Should This Man Be Leading the G-8?
Russia's Putin may be an issue at July's summit
Moscow appears unfazed. "Everyone who talks about this, whether Russia belongs there or not, can just talk," Putin says. "It's their job. The dog barks, but the caravan rolls on." After all, Russia is the world's No. 2 oil producer after Saudi Arabia, and it sits on a third of world natural gas reserves--sobering facts for energy-needy Europe and America. Russia also happens to occupy by far the largest territory of any country on the planet. It is one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and has the only nuclear arsenal able to challenge the United States. As Putin's top G-8 aide, Igor Shuvalov, coolly observed last year: "We are as necessary to the G-7 as they are to us."
The embarrassing fact, though, is that Russia under Putin is not the same country that the West thought it was inviting into the club. Boris Yeltsin's Russia may have been messy, criminal, occasionally chaotic. But it had a vibrant press and public political life. Today, parliament is a rubber stamp for Putin. Electoral changes passed in 2004 mean that the Kremlin's grip on the lower house of the legislature, the State Duma, will only tighten after elections next year. Another change, in which Putin scrapped direct elections of regional governors (who double as senators), means the upper house is just as pliant. "The parliament fully obeys the executive and plays no independent role at all," says Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the last few liberals in the 450-seat Duma--all of them likely to lose their places next year.
Meanwhile on the airwaves, the all-powerful state television channels ORT and RTR compete only to outdo each other in sycophantic coverage of the authorities. NTV, once a private trailblazer, now belongs to Gazprom, the state-run gas titan, and toes the official line. A handful of Internet sites and newspapers have independent voices, but they serve tiny portions of the population, while anyone posing a more direct challenge is dealt with severely.
So when Mikhail Khodorkovsky, CEO of the country's most investor-friendly oil company, Yukos, dared express political ambitions, he found himself charged with embezzlement. Today, he's serving an eight-year sentence in a desolate Siberian prison, and his business empire has been swallowed by the state--a powerful example to other tycoons, known here as oligarchs.
Tough but popular. Nervously eyeing pro-western revolts in neighboring Georgia and Ukraine, the Kremlin has also taken measures to manage youth discontent. On the one hand, the authorities heavily sponsor a loyal youth organization called Nashi, while on the other they suppress anti-Putin alternatives--for example, recently handing out a 3
What western critics rarely acknowledge, however, is that Putin is incredibly popular. His consistent 70 percent approval ratings are at a level that President Bush, not to mention Cheney, can only dream of. Some of this support comes from unexpected quarters, such as former Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who recently praised the ex-KGB president as ruling "sensibly and ever more forward-thinking."
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