In Russia, there is an entire generation of young people who do not have a first-hand recollection of life before Vladimir Putin. The Putin era must feel to them a bit like the Brezhnev era felt to me.
I remember Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev well. I remember the way he spoke, the way everyone made fun of him, the way he was synonymous with that era. When he died, in 1982, I was about 10 and my parents about 40. The Brezhnev era was endless, they used to tell me.
In fact, it lasted 18 years. Putin has already surpassed that, if we start the Putin timeline in August 1999 when then-president Boris Yeltsin designated the 47-year-old chairman of Russia’s security council as his successor. Putin has just announced his intention to run for re-election, which means we are looking at a prospect of at least a 25-year rule by a single individual. How and why is anything like that possible with the Soviet Union long gone?
One common explanation is that Putin is a popular politician. As measured by the Levada Center, an independent pollster, Putin’s approval rating has not fallen below 80% since March 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. But to me this highly publicised factoid is a question rather than a statement. Public opinion polls are common in Russia, and officials and journalists quote them frequently. But the jury is out on what they actually mean.
Considerations that run through the mind of a Russian respondent who agrees (most people refuse) to answer the question about Putin are very different from the considerations of a British or a French respondent asked to assess Theresa May or Emmanuel Macron. A respondent in Russia does not compare Putin with any of his colleagues or opponents: there simply is no one out there to compare him with. Russia’s political playing field has long been cleared of any serious challengers to the incumbent.
In answering the Putin question, Russian respondents may seek to confirm their loyalty to the authorities or express their feelings about their country or, more to the point, about their country as seen on national television. Since television and most other media are owned or run by the state, respondents get most of their information from a highly biased source. Even more important is the fact that the average Russian’s responses to polling questions are a staple of that same Russian’s media diet. Most polling data thus come full circle: the favourable results are highlighted and the unfavourable ones are hushed up, which influences the way people respond to pollsters next time.
These mechanisms are not specific to Russia, of course. The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, who has been in office since 2003, enjoys 80%-plus approval ratings, as does Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been leading Kazakhstan since 1991. In the absence of a truly pluralist environment, people do not so much express opinions as guess the “correct answers” prompted by media reports.
Paradoxically, support for Putin is sometimes considered an indicator of the Russian people’s high hopes, because even those Russians (and they are a majority) who are dismissive of their governors, Duma deputies, mayors or other officials, including those appointed by Putin, do support Putin himself. The logic here is that over the years most people have learned to believe that solutions to their problems can only come from the president or the Kremlin. In his frequent media appearances, Putin is always a problem-solver. During his annual televised call-in with the nation he is solving problems: ordering a housing renovation here or a long-needed road there. As a result, Russia’s political culture has degraded to the level of a primitive magical religion.
The Kremlin is said to command a mighty force of in-house pollsters who may be doing some excellent work outside of the public view. The fact that those results are never divulged does not prevent the Kremlin from using them as justification for policy decisions. Annexing Crimea was one such decision. Putin himself said in March 2015 that he took his final decision about Crimea after secret opinion polls showed 80% of Crimeans favoured joining Russia. Again, some magic can be detected here.
The Kremlin seems to be treating opinion polls not just as feedback but as substitute democracy. It is very convenient because polls, especially those secret ones, are not as binding as election results. The opposite is true, too: Kremlin political advisers often see elections in Russia as opinion polls or plebiscites of sorts. The presidential election is expected to be one of those – with Putin facing no real competition and voters having no real choice. Simplicity and convenience of use are characteristics the Kremlin has historically sought in its dream political machine.
Whether the one that Putin is operating now is such a machine is a big question. The Kremlin has based its ruler’s legitimacy on a supposed popular support that is propped up by the executive’s control over the legislature, judiciary and media. This kind of support cannot be verified independently and is essentially circular. By equating polls to elections (and elections to polls) the Kremlin claims to have built a system that runs on eternal popular support. This is tantamount to claiming to have built a perpetual motion machine.