For Putin, it’s a matter of time

Eric Morse2/19/11

Vladimir Putin’s days are numbered, but probably not to the extent that his opponents would like. Judging by his performance through the past week, if the anti-Putin demonstrations of last weekend are greeted as tolerantly as those of last weekend were, they are still not going to overthrow any regime. And warning signs have been given that there are limits; local media coverage was heavily censored and influential editors were summarily fired. A cynic might be waiting for the mass arrests to start, but Putin is probably more subtle than that — for now.

Putin will probably win his March Presidential election with a ‘managed majority’. He will then have — nominally — up to 12 more years in power. The ‘revolving-door tsardom’ looks like a guarantee of regime stability. In reality it is anything but. Putin is in a weak position in the long run, because in the end he has no institutional legitimacy.

To survive into succeeding generations, even an authoritarian regime needs broad-based institutional legitimacy of some sort. Although it lasted only 70 years in the end, the Soviet regime had this, mainly conferred by the Communist Party’s much-manipulated but very real leadership in Second World War. Toward the end, no matter how grungy day-to-day existence got, or how sour the jokes were in the street (‘Did you know Ivan changed jobs? He used to steal in the tailor shop but now he steals in the grocery shop.’) nobody seriously questioned the institutions of State and Party.

A seat in the Supreme Soviet might have been nominal but it was a local honour nonetheless. People might have been tired of the processions of black limousines with their blue lights flashing, but the succession of those who rode in them was managed without a hitch from Khrushchev’s emergence in 1956 through Gorbachev’s succession in 1985.

Checks and balances are required in such a system, but unlike those we are used to, they operate mainly at the second tier of power and inside the ruling organs. The Party leaned heavily upon the security apparatus, but made sure that it was never a power unto itself after 1953 when its last Stalinist chief Beria was shot (after at least a Star Chamber proceeding; some proprieties were observed even then). The officers of the Armed Forces never viewed themselves as independent political actors. Otherwise, it was more or less a collective balance of normative behaviour at the top; the Politburo and Central Committee made sure that none of their individual members got out of line. It was a recipe for stagnation, but 30 years of stability in that part of the world might still provoke nostalgia, and it might have lasted longer if Gorbachev had not tried to fix it without realizing he was breaking a closed system with incalculable consequences.

Contemporary China has a similar system. Perhaps owing to social media, perhaps simply because our own sophistication has evolved and China is far more engaged with the world than Soviet Russia was, we see their internal problems more clearly in real time, but it is clear that the important decisions are taken behind the veil of the Party, whose legitimacy is to be defended at all costs. Given China’s history, almost any alternatives are too terrible to imagine.

The Iranian regime likewise has a broad power base. The middle classes may despise the rule of the mullahs, but by and large the rulers do not have to care particularly; they are broadly supported by the clergy and backed up by a Revolutionary Guard and large armed militia (basij) that has its interests solidly identified with the regime. There may be violent power squabbles, but the regime itself is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Since the end of Soviet power in 1991, institutional legitimacy has been the elephant in the room for Russia’s rulers. Whatever the Communist Party may have been, nothing has replaced it. Putin does not have a broad base that is meaningfully tied to him. He has relied on manipulating the plutocrats through misuse of the judicial system, but the plutocrats themselves are a weak reed, effectively emasculated. He has taken over the levers of State and media power and brought the regional governors under control by personal appointments and outright intimidation. But he has nothing resembling a Revolutionary Guard or armed basij — or a cause beyond his own power for anyone to support — and those elements are crucial to an authoritarian regime in its first generation. So he has tried to substitute personal rule-by-revolving-door, and everyone sees through it.

Putin may last another year, or several, but in the end he will come down — unfortunately, probably messily, and given the range of likely successors, and the continuing lack of binding national institutions, when he does come down those who wished for it may regret that they got their wish.

