Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

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While withholding congratulations on an electoral landslide that sent powerful signals to the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin greets his soon-to-be Ukrainian counterpart with a provocative decree that could put Russian passports in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people in the Donbas. In Asia, meanwhile, Putin seeks to raise Russia’s profile by hosting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Playing The President

A meme on the Russian social network Odnoklassniki summed up one of the messages sent to Moscow by Ukraine’s presidential election in curt style: It showed a smiling President Vladimir Putin telling a prominent Russian comic actor: “Don’t even think about it!”

The meaning was clear after a politically inexperienced comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, crushed incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a presidential runoff, winning nearly three-quarters of the vote and dealing an indirect but unmistakable blow to entrenched leaders across the former Soviet Union.

The meme was worth a laugh in part because the comedian pictured, Mikhail Galustyan, looks vaguely like Zelenskiy – or at least both have dark hair and the faces, somehow, of funnymen. But the humor dug a little deeper because, in some of his most memorable roles, Galustyan has played characters of a different sort than Zelenskiy’s schoolteacher who happens into the presidency in the Ukrainian sitcom Servant Of The People.

For example, in the 2006-11 comedy sketch show Nasha Rasha (a sardonic misspelling of saying "Our Russia" in Russian), Galustyan’s characters included an explosively angry, sadistic, pink-track-suited soccer coach whose name translates as GasMeat Omsk, a dumpster-diving bum, and the slightly less dimwitted half of a dimwitted pair of outlandishly buffoonish migrant workers.

The unspoken message there: Once you (or an established leader) have lost the people’s trust, all bets are off. Almost anyone could potentially unseat you. While the TV comic’s victory in Ukraine seems like the starkest example, there may be similar lessons as close to the Kremlin as Armenia, where opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinian strode into the prime minister’s post after leading street protests last spring, and as far away as the United States, where Donald Trump -- a real estate magnate who had never held office -- was elected president in 2016.

'Anything Is Possible'

As Zelenskiy put it minutes after voting ended and exit polls pointed to a landslide win in the April 21 runoff: “Let the entire former Soviet Union look at us and see that anything is possible.”

Zelenskiy was presumably referring not only to his own stunning rise but also to the election itself, whose raucous, competitive feel drew comparisons with Russia’s no-contest contests.

“For Russia, the importance of Ukraine’s election isn’t so much who won, it’s how they won: in a free, fair, competitive vote in which the incumbent lost & conceded power,” BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg tweeted about 24 hours after polls closed and Poroshenko conceded defeat based on exit poll results. “In the last couple of days I’ve heard several Russians say they’d like an election like that in their country.”

Putin, who said last year that he does not have a smartphone and in 2017 that he rarely looks at social media, may not spend much time on Odnoklassniki -- though who knows, really? But it seems highly unlikely that the joke would be lost on him if he did see it.

At nearly 76.7 percent, Putin’s official result in the March 2018 election was a bit better than Zelenskiy’s 73.2 percent in Ukraine.

By The Numbers

But polls since then have shown a sharp decrease in public trust in Putin: When asked by state-funded pollster VTsIOM to name Russian politicians they would trust to resolve “important matters of state,” just under 33 percent of respondents in results published on April 14 named Putin – down from more than 48 percent a year ago and close to the lowest level since 2006.

By at least one measure, Josef Stalin seems to be faring better than Putin in the minds of Russians: A total of 70 percent said that the Soviet dictator played a positive role in "the life of our country," according to results released by independent pollster Levada Center on April 16.

Polling agencies do not appear to have asked exactly the same question about Putin, but a Levada survey released this month found that 66 percent approved of Putin’s conduct as president – down from 82 percent a year ago and 89 percent in June 2015. In January 2000, Putin’s first month as president after he was handed the job by Boris Yeltsin, the figure was 84 percent.

Loss of trust is a potential problem for Putin on the road to 2024, when his current term is due to end and the current Russian Constitution bars him from seeking another.

All of his apparent options for keeping a hand on the helm – such as by changing the constitution to stay on or by anointing a successor and stepping into a less formal but influential “national leader” role – would seem to require a sizable reserve of popular trust.

