Putin's 'Jackals'

The campaign for Russia's parliamentary elections this Sunday is nasty and tense. Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia coalition, found himself jailed for five days earlier this week after peacefully marching in Moscow. Other opposition parties were denied access to media and harassed. The Kremlin pulled out all the stops to make sure the United Russia party, and its top candidate President Vladimir Putin, win resoundingly.

In his Nov. 21 address, Mr. Putin was clearly referring to Russia's politically weak but still visible liberal movement when he mentioned those "who are, unfortunately, still within the country, who skulk around [kto shakalit u] foreign embassies, foreign diplomatic offices, counting on the support of foreign foundations and governments, and not on the support of their own people." (Shakal means jackal in Russian, and shakalit was used here as a metaphorical verb to describe the nature of the politicians' and human-rights activists' contacts with Western governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Russia.)

Mr. Putin further specified who he means: "Those who, in the 1990s, held high posts." He warned that "you can find their names among the candidates and sponsors of some parties." According to President Putin, they are "those who, in the most difficult moment, during the terrorist intervention into Russia [from Chechnya], treacherously called for negotiations, in fact for collusion with terrorists, with those who killed our children and women, speculating in the most unscrupulous and cynical way on the victims. In short, these are all those who, towards the end of the past century, led Russia to mass poverty, [and] ubiquitous bribe-taking."

The idea that a number of liberal politicians like Boris Nemtsov, Anatoly Chubais or Yegor Gaidar, who held -- by no means all, and rarely the most important -- government posts in the 1990s, are solely responsible for the deep socioeconomic crisis of that decade has been a common theme in Russian public discourse ever since the start of reforms launched after the Soviet Union's collapse. There is little novelty in this accusation.

However, Mr. Putin added a new wrinkle by accusing them of working for foreign powers and betraying Russia, and especially with his regret that these politicians are "still within the country." To be sure, these ideas aren't all that original either. But until now they were the preserve of the extreme right as well as the increasingly nationalist communist movement -- politicians like the rabble-rouser Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party.

As to who might be the gray eminence behind the allegedly criminal liberals, Mr. Putin didn't specify. Yet his past speeches, particularly his attack on the U.S. at an international security conference in Munich in February, suggest that he has the amerikantsy foremost in mind. For many Russians today, Americans are to blame for almost everything that is bad in and outside the former Soviet Union.

In Western democracies, politicians also say bizarre things, especially when campaigning for office. Russia is not a Western democracy. The institution that dominates Russian society today is the Kremlin's "vertical of power" -- a combination of formal and informal controls and curbs which is rather different from the checks and balances in democratic states. This vertical of power has President Putin at the top. It extends not only to the federal government and United Russia party, but also to other parties, regional and local governments, big business, civil society and mass media. One reasonably suspects that it also exerts influence on the court system, the police and academia.

In this election, Mr. Putin is not campaigning against real competitors on a level playing ground. While the formal rules of the voting on Dec. 2 itself may be observed scrupulously, neither the electoral process as a whole nor public politics in general is fair. Under President Putin, Russia has gone back to a Byzantine form of state-society relations where the so-called national leader is beyond criticism -- a semidivine figure who determines where the country goes and whose utterances decide what's permissible and what's not.

The national leader's choice of words, therefore, can't be dismissed as mere electoral hyperbole, soon to be forgotten. Instead, Mr. Putin has opened a Pandora's Box by suggesting, implicitly, that his liberal opponents are traitors, foreign agents and enemies of the Russian people who should leave the country. He has legitimized the paranoid, conspiratorial and Manichean theories spread by Russia's ultranationalists on the Internet, in newspapers and in books during the past 15 years.

Russia's fanatically anti-Western political activists and journalists, one suspects, will now start to elaborate on how exactly the apparent will of their national leader is to be implemented. The "For Putin" movement, an offshoot of the United Russia campaign, has already adopted his use of the word shakalit by naming a new video on the liberal opposition "Shakaly" (Jackals) -- which conveniently, and dangerously, dehumanizes Mr. Putin's opponents. The legions of nationalists in Russia's parties, editorial boards and universities can now, invoking the president's wishes, call for cleansing Russia of the West's "agents of influence," as the liberals are called in the extremist press today. While Mr. Putin and his entourage might not yet plan to deport en masse Russian opposition figures, this is what public opinion may, at one point, ask them to do.

Mr. Umland, who teaches at the National Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev, Ukraine, is editor of the book series "Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society," published by ibidem-Verlag at Stuttgart & Hannover.

The Wall Street Journal                                                                             Commentary                                                                                                                              November 30, 2007; Page A17

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