Eric Morse, a former Canadian diplomat, is vice-chair of security studies at the Royal Canadian Military Institute.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Putin+matter+time/5881707/story.html

在google上用「民主, 胡卜凱」搜尋，你會找到100頁(大約有1,000條項目)，剔除其中其他人或不相關的報導或評論，我說我寫了100篇上、下和「民主議題」相關的文章，決非「虛」言。16 – 20萬字則是保守估計。何況，我嚇唬你幹嘛？

我引用那些數字的重點在說明：

「我不可能每篇文章都從1 + 1 = 2和盤古開天闢地談起。」

這句話則在指出、顯示、或論述：你沒有「資格或份量」以，「扯淡」來評論拙作。你看不懂嗎？

本人文章(主要)散見以下網頁：

1.    本城市(民主政治相關議題請見《中國脈動錄》、《政治和社會》、以及《知識和議題》等專欄)。

2.    個人部落格《知識與社會廣場》 -- http://www.fokas.com.tw/

3.    《新聞對談》 >> 《胡卜凱的主頁》(請按《胡卜凱 發起的討論總表》)http://tb.chinatimes.com/mypage.asp?nick=20&zid=1

如果有興趣，你可以從《《中國的民主政治建設》的討論》這篇拙作開始指教。https://city.udn.com/2976/1583250?tpno=8&cate_no=80786

經過兩千多年來的流血革命和劇烈鬥爭，當前全球近200個國家/政治實體中，大約有160個左右實行不同程度的民主制度或機制。我在本城市和其他網頁討論「民主」相關議題以及與中國「民主」相關議題的文章，大概至少各有8 – 10萬字；內容包含理論、史實、和時事。總數應該在100篇上下。因此，我不可能每篇文章都從1 + 1 = 2和盤古開天闢地談起。從而，「扯淡」與否，大概不是你用兩、三百字和一、兩個在邏輯上不相干的例子可以有資格或份量評論。

「民主政治」以及「『民主政治』在中國」都是重要的公共議題；歡迎你以嚴肅、就事論事、依理說理、和言之有物的方式來討論。

本文於 修改第 3 次

The Protests in Moscow Will Not Spark a Russian Spring

The outlook for a popular uprising against strongman-style rule in Moscow is bleak because Russians believe order is more important than democracy.

Owen Matthews, 12/14/11

As thousands of riot police moved in to break protesters’ heads on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg in the wake of Russia’s rigged parliamentary election, Sen. John McCain gleefully tweeted "Vlad -- the Arab Spring, coming soon to a neighborhood near you."

But he's wrong. the 60,000-strong opposition rally last Saturday was the biggest antigovernment protest since the fall of communism. But Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square isn’t Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and Vladimir Putin isn’t about to be unseated by a wave of popular anger. Yes, the protests are the biggest challenge the Putin regime has seen since tens of thousands of pensioners took to the streets in 2005 to protest cuts.

And yes, the majority of Russians voted against United Russia, the official Kremlin-backed party that took, by its own crooked count, 49.5 percent of the vote. But the protesters on the streets of Russia’s largest cities still represent only a tiny sliver of Russian society. Among them are many of Russia's brightest, best and undoubtedly most media savvy. But the numbers are still tiny. Only 3 percent voted for the only liberal party allowed to participate in the elections (or if you take their own account, 6 percent). They is no Muslim Brotherhood in waiting. Some leaders of A Just Russia (14 percent) and the Communists (20 percent) have backed the protests -- but so far there’s no sign that their voters are willing to follow them in their hundreds of thousands onto the streets.

What Putin has on his hands is a democracy-management problem, not a revolution problem. His spinmeisters messed up -- first in chickening out of the creation of a tame liberal party headed by oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov that would have deflected much of the current protests, and again in the clumsy handling of massive electoral fraud. The Kremlin’s sinister ideologue in chief, Vladislav Surkov (creator of Russia’s “managed democracy,” as well as being a novelist, poet, and former employee of jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky) put his finger on it in a rare interview this week. The "urban discontented" must be brought into the political system, he said. True to form, Prokhorov popped up again this week announcing that he would run against Putin for the presidency in March -- and drawing accusations that he was a Kremlin-approved liberal stalking horse. And Putin will win anyway, of course.

