Putin poised to win, but without the youth vote
Russians who grew up under his leadership are among the least likely to support him.
He was born in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. He was still a child in grade school when a former KGB agent named Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president. Now Alexei Zaitsev faces the prospect that he could be in his 30s before he lives under another leader.
But the college student said Putin would not get his vote, at least as Russians head to the polls Sunday. The prime minister is widely expected to return to the presidency after the balloting, and said in an interview released Friday that “it would be normal” if he ran for another six-year term in 2018.
“I don’t mind living under Putin if he can change himself and do something good for the country, but I think Putin’s big problem is that he can’t change,” Zaitsev said, touching a white ribbon on his chest, a symbol of the opposition protests that have swelled in recent months.
Like others born in that pivotal year in Russian history, Zaitsev has grown increasingly disenchanted with the country’s leadership — and disillusioned with former role models, including a childhood teacher who called him a traitor for opposing it.
Zaitsev doesn’t remember anything from the last months of communist rule, when he was still a baby, and his first memory of a political event that bothered him was the 1995 killing of a popular Russian journalist and TV anchor, still unsolved. He remembers that his parents were glued to the television in horror, giving him his first message that something was wrong in the world around him.
His coming-of-age years were under Putin, but Zaitsev says he never really trusted the leader he saw on television every night because his parents were wary of a former KGB agent: Alexei’s great-grandfather spent 20 years in Stalin’s gulag in Siberia.
But the Moscow University journalism student says his real eye-opener came in December, when he volunteered to join the ranks of election observers with the liberal Yabloko party and spent the day of the parliament elections in the polling station in his old high school. He remembers feeling pleasantly surprised to find his two teachers of Russian literature and chemistry on the local election commission.
The day went off uneventfully without any violations, he says, and shortly after midnight, when the votes were all counted, he went home with a signed and stamped copy of the ballot count in his pocket, showing Putin’s United Russia party with only 35%.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes when the next day I found out that the United Russia ended up with 58% in my station,” Zaitsev said, shaking his head and smiling. “The fact that this outrageous lie was obviously supported by these people who taught me and other children to be honest and all was really disgusting.”
When President Dmitry Medvedev visited the university’s journalism school in January, Zaitsev told him the story as best he could and gave his aides the relevant papers. Medvedev commended him for vigilance and offered to take the case to court. The student built what he thought was a foolproof case with the help of a young lawyer.
But, he said, their witnesses were not interviewed, the signatures on the vote protocol were not examined, both teachers testified under oath against him, and the case was lost.
When Olga Timan, the literature teacher he recalls respecting so much, was leaving the courtroom, someone in the audience asked her whether she was ashamed of what she had done. Timan replied, referring to Zaitsev’s role in the trial: “I am not sorry about anything except that we reared and brought up a Judas.”
Zaitsev was stunned. “Timan and thousands other small people at the foot of this huge system are all crushed by this necessity to publicly lie to support the massive falsifications,” he said. “I don’t know if she sincerely may be thinking that by lying like this she helps the general cause of upholding stability in the country.”
Zaitsev said he is confident that Putin, who has strong support in the provinces and probably could win Sunday’s vote honestly, will rely on falsifications again to avoid the risk of not winning in the first round.
“For credibility, Putin absolutely needs to win Moscow of all places, but here I don’t see how they can pull it off without widespread cheating,” Zaitsev said. “I can hardly name a young person I know who is going to vote for Putin.”
Anastasia Rybachenko, a 20-year-old political science student, certainly isn’t. At 13, she said, she realized that the state wasn’t her best friend when she started listening to rock music and turned to the Internet. There she learned a story different from the one told on government-dominated television, where imprisoned tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was portrayed as a dangerous criminal who should be isolated from society for many years.
“I don’t think Putin has any convictions or that he really professes any ideology,” she said. “In a political sense, he is nothing but a cheap populist, but he is also the kind of crafty man who will cling to the last to this unlimited power he enjoys so much.”
Rybachenko said she won’t go to the polls but will certainly go to a protest rally.
At an opposition protest Feb. 26, another 20-year-old looked distinctly out of place. Vitaly Blinov, a technical college student from a southern Moscow suburb, held a heart-shaped poster reading “Putin loves everybody” next to a long line of anti-putin demonstrators holding hands along Moscow’s Garden Ring road.
“Look at this guy in this huge jeep,” he said, pointing at a Toyota truck passing by with a portrait of Putin with an X over his face and honking in solidarity with the demonstrators.
“He rides this luxury vehicle and all these people around don’t seem to be paupers either, and still they are all against Putin!” he said. “They don’t know what they want really!”
But Zaitsev does know what he wants: honest elections, and no violence and repression.
“Putin seems very nervous, as he keeps scaring us with a civil war,” he said, referring to a recent speech by the prime minister. “The best we should do is continue our peaceful protest and not give in to provocations from any side.”