Alleged plot gives Putin an unnecessary boost

Muscovites are cynical by nature. Many mocked or had serious doubts about the suspicious timing of Monday’s announcement that assassins intending to murder Vladimir Putin had been captured as long ago as Jan. 4.

But the current Russian prime minister and former president did not need the likely electoral bounce that the delayed news of the alleged plot should give him in Sunday’s presidential elections. He was already certain to win the presidency again.

Support for Putin, who has been in power since 2000, had dropped to a historic low of about 50 per cent in January after as many as 100,000 protesters turned out several times in Moscow to decry rampant fraud in parliamentary elections three months ago. But at least four polls released over the past few days found that support for Putin had surged again to between 58 and 66 per cent. If those numbers translate into votes, Putin will have far more than enough votes to pass the 50 per cent threshold required to win the presidency on the first ballot on Sunday.

That the 59-year-old former Soviet agent in East Germany is headed for another landslide victory was the expectation of every one of the tens of thousands of protesters who turned out for the last major anti-putin rally Sunday as a few flakes of snow fell on the capital’s elegantly named, but not particularly beautiful Garden Ring. But most of them asserted that their movement — a loose collective that gathered mostly because of meetings called on the Internet — had succeeded because it clearly got Putin’s attention. They also vowed they would continue to publicly agitate against Putin’s rule, no matter how many votes he receives Sunday.

As has been noted since they first turned out 12 weeks ago to angrily denounce fraud in the parliamentary elections, the demonstrators are a disparate, eclectic bunch. They do not agree much on anything other than that, to varying degrees, they dislike or distrust Putin, although some of them intensely dislike and distrust him. Other than the white ribbons they have taken to wearing to identify themselves, they are an amorphous group with no obvious leaders, no obvious ideology and no obvious political future.

At the beginning, many of the protesters were the spoiled children of Moscow’s self-regarding elites. Having tasted a bit of the world, they want Russia’s wealth to be shared more equally and seek an end to rampant corruption that poisons foreign visa requests and many interactions with the government and with businesses, as well as high-level interference in the legal system and the media.

Over the past few weeks, a slightly frayed older crowd has quietly joined the well-dressed kids, whose memories of the much harsher days of communism are thin or non-existent.

These newer activists have vivid memories of Stalin, Brezhnev’s brilliantly named Golden Age of Stagnation and the brief joy that enveloped Gorbachev’s perestroika movement before Boris Yeltsin’s erratic Wild West decade. They may have been emboldened to become part of the protests by the fact that police did not crack heads when the first demonstrations were held.

Few if any of the demon-

At least four polls released over the past few days found

that support for Putin had surged

again

strators are revolutionaries. They never speak of violence or of wanting to overthrow the state. Rather, they regard themselves as patriots and reformers. What they seek is a fairer, more normal country where the government, police and courts are accountable and major business deals are not opaque and riven with cronyism.

A lot of those shivering on the snowy sidewalks of the Garden Ring on Sunday had interesting things to say. One of those who got my attention was a 47-yearold architect and single mother of three.

“I can go on my knees to the government like a supplicant,” Natasha Tretyakov told me. “But I am not ready to have my children bow or kowtow. At the same time, I do not want to relive the chaos of 1917 (Lenin’s revolution) or 1991 (the end of communism).

“It is not, as the president says, that we do not love our country. It is that we did not make the new rules of this country and we feel we must somehow act now. We are here because we support a new Russia.”

Whether such a polite approach will work in a country with such a dark history of authoritarianism, often delivered with an iron fist, is an awkward question.