Putin's `strong leadership' is a soft dictatorship

[dArKeR]

By Lilia Shevtsova

Wednesday, May 05, 2004,Page 9

A joke doing the rounds in Moscow goes like this: The Americans didn't know who their president was two months after their presidential election, but we Russians knew who was going to occupy the Kremlin two years before ours.

Russia's political class has ample grounds to be slyly and cynically proud of the system they invented -- it guarantees the result it wants. Despite its lack of drama, intrigue and competitiveness, the election was important not because Russia's political class renounced all the key elements of authentic democratic electoral procedures, but because it closed the chapter on Russia's liberal democratic experiment, legitimizing President Vladimir Putin's new political system.

What is the nature of the new system? Is it democracy with adjectives, such as "managed" democracy, "illiberal" democracy or "electoral" democracy? Only a few pundits stubbornly adhere to this approach. Or is the system simply that of a conniving authoritarian? This view is already conventional wisdom, not only in the US, but in Europe as well.

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