Vladimir Putin’s Jubilees

The Russian mass media have yet another grand opportunity to sum up Vladimir Putin’s track record. There has been quite a number of such opportunities, 100 days since Yeltsin’s resignation, 100 days since being elected to the presidency, a year since Yeltsin’s resignation, and now a year since being elected to office. In my view, such a large number of summations indicates that Putin has no track record to show off. It rather proves that journalists, like all citizens of Russia, expected their president to do something outstanding while nothing of importance has really happened. However, unlike other citizens, it is the business of journalists to explain why nothing has happened yet again. Opponents ascribe the president’s underwhelming track record interrupted by frequent vacations, downhill sessions, speed-boat trips, and no-comment attitude at critical moments to his inexperience and inability to make responsible decisions. They see in this the signs of a systemic slump which will take its toll once petrodollar injections to the Russian economy dry up. By contrast, Putin’s supporters are rejoicing. One of the women journalists close to the Kremlin pool (an informal circle of media insiders with the presidential administration, who are entrusted to translate its position in the mass media), has even proudly called 2000 a year of stagnation. Of course, in its newly acquired sense, not in a sense used in Brezhnev days. For in Brezhnev’s time stagnation was evidence of a slump, while in Putin’s it spells stability. There are no upheavals, the country is not falling apart, the economy is not going falling apart, the Duma is dormant, and everything is quiet.

Still, the authors of this wonderful concept somehow forgot that under Leonid Brezhnev there was also stability — only later did we learn that it was stagnation, when the Soviet Union began to come apart at the seams, the planned socialist economy collapsed, and the USSR Supreme Soviet deputies abrogated Article 6 of the Brezhnev Constitution on the leading role of the Communist Party in our society. Under Brezhnev, we also welcomed stability following all those economic experiments by Khrushchev. One political pundit was quick to call Putin a good tsar, betraying his anxiety, however, over the fact that kind tsars in Russia are always followed by the Yeltsins, harbingers of a slump. What, then, is the bottom line? Are we to understand that both Putin’s opponents and the supporters, disagreeing as they do in their assessments, unanimously believe that the President’s lack of action might herald hard times for Russia? To draw more historical analogies, one might say that the rule of Yeltsins with their burdensome inconsistent reforms is always followed by the rule of Putins. The main issue, however, is how long that rule will last.