Playing witness to last week's season finale episode of the so-called Dissenters' March made me remember an incident from my progressively distant youth [Excuse me, this flashback will take just a moment]. In the late 1970s, in a winter of my discontent, I was delivering fresh copies of The Pittsburgh Press, a now defunct American newspaper.
As I was trudging along in the snow under the weight of my newspaper sack, I spotted Tommy Waldorf - undoubtedly the most trouble-prone kid in western Pennsylvania - running down a pair of city steps [due to Pittsburgh's hilly terrain, the city has constructed hundreds of public stairways that connect different streets] and past me on the other side with a quick "Hi, Rob!" before disappearing down an alleyway.
Seconds later, a beefy cop with handcuffs jangling and a walkie-talkie squawking was descending the concrete steps in a poor imitation of hot pursuit. When he caught glimpse of me, he took a much needed breather and inquired if I had seen Tommy. Not wanting to betray such a notorious character, nor compromise myself with the law, I thought it best to shrug my shoulders and continue with my job. The police officer uttered a mild obscenity and soon a squad car joined him in fervid chase.
As it turned out, Tommy - probably in an attempt to relieve a pang of boredom - hurled a snowball at a motorist traveling along Perrysville Avenue. As fate would have it, the snowball managed to sail cleanly through the car's half-open window, nailing the driver in the head, and thus putting into motion a four-car pileup. Not the best day for Tommy.
But more to the point. The difference between Mr. Waldorf's flight from the police and the oppositionist's is that the latter clearly wished to be pursued by the law, whereas my erstwhile friend Tommy did not. In other words, being chased by the cops is not an event people normally desire, unless the people in question happen to be a political faction in desperate need of cheap publicity.
As a foreign spectator of Russia's political theater, I have several questions: How is it possible to respect a group of political agitators who 1. Have little respect for the law; 2. Threaten the security of their fellow residents - the very people they hope to lead - by making a mad dash through the city and into moving traffic; 3. Have no political leg to stand on, but continue to disturb the peace with publicity-seeking stunts; 4. Refer to themselves as "anti-Kremlin" when in actuality they have no greater desire than to be hunkered down once again inside the fortress.
The urge to laugh at all of this proved too great when I saw a photograph of former-chess-champ-turned-savior-of-the-Motherland Garry Kasparov in the back of a police van, sporting a vainglorious grin as he flashed a victory sign from the rear window. Victory? Victory from what, I thought. If this is victory, I would really hate to see the self-anointed opposition's definition of a failure.
As is normal democratic procedure for every civilized country, The Other Russia (a mysterious land that nobody has yet defined, but if past performance of the Russian liberals is any indication, it is probably an uninhabitable outcrop of rocks in the Arctic Ocean that Russians must rent from a foreign power) got exactly what it requested from the city of Moscow: a legally sanctioned rally on Prospekt Akademika Sakharova in the heart of the nation's capital. Any American or European political group would have been thrilled with such a high-profile venue. So was this the "victory" that Kasparov was alluding to from the back of the police bus? No, of course not, because despite joining forces with other liberal factions, this bowel movement fails to pull any weight with the voters. Thus, to play by the rules of the game would force them to confront an ugly truth: Since the great giveaway of the 1990s, the liberals have zero chances of clearing their names with the Russian voters anytime soon. Actually, their public demonstrations seem more effective at attracting curiosity seekers, troublemakers and photo-snapping tourists than any serious supporters.
Ironically, Russia's weekend warriors attempted a mad dash for the Central Elections Commission office, where they hoped to protest against the "unfair" 7 percent threshold of votes required to gain parliamentary representation. This is strange. Especially since I have never read a single article from Garry Kasparov in The Wall Street Journal, a conservative U.S. paper that regularly publishes his rants, concerning the state of American democracy.
If the majority of politicians were not such hypocrites, Kasparov would have been reminding his readers that both Ross Perot and Ralph Nader - two third-party candidates who enjoyed huge support from at least 9 percent of the American heartland - were denied the right to debate (not run) against the Democrat and Republican nominees in past presidential elections.
And then there are those observers who argue that something sinister must be happening for Russia's president and the United Russia party to be enjoying such huge popularity. As one English-language daily hyperventilated, people (anonymous people, of course) are being dragged off to the polling stations against their will(!). But if Washington, for example, would spend less time and money bombing nations into the Stone Age (a prerequisite, it seems, along the road to democracy), and more on domestic infrastructure (dams flood to mind), perhaps it too would be enjoying sky-high public support. Incidentally, those former western leaders who threw their support behind the Iraq War (Blair, Anzar, Howard) are also feeling the sting of their decisions today (In Putin's 8 years in office, Russia has never opened military operations in a foreign land). Putin's biggest failure in the eyes of the West is his success: he fails to conform to the old stereotypes about Russian leaders: weak, corrupt and never far from a bottle of vodka. Putin has destroyed those national myths, and there are many people who will never forgive him for that.
Some say the Russian opposition is dreaming of introducing some new brand of orange revolution; this sort of wishful thinking is simply dangerous. After all, Russia already staged the mother of all orange revolutions in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin climbed up on a tank in downtown Moscow while tens of thousands of supporters cheered him. That historic moment - which rallied more people than all of the other color revolutions combined - kicked off Russia's democratic revolution. Today, Russia's "sovereign democracy" simply reflects the realities of Russia's past, present and future; democracy is not a one-size-fits-all Made in the U.S.A. sweater.
But most importantly, many outside observers - many of whom have never set foot in Russia, and never will - fail to understand the radical changes that are taking place in this vast country, and not just in the biggest Russian cities.
For example, a friend of mine, whose job requires her to travel around the country, bases her assumptions about the progress of a Russian city on the availability of decaffeinated coffee in the local restaurants - kind of like a Russian version of the Big Mac index. Now, whenever she orders a decaffeinated coffee in Vladivostok, Kazan or Nizhny Novgorod she is not delivered a Turkish coffee that was brought to a slow boil over hot sand.
This is fruit from the tree of upheaval that Russia experienced 16 years ago: the standard of living is rising, every product and service is readily available, and the level of patriotism - if we judge by the polls and flags - has never been higher. So from this foreigner's perspective, the last thing Russia wants or needs is another misguided liberal reformer.
By Robert Bridge
