Russians will go to the polls to elect a new president in March 2008, Americans in November, and in both countries the media frenzy is in full swing. But there the similarity ends. In today's polarized America, the election is about policy--Iraq, health care, the culture wars. In Russia, it's about property, and how Vladimir Putin's anointed successor will secure or divide it. The American elite is publicly active and privately calm, for it keeps what it has earned no matter who becomes president. Meanwhile, the Russian elite is publicly mum and privately manic, for the fate of its gains, ill-gotten and otherwise, depends on the name of the coming czar.
A czar, of course, never comes alone. He comes with cronies, the cronies are always hungry, and the stakes at the trough could not be higher. The redistribution of property that followed Putin's ascent ran into the tens of billions of dollars. The very long list includes Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil company, Yukos, nationalized in a hostile takeover; Vladimir Gusinsky's media empire, snapped up by a state-run company; Roman Abramovich's oil company, Sibneft, nationalized in a friendly takeover (with full payment to the owner); leading titanium manufacturer VSMPO-Avisma, swallowed by the state-run arms exporter; and, more recently, Mikhail Gutseriev's oil company, Russneft, currently under acquisition by Kremlin-friendly oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who has publicly promised to surrender it to the state if the Kremlin so much as asks.
Western companies are not immune. Heavy-handed Kremlin tactics recently forced TNK-BP and Shell to cede hefty stakes in Russian projects to state-controlled companies on less than favorable terms.
In the purely Russian game, the real stakes can be even higher. Gusinsky fled Russia after a few days in jail in 2001, and Gutseriev did the same this summer after prosecutors hit him with criminal charges and his son died in a mysterious car accident. Mikhail Khodorkovsky didn't just lose Yukos; he's serving eight years in a Siberian camp. By contrast, California-based Google is far removed from the shifting sands of Gazprom, Gusinsky, and Gutseriev, and its cofounder Sergey Brin, though born in Moscow, will hold on to his shares no matter who replaces Bush in the White House.
Russia's elections have had little to do with fairness and democracy. The single exception occurred when Boris Yeltsin first came to power in 1991. It is a poorly kept secret that the 1996 elections that gave him a second term were rigged: Many serious observers believe that Yeltsin might well have lost in a fair fight to Gennadii Zyuganov, head of the Communist party. But that would have been bad for "democracy," and Boris notched a win with a little help from friendly oligarchs. The West bit its tongue.
In 2008 the dice are loaded again. Now Putin is deciding whether he should stay or go. If he goes, as czar he anoints his successor (as Yeltsin anointed him). If he stays, his team will furnish the necessary window dressing, be it a constitutional referendum for another term or a force majeure maneuver.
Once the issue is settled, the Kremlin's mass-media propaganda machine will either burnish the image of the next president with endless imagery and spin, or tout the legitimacy of an extended reign for the current president. And sooner or later, the people of Russia will find out who they should vote for.
This doesn't mean that the ballots will bear a single name. The procedure must look "democratic," or else it will be difficult to convince the "enemies" of Russia that the "21st-century energy superpower" obeys the rules of the civilized world.
But these seeming contenders will be bystanders, and they will know what their names are doing on the ballot. Their purpose will be to confer an appearance of legitimacy on the leader of the pack, and to ensure control over the country and its vast resources. This is the ultimate goal, and it trumps all other concerns about Russia's future.
There is, of course, a catch to a presidential election that is really a selection: Not everyone is satisfied with what they have; some want more. If a fight ensues, the combatants have no public venue to resolve their differences and no rules to prevent the losers from having to forfeit all. No one in Moscow forgets for a minute that the signature events of Putin's presidency were the dispossession and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the effective nationalization of his oil company (along with major chunks of other "strategic" industries), and the now firmly established control of these vastly profitable and tasty morsels by a small cohort of Putin's friends and allies.
