television stations ORT and NTV, as well as to the Russian security services, which they used to drudge up damaging kompromat. The end result of the Banker's War was the end of the oligarchy itself. Within a year of their feud, they and the system that made them collapsed.
Cherkesov warned in his letter that this very same suicidal scenario is playing out all over again today: as we near the end of the halcyon Putin Era, the once seemingly monolithic siloviki have divided into two warring camps struggling over power and assets. In one camp is the Cherkesov Clan, FSB-2; in the other, the clan headed by the FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev and his Kremlin allies led by the Presidential Administration deputy and Rosneft chief Igor Sechin. "We must not allow scandals and infighting," Cherkesov wrote in Kommersant. "There can be no winners in this war... There is too much at stake." He argued that not only would both clans lose, but the system built up in Putin's reign, the "corporatism" which Cherkesov argued has saved Russia from chaos, would go down with it.
If the "corporatist" system collapses, then it's back to chaos, just as the Banker's War ended in 1998 with the financial collapse and end of "liberal reforms."
First, a little background. Viktor Cherkesov is an old Putin ally. He headed the FSB in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, when Putin was the deputy mayor. After Putin came to power in 2000, he named Cherkesov as the Kremlin envoy for Russia's northwest region (which includes Petersburg), making Cherkesov one of seven regional envoys whose job was to bring the Russian Federation back under Kremlin control in the "vertikalnaya vlast" or vertical power scheme. In the spring of 2003, Cherkesov was brought back to Moscow to head the newly formed Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency.
The name of the structure is misleading. The Anti-Narcotics Agency was really turned into a second FSB, having absorbed the personnel and equipment and assets of the massive, all-powerful Tax Police, with an estimated 40,000 employees. It was set up as a kind of Russian FBI, tasked to fight economic and organized crime as well as drug trafficking.
Putin's massive reorganization of the security ministries in March 2003 was misunderstood at the time. It was either scoffed at or, oddly enough, praised by liberals like Irina Khakamada and Grigory Yavlinsky, who "supported the changes as a step toward efficiency and a sign that Putin is making the drug problem a priority," according to the Moscow Times.
Putin's reason for the reshuffle became clear only a few months later, when he took down his rival, Yukos oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Formally, Yukos was destroyed with tax evasion charges; that explains why Putin needed to bring the Tax Police under his control, as it had surely been infiltrated by Yukos. With a new 40,000-strong, heavily armed agency under the control of Putin's ally Cherkesov, Putin had two insurmountable weapons to deploy against the increasingly powerful Khodorkovsky--the Anti-Narcotics Agency, and the FSB, which was (and is) also headed by another St. Petersburg ally of Putin's, Nikolai Patrushev.
Khodorkovsky was destroyed, but a new Monster was born, Putin's Monster: the all-powerful siloviki. They now provided Putin with the stability and control he needed to run the country. But there was no one to check their power--except each other.
The ostensible spark for the Spooks' War today is the strange and nasty criminal investigation into a furniture front company called Tri Kita. It's a paranoiac's dream, involving corruption at the very highest levels of the FSB, money laundering, weapons smuggling, and several high-profile hits (including the poisoning of Duma deputy and Novaya Gazeta reporter Yuri Shchekochikhin, whom I used to interview for his enlightened anti-drug-war views in the late 1990s). Cherkesov's Anti-Narcotics Agency was given the job of investigating the Tri Kita case; the suspects and their patrons are the FSB, right up to the top level. Perhaps most incredible has been Putin's own inability to get the Tri Kita investigation under control; over the course of his presidency, he's had to intervene several times to keep the case alive. At one point he complained that Moscow was too corrupt, so he moved the investigation to the Leningradskaya Oblast.
In Putin's first term, the investigation into the Tri Kita scandal resulted in a handful of corpses, a few high-level firings, and a quashed investigation. In the early part of this decade, the Tri Kita scandal was thought by many to be a proxy war between the remnants of the Yeltsin Family clan, and the rising silovik clan.
