Consolidating support for the President's course

Now that articles are appearing with titles like "You Must Not Leave Again. The Campaign for a Third Term Signifies That Both a 'Designated Successor' and a 'Caretaker Czar' Have Been Demonstrated to Be Excessively Risky Solutions to the '2008 Problem'" (Andrei Ryabov, Nov. 3, Gazeta.ru) - the 2008 problem looks like it really has become a problem, even for the people supposedly with their hands on all the levers.

Notwithstanding the elaborate versii (a post I had hoped to translate, but it's over a month old and thus may already be hopelessly stale by the standards of Russian politics - anyway, Google does an OK job of translating it here.) cooked up by professional political handicapper, blogger and anticompromat webmaster Vladimir Pribylovsky, it can be said rather simply that a lot of people - powerful and not-so-powerful alike, it would seem - want Putin to stick around in one Tsar-like guise or another. Others have been writing about how it would be the biggest mistake of his career for him to do so, and that if he really believed in or wanted to construct the institutions of democracy in Russia, he would step down.

Apparently, Putin is being "Driven to the Kremlin Wall" by his supporters - certainly those among the narod, but presumably more importantly, those among the elites, fretting in their Maybachs and Rublyovka mansions about what might become of their cash flow in a post-Putin Russia.

I ran across a crazy and somehow very disturbing website that seems to be part of the universal Putin love-in (last week, K-Vlast' got Russian politicians to respond to the question "Does the universal love [всенародная любовь] alarm you?" - another article I'd like to translate but haven't had time to; here's Google's best effort at a translation). The website is zaputina.ru, which launched last week and apparently is all set to become part of a nationwide "For Putin!" movement. I think I'll let the article from ostensibly objective business news portal RBC (an article which I found through a link on the zaputina website) speak for itself and also show how RBC seems to have been reduced to shilling for the regime on this story (my translation):

Virtual voting "For Putin!" is taking place on the Internet
[Nov. 8, 2007]

The internet campaign [Интернет-акция] "For Putin!" taking place on the Russian-language internet, has collected over 16 thousand votes in support of the President of Russia in a day and a half of existence. The creators of the project state that their goal is not to campaign for Vladimir Putin but to consolidate his supporters on the Internet.

As the organizers note, it is not only residents of Russian cities who are voting for Putin. Votes are coming in from London, New York, Kiev, Khar'kov and the other cities of the world.* "We don't want to convince anyone or encourage them to change their political views in favor of Putin's course," says one of the initiators of the project, political scientist Aleksei Zharich.** According to him, the goal of the project is to consolidate supporters of the president and his course.

Writer and former head of Boris Yeltsin's press service Marina Yudenich says that she decided to become involved in the project because she "watches the positive changes in the life of the country very closely." Lawyer [on TV, at least - trans.] Pavel Astakhov, another participant in the project, agrees with Marina Yudenich. "As a lawyer, I better than others understand and see the results of Vladimir Putin's work over the past eight years. These are lower taxes, social projects, and children's programs, and the development of the economy in such private-sector areas as consumer credits," says Astakhov.

The project's goal, in Pavel Astakhov's opinion, is "to show ourselves that we can choose our own leadership [власть] and can preserve those gains [завоевания] and successes which have already been achieved." Marina Yudenich thinks that the "For Putin!" project will show the part of society which is in doubt that the country's president really "possesses nationwide [всенародной] support."

The project allows internet users, aside from just voting, to publish their photo and leave a link to their web page. This personalization, according to Marina Yudenich, is very meaningful, since it "demonstrates that people are not just voting for the president, but they are doing this openly, showing their face and identifying themselves by name."***

* Here we see one of the more bizarre fixations of Putin's team (and often of Russians in general): a fixation on the support of foreigners, even those from countries perceived as enemies.
** Calling a campaign PR specialist or "polittekhnolog" a "political scientist" is such a very "virtual politics" thing to do. Or perhaps Zharich majored in politologiia at the MVD university (yes, that really is his alma mater, at least according to his LJ profile). Zharich's main contribution to the project appears to be that he had bought the zaputina.ru domain awhile back - I wonder if there is anything interesting lurking in the cached earlier pages from that domain?
*** I guess the secret ballot is no longer good enough. Ms. Yudenich neglects to mention how easy it is to manipulate such a website by posting fake photos and identities or filtering out ones the webmaster would rather not have appear; not to mention the comical idea of a "vote" on a website where there is only one choice.

It seems to me that Pribylovsky gets it just about right when he dubs this project "licking together" (a play on the name of the now-defunct, original pro-Putin youth movement, Walking Together).Strangely, there is also a za-putina project (the hyphen makes all the difference) which has been around longer and thus has more "votes"; according to Zharich, though, it's run by the same person who runs an anti-Putin site. Predictably housed at protiv-putina.ru, at least this website allows "voters" to leave comments. These sites could perhaps be seen as metaphors for the Russian political process - such polarization between a certain wing of the opposition and the mainstream that they can't even have their "voting" on the same website! And of course the more perfect way in which the official zaputina project simulates the Kremlin's view of the proper way for the people to interact with the authorities - the only form of acceptable feedback is a vote of approval; no comments, please.

