The Proof is in the Putin
Excerpts of an article by Andrew Ryvkin at Air Mail: Vladimir Putin is up for re-election. At the time of writing, the outcome is unclear: Is Putin going to get 93 percent of the vote, or will the Kremlin settle for a cool—and totally reasonable—82 percent? At one point during the 2011 parliamentary elections, Russian-state-media polls showed 146 percent in favor of the ruling party, so no number is off the table—only the idea that this election is free, fair, or real…
“Our presidential election is not really democracy; it’s costly bureaucracy,” said Putin’s spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, in an interview for The New York Times in August of last year. Peskov, known for telling the truth with the frequency of a solar eclipse, is right. Be it a babushka in Siberia or the C.I.A. station chief in Moscow, no one will be surprised by the outcome…
The biggest question about Election 2024, Russia edition, isn’t who’s going to win and by what margin, but why it’s happening in the first place. Does a neo-totalitarian dictatorship like Russia’s really need campaigns, polls, and competing candidates? Doesn’t the Kremlin have anything better to do, like bombing maternity wards in Ukraine or slowly killing off opposition leaders at home? But Putin, whose obsession with the letter of the law is matched only by his disregard for its spirit, still wants you to vote…
The 2024 presidential election in Russia isn’t about projecting an image of Putin as a legitimate ruler to a wide audience. At home, Putin is regarded as the national leader; his friends in Budapest and Tehran will accept him no matter the atrocities he commits, and his foes in Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington have no illusions about Vladimir Putin—or suffrage in a neo-Fascist regime…
But this election isn’t meant for any of them. “Putin likes plebiscites. He likes seeing popular support,” says Pertsev, “but chances are, he has no idea about how this show of support comes to be.” Why is this election happening? The answer is because it’s not an election at all, simply a multi-million-dollar production of a one-man show—put on for a one-man audience. An exercise in solipsism worthy of the Sun King.
VIDEO: Putin Walk