In 2006, Putin revived the Tri Kita case in earnest and realigned the balance of silovik-clan power. Perhaps Putin sensed that one silovik clan was getting too powerful, or perhaps he was acting on bugged conversations between Sechin and his ally, the powerful Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, which Cherkesov's people had allegedly recorded and handed to Putin. Ustinov was forced to resign, Sechin was brought down a notch, and while Patrushev was on summer vacation, his FSB and his allies in the Kremlin and the Interior Ministry were gutted by a slew of firings and reassignments. The purge took place shortly after Ustinov's son married Sechin's daughter, sealing what was thought to be an invincible alliance. You gotta assume that the firings and humiliations didn't go down too well with the FSB-1 clan. And it was bound to haunt both Cherkesov's clan, and Putin himself.
That was last year. Cut to 2007: it's the end of the Putin Era as we know it, and Cherkessov and his clan are feeling a little too fine. At the end of August, a key member of the Cherkesov clan, Vladimir Barsukov, is arrested in Petersburg. Barsukov reportedly headed the Tambov grupperovka which essentially controlled Petersburg in the 1990s. Russians will tell you that the story of Putin's ties to the Tambov grupperovka in the 90s is one of those stories that you just don't dare touch. When Putin assumed the presidency, most of the Tambov gang members were quietly eliminated in a kind of end-of-The-Godfather bloodbath, only without the opera soundtrack. Barsukov survived it and went legit. He is said to be close to the head of Putin's presidential security, Viktor Zolotov, who once protected Putin's mentor, former Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak--yes, the same Sobchak who fertilized Ksenia Sobchak.
The arrest of Barsukov was a huge shot over the Cherkesov Clan's bow, reminiscent perhaps of the way that Putin's attack on Khodorkovsky began with the secret arrest of Yukos' head of security, Alexei Pichugin, a few weeks before turning on the top oligarchs and the oil company.
After that, an intense power struggle ensued: an FSB officer was arrested by Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika (said to be aligned with Cherkasov) and charged in the Politkovskaya murder case, then subsequently released, in a humiliating slapdown for Chaika. A new Prime Minister, Viktor Zubkov, with long ties to Putin and long experience overseeing money-laundering investigations, took power. In September, the Prosecutor-General's office was formally stripped of many of its investigative powers, and 10,000 key employees, which were transferred to a new structure called the Investigative Committee, headed by Aleksandr Bastrykin, a former law school classmate of Putin's. Bastrykin allegedly is close to the Patrushev-Sechin clan, FSB-1, but as I'll argue, I have my doubts.
http://www.exile.ru/transient/274/the-clans.jpg (http://www.exile.ru/transient/274/the-clans.jpg)Click image to expand.
This month, five of Cherkesov's top people in the Anti-Narcotics Agency were taken down in mass public arrests, including his right-hand man, General Aleksandr Bulbov. This past Monday, Chaika's Prosecutor's Office demanded that Bulbov be released on technical grounnds, but the new Investigative Committee now trumps the power of the Prosecutor's Office. Meanwhile, kompromat reports are leaking to the media about Cherkesov's various business interests, including his lucrative ties to Semyon Vainshtok, the former head of Transneft, the oil and gas pipeline monopoly. Vainshtok was just replaced this week by Nikolai Tokarev, who served with Putin in the KGB in East Germany in the 1980s.
The Accounting Chamber, which monitors the federal government, has been rocked by a series of high-profile arrests over the past few weeks. The Chamber's head, former FSB chief Sergei Stepashin, responded by giving an interview in which he warned that those who were arresting his Accounting Chamber deputies today could be the ones arrested tomorrow. After the interview was published, Stepashin claimed that it was a fake and he'd never said a thing. The weirdness is accelerating with each day.
Putin hired his old mentor, the ass-kicker Viktor Zubkov, as his prime minister, and announced his Plan for staying in power by running for parliament on the United Russia ticket. Almost overnight, the Just Russia party, the Kremlin's long-held project to create a loyal left-opposition party, has collapsed.
What is happening?
I'll repeat: It's the End of the Putin Era as we know it. The struggle is on.
Here is how I see the current situation, from reading the various Russian reports and talking to people.