Zharich is not particularly modest about the project he apparently manages. On his livejournal (his handle is brigadier - is that a coincidence?) he writes about what he sees as the main strengths of the zaputina.ru website:

1. Everything on one page!!! On one page.
2. Easy-to-use interface. The possibility of changing something around is excluded, but it's simple and maximally easy for a person to leave their vote.
3. Technologicity [Технологичность]: Video, audio, photo, entertainment [энтертеймент].* [...]
5. This is the real web two [point] zero.
(For those who want it to, their photo links to their web page, blog or online project, by the way. And that's the whole point. It's not a grey mass - but real people. You click and learn about the person, it's cool)
6. If Hillary, for example, had a project like this, the whole world would talk about it.**

* This sums up how Putin has managed to keep people watching TV even with all controversial or potentially controversial news programs dumbed down or removed. It is amusing that this guy seems to have forgotten that there are many perfectly good words in Russian for "entertainment."
** I wonder if this jackass savvy political operator knows anything about Moveon.org or other internet projects that made a splash in US campaigns. They weren't talked about by "the whole world" because they were domestic political phenomena. Why exactly should anyone (other than Russophiles/Russia-watchers like myself) outside of Russia care about this uncreative propaganda website?

For a guy who was born exactly a week before I was and cannot therefore pass as a callow youth, he has a strangely childlike glee about the whole thing.

Gazeta.ru covered the zaputina project and the affiliated (embedded, actually) russia.ru website, which is sort of like a unidirectional version of YouTube (you can watch what the webmasters have uploaded but cannot upload anything of your own or leave comments), in an article appropriately titled Путин-tube (here is a Google translation). The zaputina website is compared to a flash-mob ("where many people repeat the same, most often pointless, action") and it is suggested that these websites are efforts to attract some of the campaign funds which are no doubt flooding the country. You can follow what Russian blogs are saying about the zaputina website here.

So, is this a transparent, "democratic" feedback loop? Or a colossal, polittekhnolog-orchestrated circle jerk? Here at Scraps of Moscow, we report - and you decide.

Moving on to the partner site, Russia.ru calls itself a "Telechannel" (actually, the full text of the title that pops up in your browser window is "Telechannel Russia.ru: Glory to Russia!") and aspires to Internet TV status, although in the lower left-hand corner of the site is the logo and media license information of Kremlin-friendly news portal Vzglyad. As one commenter on a blog post about this story noted:

What do you think, will Russia ever have normal democracy? I think hope is dying out with each passing day...

Even Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru - which is back in operation, hooray! - had a vignette last Friday about the zaputina project, which I'm too tired to translate and which Google doesn't really do justice. And others are laughing about the whole effort to keep Putin in office as well:

The soundtrack to the above video (really a slideshow of entertaining Putin images) is a song narrating Putin's imagined interior monologue as he arrives at the conclusion that he must remain in charge of the country "for the people."

Meanwhile, from all indications, the runup to to Duma elections is less amusing for parties not enjoying the benefit of the "administrative resource" and is anything but democratic. SPS, for example, has had one of its regional offices vandalized (and was then not allowed to use its allotted campaigning time slot on the local state-run TV channel), its website hacked, and its campaign literature confiscated on a rather thin pretext:

News Friday, November 9, 2007. Issue 3782. Page 3. Police Seize SPS Election Booklets The Moscow Times Union of Right Forces said Thursday that police had seized 14 million copies of its officially approved campaign booklet in more than 20 regions this week. In an entry on his LiveJournal blog, party leader Nikita Belykh said police justified the confiscations by saying it was necessary to examine the campaign materials for content possibly violating extremism or anti-monopoly laws. The Neo-Print printing house in Moscow, which prints most of the campaign materials for Union of Right Forces, or SPS, was raided by police on Thursday and had its operations suspended pending inspections expected to last at least until Dec. 2, when State Duma elections will be held, he wrote. A woman who answered the phone Thursday at Neo-Print said the company was operating as usual and declined to confirm whether it was raided by police. An SPS spokeswoman could not specify which police department had conducted the raid. Meanwhile, Vadim Gologuzov, a senior police official in Krasnoyarsk, said his officers had seized 2 million copies of the party's booklet because it contained an advertisement in violation of election laws, Interfax reported. In Izhevsk, police official Nikolai Shvetsov said police had seized 800,000 copies after an anonymous caller reported a hostage-taking in a garage, Interfax reported. Police found no hostages in the garage, only the campaign materials, which were confiscated to establish their legality.

Things have gotten so bad for SPS (and this time, none of it appears to be the party's own doing, as is sometimes the case with the misfortunes of Russian liberals) that they have even appealed to the OSCE for help, complaining about a "wave of persecution." Good luck.

Update, Nov. 12, 11am: I see this website is a popular topic. Today's Moscow Times in a story titled "United Behind a Putin Third Term", rehashes Gazeta's coverage and provides some more denials and perspective:

[...] [S]ix days after it opened, 27,000 people have already voted on a web site, Zaputina.ru, calling for Putin to stay on despite the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms.

Zaputina.ru did not provide any information regarding its creators, while a United Russia spokesman denied any official party involvement Friday.

"If there is no party's logo on the web site, then it's not the party's project," he said on condition of anonymity, because only the party's chief spokesman was authorized to comment.

Gazeta.ru, however, has identified the site's creator as Konstantin Rykov, who is on the United Russia party list in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

"This could have been a personal initiative on Rykov's part," the party spokesman said.

Gazeta.ru identified Alexei Zharich as the web-site project manager, and the Nic.ru domain registration center said it was registered in his name in October 2004. Zharich is listed by the web site Vybory.ru as the general director of the Political Technologies company and a former Interior Ministry employee.

A secretary who answered the joint work telephone number for Rykov and Zharich said Friday that both were too busy to talk.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, reached on his cell phone Friday, said the presidential administration had no relation to the site. [...]

"United Russia's traces can be found everywhere in one or another form," Alexei Mukhin of the Center for Political Information said Friday. "Because the party has put Putin on top of its federal list, everything done in support of Putin is done in support of United Russia."

Mukhin said the regional rallies and Za Putina, despite United Russia's denials of involvement, could be aimed at pushing United Russia's share of the vote on Dec. 2 to 80 percent and "not permitting any other party pass the 7 percent barrier" to get into the Duma.