'Father Of The Nation'

While there are differences -- including Poroshenko’s substantially shorter political history and the fact that he was running in an actual election, not trying to get around one – the Ukrainian incumbent’s effort to win another five years in power by casting himself as a responsible parent and reliable protector failed spectacularly.

The 53-year-old president “was going for a father-of-the-nation image,” but Zelenskiy “beat him by ridiculing the paternalistic ambition, desacralizing Poroshenko’s office and mocking his gravitas,” Bloomberg Opinion columnist Leonid Bershidsky wrote in an article published the day after the runoff

Still, while Zelenskiy and Porosehenko are vastly different, there’s one spot where their Venn-diagram circles overlap a little bit: Zelenskiy’s show and his fledgling political party are called Servant Of The People, while Putin with some frequency uses a similar phrase to describe himself: “Your humble servant.”

Bershidsky suggested that Zelenskiy may come closer to fitting the description.

The rule of the soon-to-be president, who for the moment has no presence in parliament and who crowdsourced questions about the composition of the cabinet and other matters of state during the campaign, is likely to be a “direct democracy experiment,” Bershidsky wrote, with Zelenskiy turning straight to the populace for support.

That governing style would “pose challenges both for Westerners hoping the country will remain on a path toward NATO and European Union membership and for Putin allies hoping Ukraine will slip back into the Russian fold,” he wrote. “Neither group is likely to have reliable interlocutors in Zelenskiy’s Ukraine. Both will have to go directly to the Ukrainian people by any means they can find.”

Putin did this right away. He went, at least, directly to the Ukrainian people living in “certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts -- not-so-shorthand for the parts of the Donbas held by Russia-backed separatists – with a decree offering them a fast track to Russian citizenship.

'Spirit And Aims'

While Putin’s ruling apparatus had set the stage for the citizenship decree by passing related legislation months ago, it still came as a surprise to many (that is, to me) – not least because Russian officials had suggested that they would take a wait-and-see approach to Zelenskiy.

Putin has pointedly refrained from congratulating Zelenskiy on his promotion from TV president to real one, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that the Kremlin will judge him “by his actions.” And Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said a day after the runoff that while Russia had no “illusions” that Zelenskiy would sharply shift Kyiv’s stated positions on Russia, the election created “chances for improving cooperation with our country.”

Then Moscow took what looked like to a big step to torpedo those hopes.

The citizenship decree, issued less than 72 hours after polls closed, was “yet another confirmation of Russia's true role as an aggressor state that is waging a war against Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said. The U.S. State Department called it a “highly provocative action” that intensified Russia’s “assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty [and] territorial integrity.”

And Germany and France -- the European guarantors of the 2015 Minsk II accord -- said Putin's decree "goes against the spirit and aims" of the Minsk process, which seeks to establish a stable cease-fire and a political settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which has killed some 13,000 people since April 2014.

In the face of the fast and firmly worded criticism from Kyiv and the West, Putin defended the decree by claiming it echoed policies in European Union member states like Romania and Hungary that grant citizenship to "their own ethnic kin living outside their borders."

"How are Russians living in Ukraine worse than Romanians...or Hungarians? Or Ukrainians who live there but feel an unbreakable link with Russia" because of family ties or "other considerations," Putin said. "I see nothing unusual here."

'Russian-Thinking'

The decree, however, makes no reference to ethnicity, background, or self-identification. Its wording suggests that anyone living in the separatist-held parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – both of which border Russia -- can apply.

Meanwhile, Vladislav Surkov, the longtime Putin aide who handles Kremlin policy on the Donbas conflict and has written voluminous, fawning articles on Russia’s future, reached into his frequently unusual lexicon to describe those targeted for fast-track access to Russian passports.

Moscow was carrying out its duty to Russian-speaking and “Russian-thinking” people in the Donbas, he said – echoing the talk of a “Russian world” that circulated at an earlier stage in the war, when there were fears that Russia and the separatists would push westward in a bid to take over a huge swath of Ukraine reaching to Russian-controlled Crimea or the Moldovan border.

In addition to throwing up a big new barrier to the implementation of the Minsk deal, Putin’s decree appeared to put the warmer ties that the Kremlin says it wants with Kyiv even further out of reach.

A day after he signed it, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation that its authors say will “secure” the use of Ukrainian as the official state language, drawing a sharply critical response from Russia.