This is no Arab Spring, because unlike Mubarak and his ilk, Putin still has many options. He could play the good tsar, for instance, distance himself from United Russia, instigate some high-profile sacking, and maybe corruption trials. Last month Putin wrong-footed a panel of foreign Russia watchers when he disarmingly agreed to a slew of accusations they leveled -- from the need for more pluralism in the political system to systemic corruption. Whether he’s willing or able to do anything about them is a different question.

But Sunday's vote was not so much a vote personally against Putin as a vote against endemic corruption that ordinary Russians encounter in their everyday lives. As veteran commentator Yulia Latynia wrote earlier this month, 99 percent of the Russians who voted against Putin probably haven't heard of the anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who has become the figurehead of the protest movement. But each and every one of them has personal experience of the rottenness of the system.

Navalny is a lawyer by training who has systematically publicized evidence of massive official corruption on the Internet -- and was imprisoned for 15 days after the postelection protests for refusing to obey a policeman’s orders. He is by far the most important figure in the opposition precisely because he speaks to the central political concern of most Russians, which is corruption -- not press freedom, not concern about Putin's rearmament spree or crackdown on immigrants or poisoning defectors or jailing dissidents and rebel oligarchs. On the contrary, the evidence is that the Russian man in the street loves all that stuff (according to a recent survey Russians prioritize “order” over “democracy” by three to one). But what ordinary folk object to is the thieving of the state’s servants, the abuse of power, the systematic extortion by police and the sheer vast dead hand of bureaucracy that has killed off Russia's real economy. That's why Navalny's message gets far, far more traction than all the liberal politicians and their griping put together (even though thanks to Kremlin control of the mainstream media he is still a national figure only to Russian Netizens). But Navalny's politics are strongly nationalist, not pro-Western and liberal, and he recently joined an anti-immigrant "Russian March."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/14/the-protests-in-moscow-will-not-spark-a-russian-spring.html

本文於 修改第 1 次

Has Putin Come to the End of His Regime?

Anders Aslund, 12/12/11

On Saturday December 10, the spell of the Vladimir Putin regime was broken. Today, the key questions that many are asking are how fast he will lose power and what will come in his place.

Peaceful mass demonstrations took place all over Russia. In Moscow, probably 80,000 gathered on Bolotnaya Ploshchad near the Kremlin to protest against Putin and what they and most observers say were the stolen elections of December 4. I had argued before these protests that if more than 50,000 came, the regime would be seen as finished.

This was the biggest and most important demonstration in Russia since August 1991. Demonstrations took place in at least 15 Russian cities throughout the country, so this is a national phenomenon and not limited to Moscow. A 26-year-old Russian told me that for the first time in his life he was proud of being Russian.

Since 2005, I have been waiting for the collapse of the Putin regime. I have argued that on the one hand, Russia is too open, well educated, and wealthy to accept such an authoritarian and corrupt leadership. On the other, since 2003 it has been evident that President and then Prime Minister Putin’s primary goal was the enrichment of himself and his friends. In order to safeguard their wealth, he needed to stay in power and impose a certain amount of repression, but he has hardly ever used more force than was necessary. His regime has excelled in good intelligence rather than crude repression, even if some repression has also been present.

Putin has lived on the high oil price and accomplished little. He arrived at a laid table, having been appointed president on New Year’s Eve 2000, after Russia’s economic growth had taken off. He cautiously rode on the achievements of economic reform in the 1990s and on an ever rising oil price. From 1999 to 2008, Russia enjoyed an average economic growth of 7 percent a year. Many leaders have fallen into hubris for less. Increasingly, Putin seems to have believed his own propaganda that the achievements were his.

In September 2008, Putin made his most euphoric speech about Russia as a "safe haven" in the global financial crisis, but it was not. Its GDP plummeted by 7.8 percent in 2009, and its stock market plunged by 80 percent in 2008. Russia’s recovery has been slow and unimpressive, with a growth of 4 percent in 2010 and perhaps 3.5 percent in 2011. Russia has lost three years of economic growth, in sharp contrast to booming BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries and oil producers.

