Hidden hand, clean hand in Russian
politics By John Helmer
MOSCOW - Ignore the plot entirely, but try
this Joseph Stalin point from a novel called
Archangel.
The story by Robert
Harris, written in 1998, is about a semi-alcoholic
professor of Russian history - an Englishman, with
a New York address - who is hot on the trail of
the Russian dictator's personal notebooks, which
he thinks were spirited out of the Kremlin by
Lavrenty Beria, while Stalin was in his
dacha dying.
Buried by Beria's
chauffeur in his backyard, the notebooks stay
where they are in what becomes the Tunisian
Embassy in Moscow, after Beria is shot by the
politburo. But the notebooks turn out to be those
of a girl from Arkhangelsk. Stalin impregnates
her in order to leave an
heir, which he does, spawning a man scarcely more
believable than the others in the plot. Almost
everyone in on the story dies, starting with
Stalin.
"I have never read a thriller
based in Russia which has such an authentic feel"
- Orlando Figes, Evening Standard, London - skip
this nonsense, and go back instead to this:
If one Russian in six believed that
Stalin was their greatest ruler, that meant he
had about twenty million supporters ... And even
if you halved that figure, just to get down to
the hard core, that still left ten million. Ten
million Stalinists in the Russian Federation,
after forty years of denigration?
This
was written in 1997, 15 years ago. The fiction,
along with Stalin's heir, are deader than dead.
But here's a fact - positive sentiment towards
Stalin among Russians is roughly double or triple
today what it was then. And if the facts can be
stuck to long enough to be analyzed, before the
false moralizing and politicking set in, here are
some more of them:
Poll data collected by
the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center
(VTsIOM) reported in April of 2011 Russian answers
to the question: Did Stalin do more good than bad
for Russia? In 2007 15% polled said they believed
he had. In 2001, this view was expressed by 26%.
Then 33% of the Russians questioned said he had
done “more bad than good”.
In January
2011, according to VTsIOM this proportion had
fallen to 27%; in April, three months later, 24%.
VTsIOM doesn't say so, but if Stalin is getting
"better" at a rate of 1% of the thinking
population per month, this month in 2012 just 15%
of Russians believe Stalin did "more bad than
good".
Last April, VTsIOM also reported
that 45% of their poll sample think that further
de-Stalinization would be an unconstitutional
restriction on Russians' freedom of speech and
belief. Another 28% refused to say what they think
of Stalin or de-Stalinization. They may be split
down the middle between those afraid to admit
anything good about Stalin, and those still afraid
of saying anything bad.
In April 2011,
reporter Yuri Pronko asked: "How do you assess the
role of Stalin in the history of our country?" His
sample of 1,500 was aimed at young people between
18 and 21, living outside Moscow and St
Petersburg. With a choice of answering positive or
negative, 75% said positive.
The Levada
Center, another nationally known polling company,
reported in April of 2011 that 45% of Russians
believe that Stalin was a positive figure in
history. The proportion was going down, the
pollster reported. In 2010 it had been 51%; in
2009, 49%.
In December 2011, analysts
working for Masterforex-V, one of the largest
foreign currency brokers in Moscow, reported
evidence they believe indicates a rise in positive
sentiment. They claim Stalin would have won the
Rossiya-1 Name of Russia contest if both Nevsky
and Stolypin hadn't been boosted artificially.
They also claim that there has been mass
support for putting pictures of Stalin on
municipal buses. According to the analysis, one of
the principal reasons for Stalin's rise today is
that the terror purges of the 1930s he is
castigated for prevented the widespread corruption
that is the most castigated feature of current
Russian life.
This isn't the place to
debate what color Stalin's hands were, really.
What is important now is what a third to half of
all Russians think of their color in relation to
the problems they believe are uppermost in Russia
today; and the priorities for the future they will
vote for on March 4 in the presidential election.
What Russians mean when they express their
opinion of Stalin is that they want clean hands,
fair hands in command - not hidden, not weak, not
corrupt ones. Most Russians suspect everyone
contending for political power to have all three.
But they think they know what Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin's hands can do - the others are
more hidden, weaker, and most likely more corrupt.
The future in the hands of the opposition, if they
were to be voted into power, would thus be more
uncertain, more unstable, more corrupt than now.
In what country of the world can an electorate be
persuaded to vote in favor of that?
Do the
arithmetic: if about 6% of Russia's current
population (9 million) are 75 or over, and thus
old enough to remember the terror of the 1930s,
World War II and Stalin's death, those with
personal reason to fear another Stalin are fast
dying out, accelerated to their end by corrupt
hospital administrators, doctors, and nurses who
are afraid of nothing, and are quite safe from
being shot for their capital crimes.
The
14% (20 million) who are 65 and over are thus
divided between those who remember the human
destruction of the war more vividly than those for
whom the terror comes first. But they too are
disappearing. They cannot make much impact when
national samples are compiled for the polls. What
remains is what the pollsters have found - the
large, possibly growing share of the population
under 65 for whom Stalin and his hands are
symbols.
But these are not symbols the
outside world understands at all. Not to
understand this (or misrepresent it as a form of
Russian fascism) results in the mistake the media
of the outside world repeatedly and vainly try to
foist on the current election contest between
Putin and the opposition - both those registered
in the race and those recorded in the streets and
on the Internet.
One of those symbols, the
strong hands, the prime minister (born October 7,
1952) understands full well. In 2009, this is what
Putin had to say:
It is clear that from 1924 to 1953
the country, then led by Stalin, changed
radically. It turned from an agrarian country
into an industrial one. However, not too many
peasants survived. But there really was
industrialization. We won the Great Patriotic
War. And whatever they say, the victory was
achieved. Even if we go back to the losses, you
know, no one can now throw a stone at those who
organized and headed this victory, because if we
had lost this war, the consequences for our
country would have been much more
disastrous.
The other symbol Stalin
now stands for - clean hands - could be
expropriated by any presidential candidate or
opposition figure who announced that if voted into
power, he will rid Russia of the oligarch system,
corrupt concentration of wealth, illegal capital
theft, export of jobs, destruction of environment,
unfairness everywhere, etc, etc.
Naturally, this can't be expected from the
oligarch candidate for president, Mikhail
Prokhorov. It might be expected of Gennady
Zyuganov, the Communist Party candidate, but he
discredited himself in supporting Mikhail
Khodorkovsky after his arrest in 2003. There
hasn't been a serious Russian politician with this
program since Sergei Glazyev teamed up with Dmitry
Rogozin in 2007.
In retrospect, it is
clear that Rogozin has understood better than
Glazyev the merit of patience. Rogozin was the
brains behind General Alexander Lebed's successful
but short run for president in 1996. After serving
in the state duma and then as Russia's ambassador
to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in
Brussels since 2008, he has been quietly promoted
and returned home to be deputy minister of defense
in charge of the military-industrial complex.
There are one or two others like him. Let's wait
and see where their hands end up after March 4.
John Helmer has been a
Moscow-based correspondent since 1989,
specializing in the coverage of Russian business.
Note Joseph Stalin
(1878-1953), premier of the Soviet Union from 1941
until his death, was among the Bolshevik
revolutionaries who brought about the October
Revolution in Russia in 1917. As general secretary
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's
central committee from 1922, he was responsible
for the forced collectivization of farming that
contributed in 1932-33 to the Soviet famine. His
determination to crush political opposition to his
rule led to the Great Purge of the late 1930s in
which hundreds of thousands of people, including
Red Army leaders convicted of participating in
plots to overthrow the Soviet government, were
executed.
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