Putin thrives on need for order

saxo-archive

Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007 | midnight

New York

There are chilling echoes of the Soviet past in Russia's current political game: President Vladimir Putin's secretive style; his KGB background; the enormous, autocratic power he wields; and if there's a power struggle going on in the Kremlin (Putin's term ends early next year), no outsider has been let in on it.

Anyone who followed the serial transitions of the final act of the Soviet Union -- Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko-Gorbachev -- must also be struck by the differences. No Soviet leader ever left office voluntarily. Most simply died, and the two who did not -- Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev -- were forced out. The older the leaders got in the post-Khrushchev era, the more collective and ritualized their leadership became. The increasingly frequent state funerals followed an identical script: From the designated mourners filing under the black-draped chandeliers of the Hall of Columns to the phrasing of the commentaries.

If there is a precedent, it is from the more recent past when Boris Yeltsin handpicked an obscure loyalist, Vladimir Putin, to succeed him. That covers only the passing of the keys to the president's office. Yeltsin was happily out the door as soon as Putin walked in, while Putin plans to change only the sign on his door, from president to prime minister.

Where “Soviet” does apply is in how Russians are watching the changes at the top. For that, it's useful to roll back to Stalin's death in 1953. In those days, most Russians had known nothing in their lives other than the terror, the war and the all-embracing personality cult of the Brilliant Genius of Humanity. So thoroughly was Stalin identified with every Soviet's worst fears and greatest hopes that the announcement of his death set off a great panic. Millions of bewildered and frightened people rushed into the streets; untold hundreds were crushed to death. Then came the shock of Khrushchev's campaign to debunk Stalin.

So by the time Khrushchev was chucked out for the sin of voluntarism, his surviving Politburo comrades -- and many in the nation -- were ready to elevate order (“poryadok”) to the level of an obsession. Under Leonid Brezhnev, the public face of the leadership became a carefully choreographed and unvarying ritual of fixed appearances, statements and funerals intended to demonstrate unvarying unanimity and order in the Kremlin. In the West, studying the Communist facade for minute variations or cracks became the science of Kremlinology, which kept a generation of diplomats, spies and journalists gainfully employed.

I covered all the transitions from Brezhnev to the end, and each time, I was impressed by the lack of alarm in the streets. Sure, there was curiosity about the new guy, but until the end -- until Gorbachev -- there was no suspense, no power vacuum, no struggle, no reason to worry. The radio would announce the death of the incumbent and the head of the funeral commission, who was then anointed general secretary. There was little hope that the new mummy would be much better than the last, but you knew that life would go on.

Now, after another period of disruption, order and continuity are again at a premium. That accounts for a lot of Putin's popularity, and a lot of the satisfaction that has greeted his endorsement of Dmitri Medvedev as his successor. That may also explain why there was so little public dismay at Medvedev's immediate announcement that, once elected, he would name Putin the prime minister.

From our vantage point in the West, it is dismaying that so many Russians are prepared to overlook how Putin has achieved that order -- repressing the opposition, dominating national TV, restoring the curtain of secrecy around the Kremlin. It's not the old Iron Curtain. Russians today certainly have far more personal freedom than they had in the USSR. And there will be a vote, or at least the facade of one.

Serge Schmemann is an editorial writer for The New York Times.