The reasons for this failure are all too obvious. Russia belongs to the dubious group of the most corrupt countries in the world. Conspicuously, it failed to extend its road network after 1997. In prominent publications by the liberal opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, charges of personal corruption against Putin have been detailed and documented. The alleged amounts exceed $50 billion and continue to rise.

A young lawyer, Alexei Navalny, started a campaign through his blog against corruption and fraud against minority shareholders of the big state-dominated companies. His big feat was to reveal evidence that appeared to prove that the management of the state oil pipeline company, Transneft, had embezzled $4 billion when building the Far East Oil Pipeline. Needless to say, nobody was prosecuted, though the main culprit fled to Israel after some time. Navalny, the effective propagandist, labeled Putin’s party United Russia, the Party of Crooks and Thieves, and that name has stuck. Navalny has managed to burn through Putin’s Teflon and make the label "thief" stick to him.

Russia’s regular elections for parliament, or Duma, were scheduled for December 4, with the voting for president scheduled for March 4, 2012. It was considered obvious that United Russia would win the parliamentary race, while three loyal support parties would be permitted to contest the elections. No independent opposition parties were allowed to register or to share the air waves with the favored political powers. After having gone through this procedure in 2003–04 and in 2007–08, most observers saw the outcome as a given.

The only question was whether Putin would follow through on his plan to return to the presidency by replacing his sidekick and successor in that office, Dmitri Medvedev.

The turning point in Putin’s fortunes occurred on September 24, earlier than expected, when he and Medvedev jointly delivered the answer to that question at the Congress of United Russia, a motley selection of mediocre officials and opportunists. They would undertake what the Russians are deriding as a castling, a chess move designed to protect the king: Putin would become president again, and Medvedev would switch back to the role of prime minister that he had played earlier. Not very plausibly, Putin claimed that they had agreed to do so four years ago.

At that moment, Putin made three spectacular mistakes in one.

First, he undercut any claim that Medvedev had been serious with all his talk about liberalization and modernization. If what they said was true and the plan was hatched four years ago, they had taken the modern Russian middle class for a ride.

Second, Putin effectively took the responsibility for the last three bad years on himself, even though the sensible thing to have done would have been to blame Medvedev.

Third, an announcement of a presidential candidacy had been expected after the Duma elections but before the presidential election. By moving early, Putin and Medvedev in effect declared that popular opinion was irrelevant to them.

A popular joke during the Medvedev presidency had been that there was certainly a Putin camp and a Medvedev camp, but the question was to which camp Medvedev belonged. Now he has made clear that he belonged to the Putin camp, leaving the modernizers without a leader. Similarly, Dmitri Muratov, the editor of the independent Novaya gazeta, stated that Russia had two parties: the television party and the Internet party. Putin led the television party that has had a majority of two-thirds, while the Internet party had no leader. After September 24, Medvedev became a figure of public ridicule, even on official television, while the Internet party is looking for a leader.

In 2008, Putin had elaborated on an impressive economic modernization strategy called Russia 2020. It contained most of the many structural reforms Russia badly needed, since hardly any reforms had been carried out since 2003. Alas, nothing has been done in the last four years. Putin alienated his excellent finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, by pushing through a populist and unfinanced increase of pensions -- by 45 percent -- in 2010!

The government did not even bother to present any new election program ahead of the balloting this month. The three-year budget for 2012–14 showed that the only priority was military and security, especially salaries and pensions. Astoundingly, the government is intent on cutting expenditures on education, health care, and public investment in infrastructure. Putin explained that public investment in particularly corrupt sectors should be cut, without even pretending that he was motivated by a desire to reduce corruption. This was a budget for repression and against modernization, and a more lackluster election campaign has rarely taken place.

On November 20, Putin encountered his Ceausescu moment. On a cold day in December 1989, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu spoke to a large crowd, which started booing, and Ceausescu eventually fled in a helicopter from the roof of the party headquarters. At the Olympic Stadium in Moscow in late November, Putin appeared before 20,000 people at a wrestling event, and they began booing. This disdain was directly broadcast on Russian state television, showing Putin losing his nerve. He looked like a very small and insecure man.

