Wisconsin Public Television University Place Global Hot Spots  Yoshiko Herrerra After the Russian Presidential Elections  March 23, 2012  >> Welcome to the Global Hot Spots Series. This is a partnership between the Division of International Studies and the Wisconsin Alumni Association that brings faculty to talk with the community about some of the interesting things that are going on in the world and going beyond the headlines on thought-provoking issues. I want to introduce today's speaker who's Yoshiko Herrara. She's an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asian Studies at the UW Madison. She received a BA from Dartmouth University and her doctorate from the University of Chicago, and she taught at Harvard University from 1999 until 2007. Her research interests include politics in Russia and the former Soviet states, social identities, nationalism, regionalism, ethnic politics, identity related variables in public health and demography, norms and institutional change, bureaucracy and constructivist political economy. She is also working more recently on xenophobia and contemporary Russian nationalisms. She teaches courses on comparative politics, social identities, and the politics of the states of the former Soviet Union. Please join me in welcoming Yoshiko Herrara to tell us about Power and Protest in Russia: What's Next After the Presidential Elections. [APPLAUSE] >> Well, thank you all very much for inviting me. 

I'm very happy to be here today. I wanted to give a little bit of a background to the situation in Russia in that many people may have seen that recently on March 4th there was an election for president of Russia, which is going to be a six-year term, and there were a lot of protests associated with that election and a lot of protests associated with parliamentary election in December 2011. And I want to give you a sense of the political situation in Russia in terms of why people both supported the president and the governing party and why there was so much protest because one of the key factors that's interesting to people is that there were pretty fraudulent elections four or five years ago in December 2007 and in the spring of 2008, and those elections, though fraudulent, did not get very much attention. So one of the interesting aspects of Russia is you have in some ways a repeated situation with the election but a very different outcome this time in terms of people's reaction to it. So I want to give a little bit of background of what the situation is in Russia and why there is support and also a great deal of protest against the current regime. So most people know that Russia is the largest country in the world in terms of area. Its population is very large also. 142 million, approximately. And it's economy is also pretty large and is mostly dependent on energy resources, as a lot of people know. What's important for us, though, is to understand how Russia emerged from the end of the Soviet Union. 

The Soviet Union broke up in 1991, and that was the beginning of Russia as an independent state in the post-Soviet period. So there were a number of problems that beset Russia as a country right after the emergence of the end of the Soviet Union. The number one problem, there were three problems that I'm going to talk about, but one key problem was the political instability in the country. So this is a picture of the former parliament building in Russia which was bombed by the president in 1993. So President Yeltsin bombed the parliament in 1993 after a couple of years of protracted struggle with the parliamentary over issue of where the power was going to reside in the country between the executive and the legislature. And this instability at the center was just one indicator of the overall instability in terms of not having a federation treaty and a constitution, having to rebuild all the political institutions, essentially, that emerged after the end of the Soviet Union. So one big problem in the country is political instability that even though Yeltsin is president in the 1990s and has a certain amount of legitimacy, there's still quite a lot of instability that people are living through in the 1990s. Another big factor for the country is that in addition to the disputes between the executive and the legislative political branches, there was also a number of nationalist sovereignty movements. The most famous of which is the one in Chechnya, and there were two wars in Chechnya, one from 1994 to 1996 and another that was renewed starting in 1999 actually really under the leadership of the current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. So Chechen wars, and this is a picture of the capital city of Chechnya in 1996 which shows the devastation of that city. 

