PUTIN: RUSSIA’S MISS MANNERS?
In Moscow, years of traffic lawlessness give way to polite order,
The usually busy Moscow street was empty of cars and also of police officers as a light drizzle turned into a downpour.
Yet, in a city where traffic rules used to be viewed as entirely optional, a dozen pedestrians all stayed rooted on the sidewalk, waiting obediently in the rain as a red light counted down the 160 seconds they needed to wait before crossing.
“I always try to follow the rules. I want to live in a civilized country,” said Aleksei Smirnov, a 22-year-old courier, when asked why he bothered to wait when there was virtually no risk of getting hit by a car or fined for jaywalking.
For anyone who lived in Moscow in the 1990s, a decade-long fiesta of disobedience and bracing liberty, Smirnov’s reverence for the rituals of good behaviour is a jolting reminder of how much Russia, or at least its capital, has changed since President Vladimir Putin took power in 1999.
But as with so much of what happens in Russia, working out the direction of that change depends on what you make of Putin: sinister former KGB officer bent on dragging the country back toward the fearful obedience of the Soviet Union, or simply a tough but modern-minded enforcer intent on bringing some order out of chaos?
For government officials, the growing and once unimaginable respect for bothersome traffic signals is proof that, whatever the complaints of Kremlin critics about creeping dictatorship, the iron rule of Putin and his hand-picked choice as Moscow mayor, Sergei S. Sobyanin, has brought about a long-overdue shift toward a gentler, more law-abiding society.
“It is not because people are afraid but because they are now taught from childhood to follow traffic and other rules,” said Alexander Polyakov, deputy director of the Moscow Traffic Control Center.
Polyakov said he was dismayed by Russia’s image in the West as a lawless land of brutish oppression. He insisted that, at least with respect to traffic signals, people obey not out of fear of any fines — the maximum is 500 rubles, or about $8 (U.S.) — but because “they now respect themselves and also each other.”
It is a view that chimes with Putin’s repeated calls for greater discipline and order. Soon after taking power, he vowed to introduce a “dictatorship of law” that he said would apply to everyone.
But many are highly skeptical about whether Putin has delivered — or even has any real interest in delivering — on that promise. Law enforcement agencies and the courts routinely hound government critics over minor or invented offences but show little interest in punishing the more serious misdeeds of well-connected insiders.
Leon Kosals, a sociologist who teaches in the law department of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, said Muscovites “know that they cannot get access to justice, that it is not a fair game.” But he said they increasingly try to follow traffic and other rules “because they want to live in a modern country, not because they think the system is now fair.”
Rather than an endorsement of the Kremlin, Kosals added, such behaviour is in some ways a form of silent protest, a defiant display of a desire to join the West, a political and cultural zone constantly vilified by staterun news media.