'More Hell, Please'

The Guardian quoted an adviser to Surkov as saying that Putin held off on issuing the decree earlier to avoid letting “Poroshenko and the country’s radicals” use it during the campaign.

But some observers suspected other Kremlin calculations were involved.

“The measure is timed as if the Kremlin wanted to help Poroshenko’s team to push through the divisive language law, which will provide Russia with further arguments to protect its ethnic kin in Ukraine,” author Leonid Ragozin wrote on Twitter. “Больше ада, as they say in Russia -- more hell please.”

“What’s advantageous to the Kremlin is that it can [portray] itself as a force protecting the existing delicate texture of society, while the nationalists are promoting a radical cultural revolution that will upend it and create cultural barriers which previously didn’t exist,” Ragozin wrote.

A Piece Of The Action

Putin’s defense of the decree came in comments on April 25 in Vladivostok, where he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first time.

The meeting put Russia into a more prominent place in the diplomacy over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program – the subject of two summits in the past year between Kim and Trump, both of which ended without agreements from Pyongyang to scrap it.

There was also no visible breakthrough at the Putin-Kim summit – a result that Russian state media had prepared for in advance by saying that no agreements or joint statements were expected.

Putin, whose country has been involved in six-party talks over North Korea’s nuclear program and has backed sanctions in the UN Security Council but whose clout with Pyongyang pales in comparison to China’s, suggested that security guarantees from the United States alone – if given -- would not be enough to get Kim to shut down the North’s nuclear program.

“I’m deeply convinced that…it won’t be possible to get by without international guarantees,” Putin told reporters after his talks with Kim.

Translation: Pull up a chair for Russia, please.

Back To Budapest

Putin added that the security guarantees would have to be legally binding and that disputes among nations, over Pyongyang’s nuclear program or anything else, must be “regulated by international law instead of the rule of force” – a principle his own country is widely accused of violating with the takeover of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

“It's funny (well, to a certain extent) to see Putin talking about security guarantees and international law,” Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, a Moscow-based NGO focusing on Russia’s nuclear arsenal, wrote on Twitter.

“It didn't quite work that way with Ukraine and the Budapest Memorandum,” he wrote, referring to the 1994 pact in which Russia, the United States, and Britain offered Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for its surrender of Soviet-era nuclear weapons.

Editor's Note: Due to the Good Friday holiday, The Week In Russia is being issued on Thursday this week. To receive Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia each week via e-mail, subscribe by clicking here.

'Gone Mad'

In big black letters against a bright red background, a magazine cover in the former Soviet Union this week made a simple declaration: "Everyone's gone mad."

It was a Ukrainian magazine, Novoye Vremya, and the faces framing the words made clear that the subject of the cover story was the Ukrainian presidential election.

But the headline could have worked pretty well for a story across the border in Russia, where 70 percent of people surveyed by Levada Center in late March said that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin played a positive role -- either completely positive or mainly positive -- in what the independent pollster called "the life of our country."

Only 19 percent said Stalin played a mainly negative role, while 11 percent couldn't say. Answering a separate question, a total of 51 percent said they had a positive personal opinion of Stalin -- including 4 percent who felt admiration, 41 percent who had respect, and 6 percent who voiced a "liking" for the late autocrat.

The pro-Stalin numbers were up sharply from the past few years and were higher than at any time since Levada started asking these questions in the early 2000s, during President Vladimir Putin's first presidential term.

Some of the historians and activists who have sought to detail Stalin's crimes against his own people have accused Putin's government of whitewashing the dictator's Great Terror -- or as the late former chairman of the rights group Memorial put it, to push the memory of his abuses "to the distant periphery of the consciousness" of the Russian people.

'Purely Mythological'

So, in some ways the upshot of the Levada poll looks like a no-brainer: Putin has succeeded, the thinking might go, and Russians -- seeking a strong hand like the one they may believe Stalin employed to industrialize the country and set it up for a nuclear-tipped Cold War with the United States -- will go along with whatever eggs Putin must break to make that kind of an omelet.

But it's not that simple, and an alternative interpretation is that the poll results spell bad news for Putin regardless of his public statements -- and private thoughts, for that matter -- about Stalin.

