Russia: Putin names his successor - full text
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On Dec. 10, Russian President Vladimir Putin named Dmitry Medvedev, 42, first deputy prime minister and an executive at Gazprom (the state-owned energy monopoly), as his preferred candidate in presidential election scheduled for March 2008.
On the next day, Medvedev revealed in a speech that if elected, he would ask Putin to serve as prime minister and lead the government, according to televised broadcasts on Dec. 11. He said that since Putin assumed office in 2000, he had promoted stability, improved quality of life and prospects for long-term development, and moved the country away from the political, economic, and fiscal instabilities of the 1990s.
Putin--who was not previously a member of Unified Russia--had in October accepted the party’s invitation to head its list of candidates in elections to the State Duma (the lower chamber of the bicameral federal legislature) held on Dec. 2. Unified Russia gained over 64 per cent of the vote, according to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), giving it 315 seats in the 450-seat State Duma. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) won 57 seats, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) 40 seats, and Fair Russia: Motherland/Pensioners/Life 38 seats.
Immediate context
Prior to the elections, the Russian authorities increased restrictions on opposition party activities. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said that the elections took place in an atmosphere of harassment and intimidation of the opposition, according to a Dec. 8 article by US State Department-sponsored Voice of America. According to the Nov. 19 International Herald Tribune, the OSCE had said that it would not send an observer team because the government of Russia had delayed sending them the appropriate visas.
On Nov. 24, the police in Moscow detained former world chess champion Garry Kasparov for five days after arresting him at a rally of the opposition Other Russia coalition. After the election, Kasparov denounced the vote, calling it the "most unfair and dirtiest in the whole history of modern Russia", ABC News reported on Dec. 3.
Putin was unable to stand for re-election to the presidency in March 2008 because the constitution prohibited any president from seeking a third term in office. He could, however, stand for election to the legislature.
Reaction and outlook
In his televised speech on Dec. 11, Medvedev hailed Russia’s internationally noted resurgence, stating: "The attitude toward Russia in the world is different now. We are not being lectured like schoolchildren. We are respected and we are deferred to. Russia has reclaimed its proper place in the world community. Russia has become a different country: stronger and more prosperous."
The government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised the lack of formal foreign observation of the Dec. 2 legislative elections, as well as the outcome. Merkel's official spokesman Thomas Steg was reported by government-sponsored TV station Deutsche Welle on Dec. 3 as declaring: "Measured by our standards, it was neither a free, fair nor democratic election."
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke optimistically about Medvedev, saying that he was "an intelligent man representing a younger generation of Russians", Pravda reported on Dec. 13. She said however, that the USA remained concerned that Russia was stifling political opposition.
Historical context
Russia, which had the largest land area of any country in the world, gradual coalesced into an empire as its various peoples came under the influence of the rising power of Moscow, with Ivan the Great effectively taking control in the 15th century. Between the 17th and the 19th centuries, Imperial Russia, ruled by autocrats, went through a period of territorial expansion, acquiring parts of Poland and Finland, as well as territories in the Caucasus, central Asia, and on the Pacific coast, while clashing with Western powers. The French emperor Napoleon invaded in 1812 but was unable to force a Russian surrender and his army was almost destroyed on the march home. An Anglo-French alliance attacked Russia in 1853, precipitating the Crimean War, a Western incursion supported the White Russians (former imperialists and social democrats) against the Bolshevik (communist) Red Army in 1918, and the Nazis invaded in 1941.
After disastrous outcomes on the battlefields of World War I and following the February Revolution of 1917 which saw the popular overthrowing of Emperor Nicholas II and the ruling Romanov dynasty, the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution of 1917 and founded a communist state. Only one party--the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)--was permitted. Political power emanated from the Politburo, formed in 1919. Its first members were Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Krestinsky.
Two years after Lenin died in 1924, Stalin took control of the CPSU, collectivising farms and, destroying the holdings of wealthier private farmers. He also promoted the rapid development of heavy industry in a bid to catch up with the West and transform the Soviet Union as quickly as possible into an industrialised and completely socialist state. Stalin gained notoriety for his the enormous scale of repression he instigated to secure his power, removing and putting to death any politician who was deemed a rival. Fostering a popular mistrust of the West and of capitalism were key elements in Stalin's ideology. Purported collusion with Western powers was the charge used to condemn the so-called "enemies of the state" in the Great Purge of 1938.
Stalin co-operated with the West to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. At the Yalta conference in 1945 the Soviet Union secured influence over several countries in Eastern Europe, later imposing command-control economic systems. This did not, however, herald an era of improved relations and by 1947 the Soviet Union and the West were engaged in a Cold War of mutual suspicion and mistrust.
Although CPSU First Secretary Nikita Khushchev denounced the repression under Stalin, he oversaw such incidents as the invasion of Hungary to crush an uprising in 1956 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The "Prague Spring" uprising of 1968 was also brutally suppressed.
In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, the high diplomatic and military costs leading eventually to a withdrawal in 1988-89.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev launched a policy of economic restructuring (perestroika) and openness (glasnost), to expose corruption and waste. The impact of these policies, the underlying weakness of the government and economy, and the rise of nationalist movements, were among the key factors that combined to bring about the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union.
In December 1991, the Soviet Union was replaced by a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose grouping of 11 former Soviet republics. Gorbachev resigned and Boris Yeltsin became president.
Yeltsin implemented a wide-ranging privatisation programme. State industries were initially redistributed to the "oligarchs" (rich businessmen with political connections) at bargain prices. By the mid-to-late 1990s, Russia was plagued by a series of financial scandals, in which it was alleged that government officials and the "oligarchs" had engaged in corruption, including the misappropriation of public funds from former state-owned operations auctioned off to the private sector and the authorities began to take steps to curb the "oligarchs" economic and political power.
Vladimir Putin, head of the Federal Security Service (FSB--a successor to the KGB), was elected president in May 2000. Putin consolidated Russia’s energy wealth and increasingly used the power of Russia’s gas and oil monopoly to influence its neighbours.