If you look at it today, it's been largely, that particular city has been largely rebuilt. But these Chechen wars in an exercise in really excessive use of force by the Russian federal government against this separatist region which had an affect on other regional sovereignty movements in terms of sending a message that Russia was unwilling to give up any territory and that there wasn't going to be a separate Chechnya. And, indeed, Chechnya remains part of the Russian federation now, and even though it remains a fairly difficult region in terms of economic and political situation, it's more or less under federal control at the moment. So there were two Chechen wars, and the first was '94-'96, but this is one of the things that people in the 1990s were dealing with. In addition to the central political problems there was also this problem of regions. The biggest factor, though, that weighed on people's minds in the 1990s was the failed economic reform. So this picture is of a Rolls-Royce in Moscow, and you see there's a gentleman here with an old-fashioned crutch. This is a very common scene in Moscow, actually. Even today you see Lamborghinis, you see Maseratis, you see cars that I rarely have seen in America all over the city of Moscow because there is an incredible, incredible level of inequality that has developed since the end of the Soviet Union. So when people look back at the '90s, even though they say, yes, we had this level of democracy and we had elections that were somewhat competitive, what we also had was a lot of political instability. 

We had this war with Chechnya, and we had, in many ways, failed economic reform. Their economic reforms were meant to create market infrastructure by liberalizing trade, by privatizing a lot of industry, and by stabilizing the financial system of the government in terms of collecting taxes and, more reasonably, spending. In many ways, the 1990s failed in economic reforms, and it culminated with the financial crisis of 1998 where essentially the state, after not collecting taxes for seven or eight years, finally went bankrupt and could not pay its bills and had a major financial crisis. So that is the context of the 1990s that brings us to Vladimir Putin. So President Yeltsin abruptly resigned on New Year's Eve 1999 and picked somebody that no one had ever really heard of, Vladimir Putin, to be his choice for the upcoming 2000 spring presidential election. Now, Putin, as I mentioned, had been one of the backers of this second Chechen war, but what Putin brought to the country was this idea of strengthening the state. So the first thing he was going to do, his number one objective, was to improve the economy. And to reign in the so-called oligarchs. So there's a lot of these so-called oligarchs are robber barons, people who had made a lot of money in a very short amount of time, and some of them have been very close to the Yeltsin family. Putin was going to systematically reduce their influence, and he did that by exiling the two most powerful and by jailing the one who was the third in line. 

Khodorkovsky was jailed in the mid-2000s and remains in jail. And it's a little bit of a cautionary tale for currently the third richest man in Russia, the 18th richest man in the world, Mikhail Prokhorov, who ran against Putin in the election that Putin's history with the oligarch has been to take a pretty strong stand against their involvement in politics as well as their position in the economy. So he had an interest in improving the economy, and he also was interested in controlling the region. So not just Chechnya but all of the other regions of Russia as well. So he strengthened a number of electoral rules that made it very difficult for regional governors or regional parties to compete, in the end outright banning regional parties and eliminating the election of governors altogether. So that was one of the ways of reducing independent power sources. And he also changed the electoral system such that parties would have to compete across the entire country They couldn't compete only in one region which, when you're the largest country in the world, is a formidable barrier to forming a party. And he also got rid of single member districts which were independent districts which if you won the majority you could get into the congress. In our political system we have single member districts. Whoever wins a districts gets into the congress. 

He got rid of those and replaced it with a proportional representation system where you have to be a member of a party and people vote for parties rather than individuals, and if a party gets over 7%, it gets into the parliament, and if it doesn't get over 7%, it doesn't get into the parliament. But what this means is that an independent person not associated with one of the parties that's going to get over 7% has no chance of getting into the parliament. Each of these rules in themselves would not be something people would look at and say, oh, that's a terrible thing. You could make arguments for proportional representation versus single member districts, but in the context of this basically strong program to control regional authority, it's fitting with this movement toward authoritarianism. So that's the point three about control of the legislature and the parties. And the final thing he wanted to do was to really reign in civil society, to make it difficult for people to protest, difficult for people to organize, etc. nd so you might say now why would anybody put up with this? Why would anybody want somebody to come in and reduce the level of democracy, reduce the freedoms in civil society? Why would anybody want to do that? This chart shows the annual GDP growth rates for Russia in the 1990s. I'm sorry this is very weak here. 1990s versus the 2000s. Now, if you look at the Putin era, that's this red line, and that shows the break between when Putin came in versus when, just getting another clicker here, when Putin came in versus his predecessor. So the red is negative growth, and the blue is positive growth. 

