Malcolm Rifkind: Putin’s Cold War Politics Will Fail Russia

Sir Malcolm Rifkind is MP for Kensington and a former foreign secretary.

At the end of the Cold War, the West would have been delighted to know that 20 years hence the Communist Party would again be rejected by the people of Russia, with the non-Communist candidate winning 63 per cent of the vote. But that was at a time when Russia was a young, struggling democracy and it was far from certain that the Communists would never return to power. Today, things are very different.

Vladimir Putin’s victory is, for the West, not entirely disagreeable. Rather, like the curate’s egg, it is good in parts. It guarantees that for the next six years Russia will be stable and fairly predictable.

It will have, as its president, a leader who is tough and cool. He will conduct a foreign policy with which we are already familiar. It will be nationalist, but not dangerous or irrational on the supreme questions of peace and war. When you are dealing with a state that still has thousands of nuclear warheads, having Putin in the Kremlin should not cause us to lose too much sleep.

But there is no getting away from the fact that he has blocked Russia’s embrace of pluralist democracy and the emergence of serious, organised political alternatives to his rule. The fact that the only opponents permitted to stand in the election were the Communists and an unelectable oligarch illustrates his commitment to the façade but not the substance of democratic politics.

Will Putin be any different in his third term?..