Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova: Back to the U.S.S.R.
Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova are writers for Newsweek.
When the history of Russia’s next revolution is written, Vladimir Putin’s decision last month to return to the Kremlin will surely mark the point where it all began. Before the prime minister’s announcement of his 2012 presidential bid, Russia had a chance—a slim one—of eventually becoming a functional democracy where regimes change through the ballot box. With Putin’s return, Russia tips inexorably toward becoming just another petro-dictatorship whose regime is propped up by oil money and repression. This is a fateful moment in Russian history, because suddenly it’s more likely that change, when it does come, will arrive from outside, not inside, the system. “Revolution is now inevitable,” says blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny. “Maybe in five months, maybe in two years, maybe in seven years.”
After the Putin news broke, Photoshop jokers posted images of Putin in 2024—the date when his likely two next presidential terms will come to an end—as a jowly, Brezhnev-like figure in a uniform studded with self-awarded medals. “The return of Putin means long years of Brezhnev-style stagnation,” says Eduard Boyakov, director of Moscow’s avant-garde Praktika Theater. The parallel is an apt one. After the oil crisis of 1973, the Soviet Union, then as now the world’s biggest oil producer, was flush with cash that covered up the catastrophic dysfunction of the Soviet economy and allowed the Communist Party elite to enrich itself. Apparatchiks pretended to believe in the lofty principles of communism as they built themselves villas and rode luxury yachts. Meanwhile, the KGB ruthlessly squashed any signs of opposition and rewarded conformist writers and filmmakers with places at the trough. Substitute “democracy” for “communism” and “FSB” for “KGB,” and you’re back to the future.
Pity the outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev and those who believed in his reformist message. Like the tragic hero from a Russian novel, Medvedev saw his country’s doom all too clearly—but was unable, or unwilling, to do anything about it. “Should Russia continue to drag into the future our primitive raw-materials economy, endemic corruption, and inveterate habit of relying on the state, foreign countries or some all-powerful doctrine to solve our problems?” Medvedev wrote on the Kremlin’s blog in the early days of his presidential career. Yet instead of fixing the problem by jailing corrupt officials and stimulating real economic growth, Medvedev just talked. During his four years in power, corruption grew to a staggering one third of Russia’s GDP, or $300 billion a year, according to Russia’s Anti-Corruption Committee, an NGO. At the same time, resentment of thieving bureaucrats and dysfunctional government has only grown. Polls show that Russians harbor a deep distrust of just about every state institution, from the police (distrusted by 78 percent of the population) to bureaucrats (a whopping 99 percent of respondents said they didn’t believe officials’ income declarations).