Putin had hoped or lulled himself into believing that he'd really set up the stable regime everyone thought Russia had become. The alleged stability had a kind of narcotic effect, convincing Putin's supporters that he'd done good, and his detractors that he'd gone Fascist or neo-Soviet. In fact, these two filters have led all of us to completely misunderstand what is really happening in Russia, and how potentially unstable the political power is, including Putin's own position.
There has been factional infighting all along, between various silovik clans, oligarch clans, and, to a lesser degree, Western interests. The infighting has been kept under control until recently by Putin's undisputed power, which he wielded to try to ensure some measure of balance. However, just as the Banker's War of 1997 showed, competing clans are never happy with their share of the "balance." As this autumn election season loomed, the two silovik clans' internecine war started breaking out, Putin, who may have wanted to step down from power and retire from glory, understood that things were potentially slipping out of his control as the clans battled for position and worked to weaken the other. Given Russian history, and given the high scary-factor of the two silovik clans, Putin should have every reason to worry about how badly he's going to sleep once he leaves the Kremlin. If power passed to one or the other clan, then London or Siberia or the untraceable-poison intensive care ward are all serious possibilities. The people poised to take power after Putin are pretty much guaranteed to make a lot of his detractors miss him.
It seems to me that Putin's recent moves--appointing Zubkov, setting up the new Investigative Committee, announcing his plan to head up the United Russia ticket, appointing his own man to run the Transneft pipelines (remember, it was over pipelines that Khodorkovsky and Putin went to war)--are all designed to ensure his power. It's hard to tell to what degree he is controlling the takedown of the Cherkesov clan or the Patrushev-Sechin clan, or if he even can control their battle. The fact that the two sides have taken their war to the media suggests that they're less afraid of upsetting their master than they used to be.
In short, Putin is already weakened. That's why he's scrambling to strengthen his position and weaken the other clans. Every move he makes from here on out is fraught with danger. If he runs for parliament, appoints his man Zubkov as president, and then becomes the prime minister of a new parliamentary republic--basically following the playbook of Khodorkovsky's plan to take power--then he'll subject himself to the uncertainty of whethor or not the new president will really hand over power to Prime Minister Putin. There could be a long tug-of-war and new factions will very likely emerge. He might get some of the power, but not all of it. Jealousies, greed, ambition, and the general mess of transition all mean that Putin could find himself locked in a serious and dangerous battle, if he already isn't in it.
His other option is the Kazakhstan Scenario. This year, Kazakhstan's dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev passed laws allowing him to remain in office for life, quashed what little remains of the opposition, and then held elections which turned his parliament into a single-party rubber-stamp committee. He managed this all with the West's collusion: when Nazarbayev announced legislation making him president for life this past May, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called it "a step in the right direction," leading to outrage among Kazakhstan's beleaguered pro-democracy movement. When the rigged elections this summer gave him a one-party parliament, the OSCE hailed it as "welcome progress." Kazakhstan has for the past couple of years been the darling of **** Cheney and the neocons. Even self-described Russophobe Kim Zigfeld wrote a suspiciously placed article praising Kazakhstan's leap forward into Western democracy.
In other words, if Putin wants to be a democrat, he should change the constitution, stay in office for life, and make the United Russia party the only party in the Duma. That's what Nazarbayev advised Putin this past summer. "Worked for me!"
But if Putin does change the constitution to stay in power, then in many ways, his situation is even more precarious. If he was able to leave office next March and retire, he'd leave as perhaps the most popular leader in Russian history, with a turnaround win-loss record that would rival Bill Parcells'. If he stays in office, particularly now that he's overseeing and managing the silovik feud, he's going to make a lot of enemies fast. And history shows that if you stay in power past your legal date, you become increasingly authoritarian, increasingly isolated--and increasingly targeted. And it usually ends with exile or extradition. Or a bonfire.
What this means is that whatever's coming next is going to be ugly. We're all going to look back at the Putin Era as some kind of mythical Happy Days, Russia's version of the Ike Era.
It's the End of the Putin Era as We Know It...do you feel fine?