Ever since, all representatives of the so-called Party of Crooks and Thieves have been several times greeted with jeers, and Putin has cancelled all large public events. As the Russian journalist Julia Latynina pointed out, a dictator has to be feared. When he no longer is, he is just ridiculous. That is Putin’s new conundrum.

Shortly before the December 4 elections, the ratings of Putin and United Russia started collapsing, which was not unexpected, but the results of the heavily rigged elections came as a surprise. Only 60.2 percent of the electorate was reported to have voted, and out of these votes United Russia received only 49.5 percent, a dramatic loss compared with 64.3 percent in 2007. Foreign observers and others all report massive fraud of all kinds at the polling places, and a realistic assessment is that one quarter of these votes were somehow stolen. That would mean that only 22 percent of the electorate actually voted for United Russia, and many of those were subject to massive pressure, such as threats of being sacked, in an environment hostile to any dissenting point of view.

In effect, the Duma elections were a referendum on Putin, which he lost. The three loyal support parties are of little interest. They are permitted to exist because they are obedient, but they received their votes because they are not Putin.

The question was how the insights flooding the Internet would impact the real powers. Moscow saw an uncommonly big demonstration on December 5 with probably 7,000 to 8,000 participants. Finally, the young middle class had taken political action. The lead speaker was Navalny, who was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in prison for resistance to the police. In the course of three days of limited and peaceful demonstrations 1,000 activists were detained. The opposition accordingly decided to gather all forces on Saturday December 10.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Putin’s former chief of staff, prohibited various venues for demonstration and limited their permitted size, but he clearly felt popular pressure. He then allowed the rally to take place at Bolotnaya Ploshchad, across the Moscow River but close to the Kremlin, though only 30,000 demonstrators were permitted. The demonstrations were more successful than predicted, and they were large and spread over the country. In Moscow, the demonstrations were perfectly peaceful following the organizers’ call for legal order. Although no fewer than 50,000 police and riot police had been called out, not a single scuffle or arrest took place. The demonstrators took pride in not having broken a single window. In St. Petersburg, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk, there were some reports about arrests.

The official organizer was Solidarity, which is a liberal umbrella organization led by Boris Nemtsov, but all opposition groups participated, from hard nationalists to communists and liberals. The dominant force was the new young middle class that has never acted politically before. Navalny, who sits arrested, seems to be the given leader, but he has no organization. Real organization appears to be lacking since all communication is carried out via social networks. But organization will be needed for new elections.

The demonstrators adopted a simple resolution that all can subscribe to: that the elections were rigged and have to be redone in proper order. They have called for new demonstrations in two weeks’ time if their demands are not met.

The authorities are both reaching out and falling into line. Opportunists have already gone to speak on behalf of the demonstrators, and many in authority are praising themselves for the demonstrators’ peacefulness. On December 10, the resistance broke through the airwaves. The television could no longer ignore the massive demonstrations. No provocateurs or hired youth demonstrators were to be seen.

Putin, however, has refused to make any concessions. Incredibly, he claims that the elections were honest, and blames the unrest on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. By habit he is absolutely stubborn. On Wednesday and Thursday, he held televised meetings with select party activists. He looked as if he had lost his bearings, speaking hesitantly and stuttering. Worse, the officials present looked at him with shocked faces as if they wanted to tell him: Don’t you realize what has happened and that it is all over?

A sensible dictator would have acted long ago, sacking lots of top officials, and starting a campaign against corruption. But Putin is more like Leonid Brezhnev, the cold war era Soviet leader -- he is reluctant to sack any senior person, and he has never fought corruption among his own cronies. He appears to be boxed into a stubborn refusal to face reality or to act. Still, he might become so desperate that he does something truly awful. After all, this is the man who launched the second Chechnya war in 1999, who threw Mikhail Khodorkovsky in prison and confiscated Yukos in 2003, and launched the Georgia war in 2008. War has been his response to electoral challenges.

Yet, I think Putin and his regime were effectively finished on December 10. I do not think it possible for Putin to serve as the next president, and I also think that Medvedev has no future role to play. Common slogans are directed against Putin: "Russia without Putin," "Putin is a thief," "Putin to prison," and "out with Putin!" Both the Russian people and authorities have shown that Russia is ready for a new democratic breakthrough. Yet, all questions about how it will take place are still open.

