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Home page  About CSIS Programs Russia and Eurasia Program Spinning Vlad as He Contemplates Aloud, if Democracy Really Exists … Anywhere?
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Spinning Vlad as He Contemplates Aloud, if Democracy Really Exists … Anywhere?
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By Sarah Mendelson, Senior Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program
July 14, 2006
The Putin administration ought to be very happy with the PR firm, Ketchum, it hired in the lead up to the G 8. The Ketchum vice president in charge of the contract recently told the Baltimore Sun that their goal was to "make sure that the experience that people have at the summit is one—to be frank—that does help improve the overall image of Russia as a reliable and responsible partner." That's tough—to be frank—given that Russia’s long on the rule of man and short on the rule of law. But hey, that’s what PR firms are for.
Most of the heavy lifting of course occurred long before today's cocktail party with the world leaders begins in St. Petersburg. In fact, in the last few weeks, the tempo of Western media appearances and encounters with civil society picked up every day; President Vladimir Putin seemed to be everywhere, meeting almost everyone.
Good job, Ketchum! I mean, Kremlin!
These were not always the friendliest of audiences. From the dacha photo opportunity with some of his harshest international critics—leading international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—to the sit down interviews with network television in— not one but—three of the G 8 countries, Putin got grilled.
Accordingly, he seems to be getting lots of points for, well, showing up. But how about the "messaging"—or PR speak for delivering the point you want people to focus on at the exclusion of other issues. How’s that going? It depends on who you are and how much you want to believe what he is dishing out.
Putin PR on Democracy
Every interview—indeed by now almost every article—on the G 8 touches on Putin's (and by extension the G 8's) political problem: the democracy conundrum.
The G 8 is supposed to be a gathering of market oriented democracies, yet the host country has experienced, shall we say, a decline in democracy, a shrinking of public political space and an increase in threats to human rights. This trend has occurred over several years precisely while President Putin (and President Bush) has been in office. So either Russia is really a democracy or the G 8 is not really a group of market oriented democracies.
Putin handles this issue in a few different ways. There’s philosophical Putin, trying out the idea that real democracy—as defined by no less than the ancient Greeks—doesn’t really exist anywhere in the world. "Democracy," he explained ponderously to NBC’s Matt Lauer, as if he needed instruction, "is the rule of the people. But what does the rule of the people mean in the modern world, in a huge, multiethnic and mutlireligious state?"
Apparently not much. After lamenting a mythic bygone era of voting in the town square, he went on to argue that Russia is actually more democratic than the United States because the president of Russia is elected by "direct secret ballot." Incongruously, he suggested to Canadian television that Russia had more democracy since regional leaders were no longer elected by direct ballot (which he abolished shortly after the September 2004 Beslan tragedy) but through "a voting procedure in the regional parliaments." He neglected to mention that new rules he pushed make it almost impossible for a party other than the one the Kremlin favors from running for office. Never mind the details, though, the message is: we have more democracy than you so leave us alone.
Rabbits and Rats
This type of reasoning reminded me of the argument that a group of Russian elites tried out on a Washington audience a few years back when the Kremlin was aggressively taking over one national television station after another. Shrugging off the implications of state controlled television, one prominent Russian suggested to a think tank audience, “what’s the difference between a rabbit and a rat? One has better PR than the other.” He went on to explain that as far as he could tell, "there was no real difference between the Kremlin dominated Channel One in Russia and the BBC." He chuckled to himself as people in the back of the room sat slack-jawed, incredulous.
What the Russians were selling, no one in Washington was buying. Similarly, earlier this week, Ellen Pinchuk interviewing Putin for the Canadian network, CTV, was having trouble with the line that Russia is actually more democratic than say "many European countries or India." What about, she said, interrupting him, a finding by the Russian Union of Journalists that "not a single negative report has been made about you in the last three years. Nothing bad has been said about you on the three national TV channels. That is the reality." She was too polite to add that this lack of critical reporting must be part of the recipe for his sky-high approval ratings among the Russian public. For example, there has been no critical independent investigation of the botched rescue efforts conducted under his watch of the theatre in downtown Moscow in October 2002 in which 130 died, or of the school in Beslan, where over 300 hundred perished, most of them children. No senior official has been called on the carpet. None of this has affected how people think of Putin.
Putin paused, "I don’t think this is the case." And then he grew defensive. "This (criticism of freedom of the press and democracy) is an approach based on the old Cold War-era" suggesting that only outsiders who wished "to manage and dictate" what happens in Russia bring these issues up. With NBC's Lauer, he noted, "we categorically oppose the use of all levers, including arguments [!] on the need for us to democratize our society, in order to intervene in our internal affairs. This is something we consider absolutely unacceptable." So much for the role of ideas.
Sovereignty Rules
Here Putin probably didn't need talking points from Ketchum. The Russian government has been in a hyper-sovereign mode of late, and in this manner, rejects the concept of the universality of norms and laws.
Sound like anyone else we know? The Bush administration has also been struggling with legal obligations. On the one hand, the Bush administration has staked its legacy on international democracy promotion, and probably Bush himself wants to talk about the decline in democratic practice inside Russia. On the other hand, the Bush administration is widely criticized – from retired military generals to human rights activists, from the Supreme Court to the Council of Europe – for undermining international and national human rights and humanitarian laws while conducting “the war on terror.”
In one of the more revealing moments in the recent Kremlin media blitz, Putin implicitly addressed this phenomenon: "only those who themselves have a spotless human rights record have the right to point the finger at others." In other words, the Bush administration’s undermining of torture norms and laws have greatly reduced its effectiveness as a messenger on democracy and human rights problems inside Russia. And so Putin shined the spotlight on the Bush (and Blair) administration’s human rights conundrum.
This leads one to think that this weekend there may be a tacit agreement: Bush won’t bring up Putin's democracy problem if Putin agrees not to mention Bush's human rights issues. Now that’s what the PR folks call spin!
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions; accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in these publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors.
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