Now, who gets credit for this? Well, what really happened is the price of oil went up, and Russia is a major exporter of energy. So you could say, well, you know, this isn't that much better but anyway, you could say it's not really Putin, it's just the price of oil, don't give him any credit. But what people in their everyday lives see is that they had almost 10 years of negative economic growth, and that's following the economic kiss of the end of the Soviet period followed by a trajectory of unprecedented positive growth in the early years of the Putin regime. However, there was a financial crisis in 2008 which resulted in a dip in 2009, and I'll talk about that a little bit later. Even though Russia has recovered, that's one of the things that shook a little bit of the faith in Putin. But this economic recovery under Putin's reign is one of the primary reasons that people think, wow, when I think about what was life like before Putin and I think what is life like under Putin, most people, economically, are much better off in the 2000s than they were in the 1990s. And so that's a huge factor in people's understanding of the political situation. If you look at the aggregate size of the economy, this black line is the 1998 financial crisis. And people in the '90s were talking about this decline in the overall size of the economy during the 1990s and how it would be impossible to even get back up to the level of the Soviet Union. And you see that actually within a couple of years of this high oil prices under the Putin regime they had already recovered back to the period of 1991, and even with the financial crisis the overall size of the Russian economy is just much bigger under the Putin regime than it had been under Yeltsin. 

Now, this, oops sorry, this chart differentiate Putin versus Medvedev. Dmitry Medvedev is currently the president of Russia because one of the things that Putin did is he was elected in 2000, he was reelected in 2004. So he served two four-year terms as president. The constitution prohibits a third term. And, interestingly, instead of changing the constitution even though he had about 80% approval rating at the time in 2008, instead of changing the constitution what he did is he picked somebody he thought would be extremely loyal to him to run as president who would then appoint him as prime minister. So they switched roles, and Dmitry Medvedev became president in 2008, and Putin became prime minister in 2008. He waited out his one term until 2012, and then they switched roles again with Putin as winning the presidential election in March of 2012 with the understanding that Medvedev should be the prime minister. But, as I'll talk about later, this idea of the tandem presidency and this switch did not turn out to be very popular with people after 2008 because after 2008 and especially with the financial crisis a lot of people's understanding of the direction of the country changed a bit. But going back to the economy, in addition to high oil prices, Putin went on a systematic, he had a systematic campaign to strengthen his authority. And part of that is about this cult of personality. 

I wish I had time to show you some of the videos associated with these. But what he would do is he would go on vacation, take his shirt off, say look what a tough guy I am, I'm able to take care of the country because I'm such a strong leader, literally. And this reverence for him was not limited only to Russia. He's the 2007 man of the year by Time magazine. And a lot of people looking in 2007-2008 at the height of his popularity are saying, hey, he's done a lot of things. He turned around the economy. He collected taxes. That's something that was not done in the Yeltsin era, so you have to actually give him credit for reforming the tax system. He got rid of the oligarchs, and Russia seems to be turning around. Now, I would say it's sort of ironic in that Time magazine calling Putin man of the year for 2007. 

This is a time when most political sciences are saying as of the December 2007 elections, Russia is no longer a democracy. If there is any doubt, the December 2007 elections solidified the case that it is not a democracy And meanwhile, the west is saying, hey, man of the year. So there's a kind of confluence of his own popularity in the country and in some ways western support for the regime at that time. But a critical factor is that he's still pretty popular in the end of 2007-2008. In addition to supporting his own image, he really cracked down on civil society. So this is a picture of one of the communist protestors. He had reduced, essentially, the kind of people protesting to be old age pensioners who had sort of communist leanings and that were not necessarily taken seriously. However, as it turns out, some of the things he really wanted to do, such as monetizing pension payments, so that is giving people money instead of a free pass or some kind of money instead of free medical care, turned out to be incredibly unpopular. And even at the height of his popularity, he was not able to do that because when they did try to monetize these pension payments they would get pensioners out on the streets protesting at the regional level. Now, a lot of people didn't pay attention to this because Putin seemed like he building a very strong state. 