After all, one factor that seems to draw people to Stalin -- or to what Russian socialist Leonty Byzov said was the "purely mythological image of Stalin" -- is disaffection with their current government at any and all levels, from the local bureaucrats and police on up to the president and his cabinet.

That was true in the 1990s, when millions of Russians were struggling to stay afloat and get their bearings following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its communist system, and an entire way of life.

Income Inequality

Memories of the actual Stalin era were far fresher then, and a sickeningly gaudy wealth of details about his abuses had been pouring out into the light since the glasnost era of Mikhail Gorbachev -- but despite that, there were those who yearned for a leader they believed would bring order and restore justice, punishing those perceived to be profiting from the misfortunes of others.

It is true now, too, according to Byzov, a researcher at the Sociology Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences. And now, the truth about Stalin's crimes may be established but it is easier to avoid or just not notice, relegated to some degree to history and to monuments -- like the Wall of Sorrow in Moscow, which Putin helped unveil in October 2017 but did not visit on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions a year later.

Russians now feel "increasingly abandoned" and "Stalin is seen in society as a defender of the oppressed," Byzov said, according to the news outlet RBK. "The figure of Stalin is starting to be perceived as a symbol of justice and an alternative to the current authorities, who are judged to be unfair, cruel, and uncaring about the people."

Of course, Putin's official result in the March 2018 presidential election -- nearly 77 percent of the vote -- hardly points to disaffection, even if factors like cheating, the sidelining of opponents, and the state's dominance over TV content are taken into account.

Melting Middle Class?

But his poll numbers have slipped substantially since the vote, in part because of an unpopular pension reform that is raising the retirement age and compounded concerns among Russians about their economic prospects.

With oil exports fueling strong economic growth during his first two terms, in 2000-08, Putin is credited with helping to build a bigger middle class in a country that was supposed to have been classless just a decade or two earlier. But according to Russians themselves, the size of the middle class has shrunk substantially since 2014, the year global oil prices tanked and countries in the West imposed sanctions on Russia over its interference in Ukraine.

A poll called the Ivanov Consumer Index -- after the Russian equivalent of the common name Johnson -- found that 47 percent of those surveyed in 2018 considered themselves members of the middle class, down from 60 percent in 2014, the daily Vedomosti reported. The proportion of respondents who said their income was below average, meanwhile, rose from 35 percent in 2014 to 48 percent in 2018.

A poll conducted by Levada a few weeks after Putin's reelection last year found that 45 percent of Russians felt that over his years in power Putin had failed to provide for the "just distribution of income" -- a complaint cited by more respondents than any other in the survey.

Mercedes vs. Ford

And a study by the Higher School of Economics and state-run bank VEB put a number on that distribution, according to the Moscow Times and Kommersant: It said that that the richest 3 percent of Russians hold more than 89 percent of all financial assets.

By coincidence or not, the U.S. giant Ford announced in late March that it will close three plants in Russia this year, ending production of cars in the country, though it will continue to make vans -- and about a week later, Putin opened a Mercedes-Benz factory.

Calling himself "your humble servant," as he often does, Putin said that he and many of his colleagues drove Mercedes and added, "It is absolutely certain that Mercedes will be popular with Russian consumers.

"Popular, surely. But affordable? Not likely," a Financial Times article said of the luxury sedans that the plant, the first to be opened in years in Russia by a foreign carmaker, is to produce.

Celebrating Alla

Ford, of course, is an icon of the middle class, and once manufactured the most popular foreign car in Russia. Mercedes cars have been icons of a different sort, unmistakable status symbols in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Speaking of icons: Alla Pugacheva.

The singer, who turned 70 on April 15, is perhaps the most recognizable performer with a career spanning two eras, Soviet and post-Soviet.

Her best-known song, perhaps, is one whose title translates as A Million Scarlet Roses, a tale of great love and extravagant financial sacrifice that one Twitter user said "any Russian will recognize...after the first two notes."

That statement applies to many people in other former Soviet republics as well -- and to many foreigners whose lives are tied up with Russia or the region.

Birthday tributes to the diva ranged from a telegram from Putin -- who wrote that Pugacheva's talent, voice, "colorful artistic temperament, and capacity for work" had earned her "truly national glory," according to the Kremlin -- to a stunt in which employees of independent media outlet Dozhd wore big red wigs and sang one of her songs, This World.