A Russian Diary Read Online Free PDF Page B

authorities act in their corporate interests. They don't want to lose power. That would put them in a very dangerous situation, and they know it.”
    Yavlinsky was not to make it into the Duma.
    Were we seeing a crisis of Russian parliamentary democracy in the Putin era? No, we were witnessing its death. In the first place, as Lilia Shevtsova, our best political analyst, accurately put it, the legislative and executive branches of government had merged, and this had meant the rebirth of the Soviet system. As a result, the Duma was purely decorative, a forum for rubber-stamping Putin's decisions.
    In the second place—and this is why this was the end and not merely a crisis—the Russian people gave its consent. Nobody stood up. There were no demonstrations, mass protests, acts of civil disobedience. The electorate took it lying down and agreed to live, not only without Yavlinsky, but without democracy. It agreed to be treated like an idiot. According to an official opinion poll, 12 percent of Russians thought United Russia representatives gave the best account of themselves in the preelection television debates. This despite the fact that the representatives of United Russia flatly refused to take part in any television debates. They had nothing to say other than that their actions spoke for them. As Aksyonovremarked, “The bulk of the electorate said, ‘Let's just leave things the way they are.’ ”
    In other words, let's go back to the USSR—slightly retouched, slicked up, modernized, but the good old Soviet Union, now with bureaucratic capitalism where the state official is the main oligarch, vastly richer than any property owner or capitalist.
    The corollary was that, if we were going back to the USSR, then Putin was definitely going to win in March 2004. It was a foregone conclusion. The presidential administration concurred, and lost all sense of shame. In the months that followed, right up until March 14, 2004, when Putin was indeed elected, the checks and balances within the state vanished, and the only restraint was the president's conscience. Alas, the nature of the man and the nature of his former profession meant that was not enough.
    December 9
    At 10:53 a.m. today a suicide bomber blew herself up outside the Nationale Hotel in Moscow, across the square from the Duma and 145 meters [160 yards] from the Kremlin. “Where is this Duma?” she asked a passerby, before exploding. For a long time the head of a Chinese tourist who had been next to her lay on the asphalt without its body. People were screaming and crying for help, but although there is no shortage of police in that area, they didn't approach the site of the explosion for twenty minutes, evidently fearing another explosion. Half an hour after the incident the ambulances arrived and the police closed the street.
    December 10
    There is little comment on the terrorist incident, or on why such acts take place.
    Russia's upper chamber, the Soviet of the Federation, has announced the date of Putin's reelection. Putin immediately goes into top gear, using all sorts of anniversaries and special days to present himself to the country and the world as Russia's leading expert on whatever is beingcelebrated. On Cattle Breeders’ Day he is our most illustrious cattle breeder; on Builders’ Day he is our foremost brickie. It is bizarre, of course, but Stalin played the same game.
    Today, as luck would have it, is International Human Rights Day, so Putin summoned our foremost champions of human rights (as selected by him) to the Kremlin for a meeting of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. It began at 6:00 p.m. and was chaired by Ella Pam-filova,* a democrat from the Yeltsin era.
    The pediatrician Dr. Leonid Roshal spoke for one minute about how much he loves the president; Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group spoke for five minutes about improper use of state resources during elections (which Putin didn't deny); Ida Kuklina of the League of