It seemed like he was very popular, and it's one of those things that people who studied pensions were following it, but it wasn't followed that widely in the news. But it turns out, when you look back you say, yeah, the state was not actually as strong as we think it was because even at the height of his popularity he was not able to do one of these critical economic reforms. In addition to that aspect, they also supported, the state also supported youth movements, nationalist movements. This one is called Nashi where they would get thousands of students out in support of the government. They give them trips places, give them t-shirts, give them various things in order to get further state support. So this is all when things are sort of going well for the administration. They are moving along in the economy, and everything seems like it's going okay. But with the 2008, and this is the idea of Dmitry Medvedev here as the puppet of Putin, this tandem executive, what starts to happen is that there is a solidification of authoritarianism in the sense that the elections become non-competitive. So in the 2008 elections, for example, the only people allowed to run in the parliamentary elections are parties either supportive of the government or fake parties that have been made up by the government in order to introduce the idea of competition. The regional politics have been completely controlled at that point, and there's one party, a party called United Russia which is Putin's party, that has pretty much taken control of both the legislature and the executive. 

So if you go back to remembering Yeltsin bombing the parliament, by 2008 we're in a completely different situation here where the parliament and the executive are acting as one. There's one single party operating. There's one person that seems to be controlling both the prime ministership and the presidency. So you might say, well, that looks pretty secure, and a lot of people would have said this is a period of very strong state, Putin looks like he's going to be in power for a very long time, what could go wrong with that? 2008 financial crisis exposes the fragility of the Russian economy. Even though you have to give Putin credit for having a finance minister, Aleksei Kudrin, we set aside a financial stabilization fund, a sort of rainy day fund for taking in money from the oil revenues and setting them aside in case of a financial crisis. Even though they did do that and they actually weathered that storm a bit better than some other countries historically, what it exposed is how connected to oil prices in the world economy Russia's economy is and how little it had actually changed in the 2000s. So people kind of woke up and said, well, it's true we have been getting higher wages, and it's true I was able to renovate my apartment and I am better off, but gosh, this economy is just living off of oil, and nothing really has happened. Even though Putin had made as part of his plan the idea of modernizing the economy, diversifying the economy, and reducing corruption, people saw by 2008 none of that had been achieved. And corruption in particular became a bigger and bigger issue. It's something that people talk about all the time on the street now. 

If you have a call-in show where people talk about what's happening in the country, every other comment is about corruption. In addition, this diversification just did not happen. And you think, gosh, he had 80% approval rating, he had all this legitimacy, this personality, and still they're still doing the same thing, they're still relying on energy resources. So a lot of people are saying he really did not do what he said he was going to do. This is supposed to be good management of the economy, and it's really not happening. So this was one of the primary cracks in the system that's exposed in 2008. In addition, even though the regime had supported these nationalist youth groups, what they didn't anticipate was the rise of a lot of xenophobic violence that they had not seen in the past. So this is a riot that happened in downtown Moscow in response to a soccer match and an ethnic Russia guy was killed at this soccer match, and his supporters organized a kind of memorial rally right downtown. This is the Kremlin right here, and they organized this rally right in the very heart of Moscow. And they're doing Hitler motions with their arms, and shouting all kinds of ethnic statements like Russia for ethnic Russians, etc. nd the government is watching this saying, wow, things look a little out of control. 

And they called in a huge police presence, a huge presence of interior ministry troops, and what they get is a enormous fight between all these young nationalists and the police where they essentially have to just force people into the metro stations. And there's all these videos of people in the metro stations just beating up anybody they find on a subway car. And it turns into a huge disaster But what it also exposes is that this is in December of 2010, so this is only one year before the recent elections. So just one year before the December 2011 elections you see that in downtown Moscow the government is unable to even keep order. So it's another signal that people are saying you have corruption, you have this oil-based economy, now you have this kind of out of control nationalism, and who is in charge of that? What's happening? Finally, enter Alexei Navalny. This is probably the most charismatic person in Russia today, maybe the only charismatic leader right now in Russia today. So he is a blogger, and he is a real estate lawyer. He also had a postdoc at Yale. He is an interesting person, and what he did is he had a website where he would post government documents from privatizations or other deals that the government had done to show people who benefited, how whoever got something was connected to somebody else, and he would have little questions on his site saying, what do you think of this? And one of the questions he had is, do you think the governing party, United Russia, should be better known as the party of crooks and thieves? And he gets initially 10,000 people to say yes, and people ignore this and say, well, 10,000 out of a country of 142 million, that's not that many. But now the governing party is known as the party of crooks and thieves. 

