Carnegie Moscow Center
This year’s top three “men of the year” include Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, and Edward Snowden. But if the “people who made history in 2013” were to be chosen, it should be the actual people—those Ukrainians who have gathered in the Kiev Independence Square.
Nation-building in Ukraine is a formidable task, its divided nation also a hurdle to a democratic development. Still, Ukraine seems to have a better chance of evolving as a democracy than Russia.
On November 4, President Putin spoke in the Kremlin about cohesion, consolidation, and indissoluble unity of the people of Russia. Government policies, in contrast, do more to deepen the xenophobic sentiments than to temper them. If the Day of National Unity was established as a step toward consolidating the Russian nation, today it sounds at best as a celebration of wishful thinking.
As outbursts of ethnic violence grow more frequent, the Russian government relies first and foremost on police measures, such as roundups, detentions, or tightened migration policy. The rhetoric of administrators of various levels increasingly caters to xenophobic sentiments which risks to incite such sentiments even further and lead to new ethnic clashes.
Following Putin’s re-election, Russia faces two more key junctures that could shape the country’s future. The Kremlin will have to deal with limited revenues and it faces another election cycle in 2016-18.
A true de-Stalinization process in Russia will require no less than a reinvention of Russian nationhood based on a rejection of the traditional concept of the state, an end to the political and historical immunity of the secret police, and the emergence of a concept of "we, the people."
The Kremlin recognizes that decentralization is both necessary and inevitable, but Putin’s proposals for the Russian regions demonstrate that the regime is not quite ready to make decentralization a reality.
The Kremlin is unlikely to agree with all of the Institute for Social, Economic and Political Studies’ proposals for improving the gubernatorial election process.
If the Russian authorities want to gain a free hand in implementing their social and economic measures, they must first extricate themselves from the current political crisis.
The recent regional elections have shown that rather than making the political system more open and competitive, the Kremlin has found new ways to outmaneuver the opposition while maintaining its hold on power.