Vladimir and Me

Even someone with only a vague awareness of Russian politics cannot have been be surprised by Monday’s election result.

Now, there’s a sentence I didn’t expect to be writing. “A vague awareness of…” Who, you might be wondering, has anything more? Well, as discussed before, I’m something of a political junkie and I’m always intrigued by any country’s electoral process, but Russia…

Well.

Let’s just say Russia is… Different?.

Churchill once described Russian politics as a “riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma.” It’s a good description and there’s no surprise that most of the election coverage is using some kind of Russian doll image with Putin’s and Medvedev’s faces superimposed over the top. It’s nicely apt. The man within, behind and below. Medvedev won’t know which way to watch out for potential knives if he steps out of line.

I wonder if anyone, anywhere, truly believes that Putin’s not going to be running the show?

EU and UN observers have voiced concerns that the elections weren’t free and fair. You think? What with most opposition candidates in jail? Mind you, at least the Russian authorities are doing a better job at covering it up this time - the 99.6% turn out four years ago was a little unbelievable.

But then again, perhaps not.

So what if Putin controls the media. He may have had a few journalists bumped off. He might even have sanctioned the assassination of a dissident on foreign soil, but, hell, look into Litvinenko and he was deeply involved in all sorts of dodgy mafia activity and, frankly, was only interested in seeing who he screw money out of. Oh, and there’s the possibility that Putin ordered for a block of flats containing civilians to be blown up so it could be blamed on Chechnyan rebels.

But.

It’s undeniable that Russian is in a better state in recent years. The wealth of the oligarchs is diminishing, the growing middle class, education and health care are improving. The economy is on the up and we can see time and time again that all most people really care about is how much is in their pocket.

So, it’s either complete and utter apathy in Russian over rigged elections (hard to believe considering the ongoing troubles in Kenya - people care about voting) or they really are happy with the Putin’s and the United Russia Party’s leadership.

(Okay, so they might be more frightened of disappearing in the middle of the night, but it’s only a hypothesis.)

They might have voted for Medvedev because of the party he represents. Whilst it’s pretty unusual for a former leader to take a more junior role, perhaps Putin really does just want to serve his country.

Yeah, right.

But then, we all do it, don’t we? We all get involved with things, initially with good intentions and at some point we decide that we can do better and stage a coup d’etat.

Within my course the best of the student’s work is published annually on a website. There’s a launch event to which editors and agents are invited. There’s free wine. Great, but it’s up to us to organise it on a tiny budget. Now, I’ve done events - admittedly very different ones, but certain principles still apply - and I really didn’t want to get involved in another one for the time being. But I went along to the early meetings thinking I could do the minimum to help, Lick stamps or something. Somewhere along the line I seem to have picked up more and more jobs. I did a site visit last week to think about venue layout, I’ve been ordering business cards, I’ve got some sponsorship against the project, I’m sorting out the catering, I’ve been involved in marketing discussions. Everyone is involved, working hard and doing a great job, but I can’t seem to help myself.

I have to poke my nose in.

And now if anyone has a question they come to me rather than anyone else and it annoys me, but it’s all my own fault because I can’t not get involved.

I’m the one who spends Saturday afternoon taking screen shots of the website and converting them to jpegs and gets pissed off about it, but then I’m the one who volunteered to do it.

Is it ego? Am I a control freak? Am I just a bit of a moaning git?

People just want to see things done right and once we take a little bit of power we want more and more until we’re so immersed in it that it becomes a definition of who we are. You can no longer distinguish the person from the role.

Perhaps, there’s (horrible idea) a little bit of Putin inside us all?

Just ask Ken Livingstone.