That's what people call the party. And it is very bad when it becomes fashionable for the governing party to be known by a label like that. So Navalny, he was not himself a politician. He was just somebody that was trying to expose this corruption who had sort of had enough of it, but what he represents is younger educated person, no ties to the 1990s liberal elite, a completely different force that's saying I'm tired of the corruption, I'm tired of the lack of modernization in the country, and I want something to be done about it. So Navalny becomes a very important figure in the course of 2010-2011. All right, so that takes us to the 2011 Duma election. Duma is the word for the parliament there. And a very interesting phenomena happens there. The Duma had been dominated by four parties. The United Russia governing party, the communist party of the Russian federation which is a successor to the communist party of the Soviet Union. 

It's considered an opposition party but it's not a serious opposition party because they never get more than approximately 20% or so of the votes, and so the communist party, they're never going to take over. There's never going to be enough support for them. They're somewhat like, I hope there's no Ron Paul supporters here, but a little bit like that in that you have a dedicated corps of people who are very unlikely to get a majority. So they're not really a threat to the governing party, and that's why they were allowed to exist. The liberal democratic party of Russia is nationalist party. It's not liberal; it's not democratic; it's headed by a sort of clown-like figure Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Another party that's sympathetic to the government, always votes with the government, and hence was allowed to exist as an opposition party. And then you had this fourth party called fair Russia, which is a fake party set up as the government as an opposition party. So what the people Navalny and other democrat opposition types did was to say what should we do in the 2011 election? We know that our party, if we start a new party, it's not going to get, A, even on the ballot, we're not going to get media time, and we're not going to probably make this 7% threshold So what should you do in this situation? What you should do is vote for one of the four parties but not the governing party because if you don't vote or you vote for a party that doesn't get in, it's essentially a wasted vote in that the votes that are there get divided amongst the four parties. So people on mass vote for this fair Russia party which raises its seats by a third to a half, and they also voted for the communist or the liberal democrats. 

So in the December 2000 election, you see a big drop in the government support because people were voting for those other parties. But why they were doing that is out of almost a fablistic recognition that we can't really change the whole system, but we can at least send the government a signal that we are dissatisfied with the current situation. And not only that but you get also the protests. So this is a person, this is a lot of media outlets where people had tape over their mouths essentially saying I don't have a vote. It turns out the word for voice and vote is the same, golos in Russia. So this is saying no vote, or no voice too. It has a double meaning. And you have thousands of people, this is 50,000 people downtown Moscow on December 24th. So throughout December people were protesting the parliamentary elections and the mass of fraud that they thought happened during those elections. If you skip through to the March 2012 elections, you see that you might say, well look, despite those protests, Putin got 64% of the vote so he won, the protests weren't really very effective. 

The candidates in the presidential are similar in terms of parties to the previous one with one exception. So you have the communist party competing, and their leader, Zyuganov, is the same person who's been running since the 1990s. Same one that ran against Yeltsin in 1996, so a kind of consistency there. Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the liberal democratic party. Sergey Mironov, who himself in 2008 said I personally, even though he ran against Putin, said I voted for Putin because he would do a better job than me. So that's a level of independence of these kind of candidates. But the other candidate was Mikhail Prokhorov, who was an independent and got 8% of the vote. Again, you might say, well, these elections Putin still won so what's the big deal, what has changed? But what has changed is, number one, the two elections allow people who study elections two data points. That is, more than two but two big points to compare. So one of the things people compare, for example, is this is the turnout, this is a chart of turnout for the December 2011 elections. 