Many developments will in all probability start in rapid speed. Opportunists within the old regime will likely start acting independently and try to take a lead. Moscow Mayor Sobyanin has gotten somewhat ahead of things by permitting the demonstrations to take place. The three pocket parties in parliament will make themselves independent in a bid to gain credibility, but neither of them is likely to make it. Official journalists will very likely break out of their constraints. Leonid Parfenov of NTV took a lead in the December 10 demonstration. Russian television will gain new life and try to recover from having been outcompeted by the Internet. Now journalists will go after Putin. The corruption and other crimes of the Putin regime will be exposed. A massive anti-corruption campaign -- probably led by Navalny -- will take place.

The opposition will try to organize. Navalny is the obvious young hero. Nemtsov and Ilya Yashin are prominent and able. The time for violence has probably passed. Nashi, the pro-Putin youth movement, and other Putin young guards, are no longer a potent force.

The pressure on the regime to address the demand for repeat elections will be enormous. It would make sense to hold new Duma elections within half a year or so. The presidential elections should be postponed. Demands for the freeing of all political prisoners have been raised, and demands for the release of Khodorkovsky will rise. Lots of top officials will be forced out. And of course regional governors should again be elected, as they were before Putin changed the system and seized the prerogative to appoint them himself. Russian politics have become exciting again.

December 10, 2011 is the greatest day in Russia’s new history since 1991. Finally, young Russians can be proud of being Russian.

http://www.piie.com/realtime/?p=2573

Crackdown or Negotiation? Russian Protests Pose a Dilemma for Putin

Simon Shuster, 12/11/11

Mercenaries, goateed liberals, jackals who scavenge for money at foreign embassies in Moscow -- those are some of the things Vladimir Putin has called Russia's opposition. But he's never before had to reckon with them as a significant threat to his rule. That may now have to change. On Saturday, in the biggest act of popular resistance ever to Putin's government, tens of thousands of protesters rallied across the country to challenge the results of parliamentary elections held a week ago. This time, the once and future President can't ignore his challengers or simply dismiss them with colorful epithets.

"We realize these aren't Chinese people sent here to protest," an official from Putin's United Russia party told TIME after the demonstrations. "These are regular citizens, and we have to respond to their demands." (The official asked to remain anonymous because these are "nervous times" and "no one wants to talk out of turn.") Since the wave of protests began last Monday, party officials and Putin's circle of advisers have held emergency meetings to try to hammer out a response, the official added, but have so far come up with little. (See photos of Russia's protests and counterprotests.) 

For the first time, even Putin's loquacious spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was speechless when asked about the Saturday demonstration in Moscow, which was by far the largest since Putin rose to power 12 years ago. "The government of Russia has not yet formulated its position," Peskov said. In the upper ranks of the party, two opposing camps have emerged, according to the United Russia official. The largest group is calling for a quick and decisive crackdown, banning any further demonstrations and using force if necessary to break them up. The minority view, however, holds that the protests will fizzle out on their own if people are allowed a chance to vent their frustrations. "So far the arguments of the reasonable minority are winning out," the official added.

That much has been clear in the government's response so far. After Monday's postelection rally, which drew up to 7,000 people in the center of Moscow, authorities granted permission for a protest of up to 30,000 people on Saturday on an island in the Moskva River, a short walk from the Kremlin. Around 40,000 people showed up despite freezing temperatures and heavy snow, many of them carrying white flowers and wearing white ribbons, the symbols of what the organizers are calling the "snowy revolution." In a striking departure from tradition, all the state television channels showed footage of the rally, while the police presence was remarkably unobtrusive. No arrests were made even when thousands disobeyed orders from the city government and gathered, beforehand, near the walls of the Kremlin to march to the rally site. "Friends, you are acting like the police force of a democratic country!" one of the main organizers, Vladimir Ryzhkov, told the troops from the stage. The massive crowd responded by chanting, "The police are with the people!" (See why Putin sent in the storm troopers.) 

