Strongman, The

From now on, he himself would nominate them, and their appointment would be rubber-stamped by regional assemblies. (The implication, never properly explained, seemed to be that Beslan would not have happened if regional governors were not ‘out of control’.) Second, it was made almost impossible for independent politicians or radical opposition parties to get into the State Duma. Until now, half of the 450-seat parliament had been elected from party lists, while the other half were individual politicians directly elected by voters in 225 constituencies. From now on, all would be chosen from party lists; the single-member constituencies were abolished. The threshold required for a party to enter parliament at all was raised from 5 to 7 per cent. The rules for setting up new political parties were also tightened.
    Putin was ratcheting up his own control, and strangling the opposition. The ‘vertical of power’ created in 2000 was now made rigid. Putin’s ‘ideologist’, Vladislav Surkov, was wheeled out to dignify the crackdown with a pseudo-academic term. He called it ‘sovereign democracy’, or sometimes ‘managed democracy’. In fact, it was the end of democracy. In an interview with the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda , he gave an Alice in Wonderland version of the latest reform package. Everything was the opposite of how it seemed: the new election system would not weaken the opposition but ‘bring it back from political oblivion’; the reforms would strengthen not Putin but the state; the appointed governors would have greater, not fewer rights. A further initiative announced by Putin – the creation of a new ‘Public Chamber’, an assembly of 126 appointed worthies who would discuss civic initiatives and draft laws – had caused some bewilderment, since it was assumed that this was what the elected State Duma was supposed to do. Surkov explained that the trouble with parliaments is that deputies are always thinking about re-election; in the West this is known as ‘being held to account by the electorate’, in Russia according to Surkov, it leads to populism. The experts in the Public Chamber would be less dependent on the political climate and thus be more objective. 12 (A measure of Surkov’s grasp on reality was given a few years later, when he said on television that ‘Putin is a person who was sent to Russia by fate and by the Lord at a difficult time for Russia. He was preordained by fate to preserve our peoples.’ 13 Clearly such a God-given leader could interpret democracy any way he liked.)
    And what were people to make of the president’s talk of foreign powers trying to seize a ‘juicy piece of pie’? According to the experienced analyst Dmitry Trenin, Putin’s foreign policy was entering a new stage. Until 2003, he wrote, ‘Russia had been mostly moving toward rapprochement with the West under the slogan of its “European choice” and with a quest to become allied with the US.’ Henceforth, ‘Moscow pursued a policy of nonalignment, with an accentuated independence from the West, but combined with reluctance to confront it.’ 14
    It was the beginning of a new isolationist stance. In Putin’s second term there would be no more sucking up. He believed Russia had dropped its guard and needed to defend itself against twin evils – terrorism (now defined as part of a foreign conspiracy) and Western-style democracy, which was infiltrating the former Soviet space, first through Georgia, and soon ... through Ukraine.

 
    7
ENEMIES EVERYWHERE
    The Orange Revolution
    The scenes in Kiev in late 2004 caused apoplexy in the Kremlin: a sea of orange clothes and banners, a million protesters braving sub-zero temperatures, day and night, to bring the Ukrainian capital to a standstill. Bad enough that this was a repeat of the Tbilisi events a year earlier – protests against a rigged election, mass support for a pro-American, nationalist candidate who offered an alternative to corrupt, authoritarian, pro-Russian rule. But this was happening in Ukraine, the most important for Russia of all the former Soviet republics. With 47 million inhabitants, Ukraine was ten times the size of Georgia. One in six of the population was an ethnic Russian, and there were millions of mixed Russian-Ukrainian families. Putin (like many Russians) saw it as a mere extension of Russia itself. He reportedly told President George W. Bush in 2008: ‘You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a