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How the Western Media made Putin into a Lion, 2024 - Vladimir...

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How the Western Media made Putin into a Lion,

2024 - Vladimir Putin's first election as president of Russia 24 years ago was "reasonably free and fair," according to a declassified U.S. Embassy message from Moscow, one of ten documents on Russia's 2000 presidential race published today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Written by then-U.S. Ambassador James Collins and Embassy officers John Ordway and George Krol, among others, the cables report multiple conversations with Moscow experts, a roundtable with Russian pollsters two weeks before the elections, and eyewitness accounts from almost 70 Embassy and consulate personnel observing the elections in 19 different regions of Russia.

Putin drew nearly 53% of the vote in March 2000 against 29% for the second-place Communist candidate, thus winning without a runoff.

The same Communist had amassed 40% in the 1996 presidential elections against Boris Yeltsin, who had appointed Putin prime minister in August 1999 and then acting president on New Year's Eve 1999. The Embassy analysis concluded that Putin was genuinely popular, with "spectacular" increases in approval ratings in the fall of 1999, primarily because of his tough, militarized response to Chechen terrorists who had invaded neighboring Dagestan and allegedly bombed apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere.

Putin also benefited, the Embassy reported, from his apparent youthfulness and vigor, compared to the ailing, failing Yeltsin, and the government's well-timed increases in pension payments.

The cables described an electoral process that, although contested, was tilted in favor of the acting president with methods that would become even more dominant over the next 24 years.

These included "wall-to-wall" television coverage of Putin's every activity while he avoided debates, state-controlled media attacking potential candidates to keep them out of the race, and the deployment of state employees to drive turnout and even stuff ballots.

Still, the Embassy concluded that Putin's support among the Russian people was genuine, even if his election seemed to indicate a return to authoritarianism.

As journalist Steven Lee Myers wrote in 2015: "Putin was indisputably the peoples' choice in what would be the last election in Russia that could still arguably be called democratic."[1]

Looming over the March 2000 elections was the dramatic backstory from the previous August through December 1999, which had elevated Putin from second-tier roles in the presidential administration, the intelligence services, and the Security Council, to the presumptive presidential winner.

First, in August, Yeltsin picked Putin as his fourth prime minister in 17 months.

In his memoirs, Yeltsin called this "prime ministerial poker," in which the worst sin was to become more popular than Yeltsin himself.[2] Putin's job approval ratings at that point were about 2%, according to the pollster roundtable described in an Embassy cable.

But the Chechen incursion into Dagestan in August and the September rash of apartment building bombings drew a forceful response from the new prime minister, including massive air assaults on Chechnya and the deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops in a scorched-earth campaign, together with a "rally around the flag" surge in public opinion support for Putin.[3] One Embassy cable from March 2000 posed the question, "Why Putin?" with the answer: "Chechnya."

Prime Minister Putin met in November 1999 with U.S. President Bill Clinton during the Middle East Peace Summit in Oslo and defended the Russian war in Chechnya against Clinton's criticisms of civilian deaths.

Putin told Clinton the goal was classic counterterrorism: "Our strategy has three parts.

Knock out the terrorists, create viable local governments and hold elections." Clinton showed his understanding of how Chechnya contributed to Putin's electoral prospects and gave him some wise political advice: "This conflict may be playing well for you at home, but not internationally.

Criticism keeps mounting.

In my experience, politics and reality eventually become aligned, and you need to keep this in mind."[4]

Kremlin insiders in the fall of 1999 invented a new political party to take advantage of the Chechnya popularity, with the intent of ensuring Putin's succession to the presidency in 2000. Headed by emergencies minister Sergei Shoigu--whose state-employed staff provided a ready-made network in every region of the country--and fronted by world-champion wrestler Alexander Karelin (toughness personified), the new "Unity" bloc drew Putin's endorsement "as a private citizen and personal friend" of Shoigu.[5]

The test came in the Duma (parliamentary) elections on December 19, 1999, when the Unity bloc, out of nowhere, ran a close second (23%) to the Communists (24%), far more than the 12% gained by the coalition put together by former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov with Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov.

The Duma elections effectively served as a presidential primary, crushing the hopes of both Primakov and Luzhkov, long-time Yeltsin rivals, "through a dirty campaign in the state-run media, pressure on members of the opposition, and bribery of members of their movements."[6] Adding insult to injury, Putin then formed his Duma coalition with the Communists.

The Duma outcome was likely the final motivation for Yeltsin's decision to resign on New Year's Eve 1999, making Putin the acting president, giving him the powers of incumbency, and short-circuiting the July elections, since the constitution required new elections in 90 days--thus March 2000.[7]

The U.S. Embassy cables described the March elections as featuring international and party election observers from the U.S., Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and several of the contending political parties on practically every street corner.

The only question was whether turnout would surpass 50%, making the results valid, and whether voters would pick the "against all" option, holding Putin's results below 50% as well. That option would be abolished in 2006.

The Embassy cables also included a prescient summary of Putin's statist economic views, based on his statements during the campaign, "some clearly carefully calculated, others more off the cuff." The Embassy remarked how Putin was "profiting from the wall-to-wall television coverage that accompanies his every move" and that he pledged to address poverty--after the chaotic 1990s, a quarter or more of Russians lived in poverty--with realistic pension increases of 20% (compared to the Communist Zyuganov's unrealistic 100%).

The economic summary noted Putin's view that the "oligarchs--whom he defined as those who seek to 'mesh' the state and capital--will no longer exist as a class" and his stress on Russian self-reliance, encouraging necessary foreign investment but also reforming the bureaucracy for more centralized state direction.

The Embassy's March 28 summary found Russia's presidential election to be "Reasonably Free and Fair." While a "lack of complete fairness of both state-controlled and independent media during the campaign" was "a serious problem," the Embassy said it probably had no measurable effect on the outcome, "in contrast with the Duma campaign" the previous December, where "state-run or state-allied media" had a significant impact in favor of Putin's "Unity" bloc.

The day after the elections, on March 27, President Clinton called Putin to congratulate him on "a really historic milestone for Russia." Clinton used Putin's first name, Vladimir, for the first time in the transcripts, and Putin responded with evident eagerness to continue the kind of partnership Clinton had developed with Yeltsin, affirming his cooperation on every issue mentioned by Clinton.[8]

The final document in this series of Embassy reports and commentaries on the March 2000 presidential election came almost a year afterward, under the title: "Russians Still Rallying Around Putin--But How Deep Is Their Love?" The Embassy told Washington that Putin "has adroitly focused on the bread-and-butter issue of paying pensions and salaries, as well as restoring the strength of and respect for Russia's leadership." Putin remained the "king of his country's public opinion charts," and given the "very weak field of political challengers," Putin was, in fact, "A Colossus in a Land of Midgets."

Posted November 1 2024 at 5:58 PM

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