Another installment from me at The Weekly Standard:

Many have asked why Putin went to so much trouble to shore up a victory that was inevitable and that, on the surface, only earned United Russia 12 additional seats in an obsolescent legislature. One reason he broke with the post-Soviet presidential custom and aligned himself with a party at all had to do with the governors of Russia’s 89 administrative regions. These were, remember, formerly elected until Putin decided it would be much easier to appoint them directly–a “reform” he railroaded through in 2004 under the pretext of waging unrestricted war against terrorism in Chechnya, a republic which, incidentally, boasted a 99.5 percent voter turnout in this election. (The other .5 percent must have overslept.) Sixty-five governors led local United Russia lists this year, giving the party and its new figurehead unfettered control over every regional apparatus, “from police to tax inspectors,” as the Washington Post put it.What’s particularly interesting about this development is that, instead of the tyranny of the party devolving into the tyranny of the lone dictator, the consolidation of power in the new Russia has progressed, strangely, in reverse. The strongman has purchased himself a loyal army of hirelings after the fact. The current state may therefore be seen as even more of a mafia outfit than its Soviet predecessor, a characteristic that also renders it, thankfully, more vulnerable and ephemeral. Whereas with Stalinism there was an abiding ideology, secured by a generation of indoctrination and terror, that vouchsafed the continuance of at least some version of the status quo, with Putinism, there is only Putin. As such, United Russia should not be so ecstatic about its thralldom because, like Milton’s famous villain:

“If he whom mutual league
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin.”

Andrei Illarionov, the former economic advisor to Putin, published an essay a few days ago in Yezhednevniy Zhurnal, in which he declared, “December 2 is nothing but a special operation.” Illarionov grimly analogized the now-concluded campaign to the ones preceding the Supreme Soviet election in 1937 and the Reichstag election in 1933.

And the temptation for Western media to draw Stalinist analogies to the weekend’s events has been even harder to suppress (the Guardian headlined its editorial, “The shadow of Stalin that hangs over Mr Putin”) particularly with omnipresent banners and images of Dear Leader blighting the Russian landscape.

Still, if there is one auspicious takeaway from the enormous sham just perpetrated over eleven time zones, it is that the Russian people can still make the Kremlin nervous. Moreover, we are hearing from them more frequently and loudly than we had before. As Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinksy phrased it about a year ago, Russia is not yet the Soviet Union Redux. “You can criticize, you can write essays, you can write books. But only if you don’t cross the line.” Crossing the line, of course, means defying the economic and political hegemony exercised by the head of state and his tiny circle of silovik antagonists. Culture, too, is subject to creeping encroachments from the almighty center. Still, we are not quite at the point of historical, let alone moral, equivalence between Russia’s past and present.

As it happens, this year Robert Conquest, the great historian of Stalinism, is releasing a 40th anniversary edition of his seminal work The Great Terror. In it, he has a new preface, from which a small section bears quoting:

“Today’s Russia is not totalitarian. The Terror is not denied. The economy is viable. But one can have ‘reform’ without liberalism–as with Peter the Great and Pytor Stolypin. Above all we are still far from the rule of law–much more important than ‘democracy.’ As elsewhere, the problem seems to be to free the idea of the ‘nation’ from both archaic barbarism and from the more recently bankrupted verbalisms that have partly melded into it. To turn inward, outward, and upward?”

Yes, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Russia’s Rigged Election - The Weekly Standard