'Putin' Russia on Our Radar Screens

As a one-time cable news junkie, I came home for the holidays ready to spend hours delighting the senses with the exotic sights and sounds of CNN, MSNBC, maybe even a little C-SPAN, if I felt wonkish enough. And I wasn’t at all disappointed with what I got: hours on Michael Jackson’s arrest, the Kobe Bryant trial and the latest headline-grabber, an isolated case of mad cow disease in Washington. See, unlike many of my fellow pretentious intellectual types at Harvard, who read all the news that’s fit to print on a daily basis but rarely deign to catch the evening news, I appreciate what mega-conglomerate news can provide for people like me—a dose of reality, American pop-culture style. It keeps me in touch.

But now that I’m done reveling in the rapturous embrace of Judy Woodruff, Wolf Blitzer and the entire CNN news team, the new year has gotten me thinking about those important stories that always seem to slip through the large holes in the American media’s net. You know the ones I’m talking about—they usually have to do with countries that President Bush can’t pronounce. One stood out in particular: the recent parliamentary elections in the Russian Federation. Now, I’m a Russian studies concentrator, so maybe I just think that whole part of the world and its aging nuclear arsenal is more newsworthy than it actually is. But I was struck by how this story melted off American radar screens but a few days after the elections.

Since he assumed the presidency of the Russian Federation in January 2000, Vladimir V. Putin has slowly but surely consolidated his power, all the while keeping his public approval ratings in the 70 percent range. After systematically banishing, locking up or otherwise neutralizing many of his most outspoken rivals—and taking over their TV stations—Putin has pulled Russia into what scholars now dub “managed democracy.” In this nice little arrangement, the Russian president and the party he supports submit to relatively free democratic elections, but use state control over procedure and the media to push for electoral success. Some of the dirty tricks they perpetrate would make Richard Nixon blush, such as forcing government employees to actively campaign for the president’s favored party and limiting the opposition’s access to television time.

This time around, Putin’s management worked like a charm. The pro-Kremlin party United Russia—which has a vaguely nationalistic platform based around support for the president—won the largest share of the vote of any electoral faction in the history of post-Soviet parliamentary politics, 37.5 percent. With the other solidly pro-Putin deputies added in, the ex-KGB officer has enough votes in Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, to alter the Russian Constitution, a scary prospect in a country still shaking off centuries of despotic rule. Putin could use this constitutional majority to give himself a third term, or to extend his power to rule by decree, or to do whatever the hell he wanted with United Russia and the electorate now slavishly loyal to him.

But such alarming news hardly made a splash in the United States. Sure, The New York Times ran its requisite coverage from the foreign desk and an editorial from out of nowhere praising the slow but steady progress of Russian democracy, but the talking heads simply brushed it aside, and the story became little more than a small blurb on Headline News. Instead of hearing about tainted elections, we heard about the Paris Hilton video. And while both are important in their own way, I’m pretty sure most of us would agree that Putin is a little bit more important than porn.

—Stephen W. Stromberg is an associate editorial chair.