But the police were, of course, simply obeying orders, which could change quickly if the standoff is not resolved. And, considering the demands of the opposition, it is hard to imagine any quick resolution. Their first demand is for the parliamentary-election results to be annulled, as well as for a new nationwide poll to be staged. "This is completely and utterly out of the question," the United Russia official said. Such a vote would likely cost the party its majority in the parliament, which it barely managed to hold despite massive vote rigging. Without a parliamentary majority, Putin's government could face constant pressure from the registered opposition parties. Although they have only posed token resistance to Putin's rule so far -- one of the parties, Fair Russia, is in fact a Kremlin creation -- they could start investigating corruption in Putin's circle, block passage of the budget and break the tradition of rubber-stamping laws. Putin's legitimacy would also be deeply eroded if last weekend's vote is annulled, a risk he cannot take ahead of presidential election next March in which he hopes to win a new six-year term.

The brightest response to the crisis from the government side is typical of Putin's system of managed democracy. The ruling party wants to engineer a liberal party to channel the energy of the young, educated and middle-class voters attending the latest demonstrations. "This is a gaping hole in the system," the United Russia official said. "We have no party that can absorb this part of society." Last summer, the Kremlin already attempted to create such a party, Pravoe Delo (Right Cause), by tapping the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets, Mikhail Prokhorov, to run it. But he did not prove sufficiently loyal. As that party's list of candidates for the parliamentary vote was being formed, Prokhorov began pushing through his own men instead of accepting orders handed down from above. The reaction was swift, and revealed the Kremlin's almost pathological fear of competition. In September, Prokhorov was unseated as the leader of the party, a coup he blamed on the Kremlin's "puppet master," Vladislav Surkov, who has overseen the media and national politics throughout Putin's rule. Most of the protest votes in the elections then ended up going to the Communist Party, which got 19%, even though Russia's urban middle-class youth hardly wants to see it returned to power. Both the Communist speakers at Saturday's rally got a cold reception from the crowd; one was booed off stage.

It is far from clear, however, that another Kremlin puppet party, no matter how liberal and democratic its rhetoric, would satisfy demands for real democratic reform. The organizers of the protests, most of whom belong to unregistered opposition parties, demanded that they be allowed to take part in elections for the first time -- a risk that United Russia might consider taking, the official told TIME. "At first we'd like to have them take part in some discussion club. They send their men, we send ours. And maybe later, in time for the next elections, they might get registration," which would allow them to field candidates. (Watch TIME's video "A Russian Road Trip.")

But these half measures have so far inspired only anger among Russia's disaffected voters. On Sunday, President Dmitri Medvedev offered another minor concession via his Facebook page, saying he had ordered all claims of voter fraud to be investigated. Within hours, the post had more than 7,000 comments, many of them deriding Medvedev as a "pathetic" President or repeating the opposition's insistence on new elections.

If the demand for a new election is not met within two weeks, the opposition says, it will hold another mass demonstration in Moscow and other cities in the hope of forcing the government to negotiate. "They thought we couldn't even get 10,000 people to rally, and now we've showed them," Ilya Ponomaryov, the parliamentary deputy who led the Saturday rally alongside Ryzhkov, told TIME afterward. "We have enormous momentum. The people are fed up. The authorities spit in their face with these elections, and they are spitting back. So I think, yes, Putin will have to negotiate."

But for a man who has only ever shown contempt for Russia's banned opposition groups and who has ruled unchallenged for a decade, it would be painful and humiliating in the extreme to sit down and discuss their demands. It would seem easier, and more in line with his character, to side with the faction inside his party that is clambering for a crackdown. And that is when Russia's snowy revolution could suddenly turn into a bloody one.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2102050,00.html

當歐債讓許多人質疑「民主政治」的功能或它在政治層面的價值時，「莫斯科之春」及普丁當局的反應，無疑成為「民主政治」意義和「阿拉伯之春」影響兩者一個強力的佐證。

我相信這個事件會對俄國和中國的政局產生相當程度的震撼，以及隨之而來的改變。