....According to the Russian Constitution, the president may declare
martial law in the case of aggression or "direct threat of aggression."
A subsequent "martial law regime" could be easily fashioned by the
Parliament to include the cancellation of elections until the "threat"
is over.
The "threat" could be found to emanate from Estonia, which has been
sharply denounced by Russia's official propaganda this year. Estonia's
ambassador in Moscow has been harassed by a government-organized youth
group and its Web sites have been subject to cyberattacks. Or it could
be Georgia, which borders on Russia's volatile North Caucasus and is in
a de facto state of war with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, its two
breakaway provinces. In Abkhazia, a majority of the population holds
Russian passports, and the leaders of South Ossetia have repeatedly
expressed the desire to join the Russian Federation. During a state of
emergency, Russians could be counted on to rally around the flag, at
least initially...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/opinion/25aron.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&p
agewanted=print
October 25, 2007
We'll Always Have Putin
By LEON ARON
PRESIDENT BUSH said last week of his erstwhile "friend" Vladimir Putin
, "I have no idea what he's going to do." Mr. Bush is not alone: no one
but Mr. Putin knows whether the Russian president will relinquish power
next year. Still, after Mr. Putin's announcement that he would not be
averse to becoming the next prime minister, the prevailing guess is that
after the March 2 presidential election Mr. Putin will head the Russian
government under a new president.
Yet before the Bush administration and the leading contenders for the
White House begin to design a Russia policy based on this, its
plausibility has to be examined. In the light of what we know about Mr.
Putin and the political and economic system he has forged, he is more
likely to find a way to continue in office as President Putin.
To begin, Vladimir Putin has done the opposite of what he publicly said
he would do with regard to some major policy issues. In November 2003,
he declared that "the state should not really seek to destroy" Yukos -
at the time Russia's largest, most modern and most transparent private
company - and then methodically did just that through a palpably
fraudulent prosecution.
He has repeatedly averred that Russia needs a robust party system - and
then proceeded to make participation in parliamentary elections arduous
and subject to unchallenged management by an election commission that is
subservient to the Kremlin. No party may hope even to get on the ballot
in Russia without the Kremlin's approval.
The president has extolled democracy in virtually every one of his
annual state-of-Russia addresses since 2000 - and then canceled the
election of regional governors, who are now all but directly appointed
by Moscow. He correctly identified independent mass media as the main
weapon against corruption - and then brought under the Kremlin's control
practically all nationwide print, radio and television outlets.
For Mr. Putin, taking on the job of prime minister would be not just
"stepping down" but wallowing in self-abnegation. The prime ministers
under Mr. Putin have been appointed by the president and have served at
his pleasure. They have been little more than figureheads who cannot
even pick their own cabinets. This year, Mr. Putin deprived the prime
minister of supervision over the so-called state corporations, into
which the president's administration had earlier merged some of Russia's
vital, and often most profitable, industrial enterprises - like missile
production and nuclear power.
Of course, with Mr. Putin's party, United Russia, poised to take
two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, its approval of constitutional
amendments emaciating the presidency and fashioning a more powerful
"executive" role for the prime minister is assured (as is the
constitutionally mandated endorsement of the two-thirds of the regional
legislatures now also firmly in the Kremlin's hand).
Still, while Ukraine has profited from a similar devolution of
presidential authority, Russia would have to go much further to make the
job of prime minister palatable for Mr. Putin. In addition to giving the
Parliament, and not the president, the right to form the government, the
prime minister may have to be made commander-in-chief as well.
Yet power in Russia today grows not only from the barrel of a gun, but
also from a barrel of oil. And here, too, everything has been done to
ensure that the president's administration, not the prime minister's
office, be in charge of the daily export of seven million barrels of
crude oil and oil products (like fuel oil and diesel fuel). With natural
gas, these fuel exports fetched $190 billion last year.
Never before in Russian history have so few exercised such tight control
over a national wealth that is so vast and liquid, in more ways than
one. The stakes of relinquishing power have grown commensurately for Mr.
Putin. If he becomes prime minister, a vast network of informal
arrangements that made the president and his entourage the managers of
Russia's most lucrative natural resources will have to be dismantled -
redirected away from the Kremlin and toward the prime minister.
For a man who declared the demise of the Soviet Union to be "the
greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," even the most
"executive" of prime-ministerships may not be enough. The Russian
president is the symbol of the nation, its above-the-fray father. He is
now also in complete control of the election and of much of the economy.
Mr. Putin must consider moving out, like some silly American president
vacating the White House, to be downright humiliating - not to mention
bad for the country and the people who like him so much.
Staying in the Kremlin without violating the letter of the 1993
Constitution (the spirit went out of it several years ago) could be
accomplished by Mr. Putin in several ways. The easiest method would be
for Parliament to pass a constitutional amendment eliminating term
limits. The problem with this solution is that it would make Russia look
like Belarus or Kazakhstan, ruled by a president-for-life. For all the
popularity that Mr. Putin enjoys, the national embarrassment (never mind
the international outcry) might be acute and widespread enough to carry
significant political risks.
But at least two other solutions could be found. Both possess the
significant advantage of avoiding a constitutional amendment that
President Putin seems reluctant to bless. In one possibility, Mr. Putin
could become prime minister and then become acting president should the
new officeholder find himself incapable of carrying out his duties.
Viktor Zubkov , plucked by Mr. Putin from obscurity a few weeks ago to
be made prime minister, is 66, six years past the retirement age for men
in Russia (and 11 years older than Mr. Putin). Should Mr. Zubkov, with
Mr. Putin's endorsement, be elected president, he may quickly find the
burdens of power too hard to sustain after only a few months in office.
And then a new presidential election, which must be held within three
months and which Mr. Putin would be certain to win, would give Mr. Putin
another full term in office, without formally violating the
constitutional limit of two consecutive terms.
The other option would not require Mr. Putin to move out of the Kremlin
even for a short time. According to the Russian Constitution, the
president may declare martial law in the case of aggression or "direct
threat of aggression." A subsequent "martial law regime" could be easily
fashioned by the Parliament to include the cancellation of elections
until the "threat" is over.
The "threat" could be found to emanate from Estonia, which has been
sharply denounced by Russia's official propaganda this year. Estonia's
ambassador in Moscow has been harassed by a government-organized youth
group and its Web sites have been subject to cyberattacks. Or it could
be Georgia, which borders on Russia's volatile North Caucasus and is in
a de facto state of war with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, its two
breakaway provinces. In Abkhazia, a majority of the population holds
Russian passports, and the leaders of South Ossetia have repeatedly
expressed the desire to join the Russian Federation.
During a state of emergency, Russians could be counted on to rally
around the flag, at least initially. In a longer run, the prolonged
presidency would have to be legalized somehow. But, as Lenin wrote,
quoting a maxim often attributed to Napoleon, "on s'engage et puis on
voit": you get in a fight and then you see what to do next.
Apart from Nicholas II, who resigned in a revolution, only two Russian
leaders have walked away from power: Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris
Yeltsin . But these two men were remarkable in a larger sense: they
presided over a proto-democracy that made Russia the freest it has ever
been, save for the eight months from February to November 1917.
Proto-autocracies - even "softer" ones that, for the moment, enjoy
popular allegiance - are harder, and more dangerous, to leave behind.
Leon Aron, the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise
Institute, is the author of "Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2006."
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