And what you have here along the bottom is the turnout rate. So it goes from zero to one. One meaning 100% turnout. And on the vertical axis you have the support for the governing party. This is in the parliamentary elections. And you can see here that there's basically a linear connection in that the higher the turnout, the more the support for the governing party. Why is that? Because there is massive ballot stuffing. So people filled out ballots in advance and they put them in the ballot box, and so wherever there's more turnout, there is greater support for the government. Unfortunately for the people who did this, a lot of people videotaped this exact process. So, for example, an election point would be at a school, and these poor teachers who were asked to do this who did it at the school would show up on Saturday, the election is on Sunday, and people have videos posted on YouTube of teachers with a stack of ballots and marking off ballots on the Saturday before the election. 

It's very hard to explain what you're doing with a pen and a stack of ballots on the Saturday before the election. And those people, their faces are on the school's website, so it's very easy to see exactly who's involved here. In addition, the government releases its own turnout data that would show, for example, turnout would be in the course of the morning at 8 AM, 10 AM, noon, every two hours. And so you have two electoral stations, one of them around 4 PM has about 41% turnout, the other also like 41%, 42%, and then by 8 PM one of them has 80% turnout. Or even worse, the turnout goes up in just the last two hours which would mean something like a thousand people showed up in the last two hours and nobody noticed it. So there were all kinds of ways that people could see this is fraudulent, but the connection between turnout and support is one of the key ways. But even more important is that when you look at the presidential election, sorry, too many clickers here, when you look at the presidential election, you see this is the turnout versus support for Putin in the presidential election. A completely different graph. Now, statistically, this is very hard to explain. Why would you get, in December, a certain pattern of turnout and a completely different pattern in March? What happened to people? Why did so many people stay home? Why don't you have the same kind of relationship? And that's where we see the effect of these protest and what people have done. 

So you see that in the city of Moscow, for example, the support for Putin was only 45%, not 64%. You might say, well, that's one city. But it's the center Moscow. It's the capital Moscow. It's where a lot of young educated people are who are not supporting the regime, and that's a big problem for the regime. So the pattern of turnout changed in such a short time. That's one indication, but there's other indications. This, for example, looks at data on St. Petersburg where there's suggested to be a lot of fraud. And in St. Petersburg you have a case where normally you would have what's called a normal distribution of turnout that you would have the number of electoral stations, so a small number are going to have very low turnout. Then the medium number stations is going to have whatever is the median turnout. 

And then you'll have fewer stations that have extreme. So when you think about it, you're going to have some stations where there's a lot of turnout, some where there's very low turnout, and the majority are going to be in the middle. And that's how you're going to get a median. But here what you have is you have the median turnout, which is around 58%, but then on the far end, oops, sorry, on the far end, you have all these stations of near 100% turnout. So this kind of distribution, it's impossible to kind of explain why would you get that. Why do you have all these stations with almost 100% turnout? And when you combine that with anecdotal evidence or other evidence like regions like Chechnya where I showed you that devastation. So Chechnya has 99.8% turnout with 99.3% people voting for Putin. Does that seem reasonable? [LAUGHTER] There's no way that can be the case. There's no way in a war-torn region with all those refugees you would even get close to that level of turnout, and there's no way you would get that level of support for the government. So when people put it together, they use the government's own data, the turnout levels and other things, to see that there was a tremendous amount of fraud. 

So I'll just wrap up with saying where I think Russia stands now. It's still an authoritarian country. Putin is still going to be sworn in in May as the president for a six-year term. So that's probably going to stay. But these democratic protests since December I think have had an effect. They've had an effect on people's overall understanding of what's happening the country, of their own efficacy of what they can do, and of the possibilities for taking action, for example, in upcoming regional elections and things like that. One of the things Putin gave up in between the two elections was the idea of having regional governor elections. So regional governors are going to be elected again, and you can imagine that there's going to be pressure in those areas to have more fair elections. On the economy, even though Russia has had growth for almost 10 years with that recession in fall 2008, it still fundamentally a natural resource economy, and overall when you ask people in the country what's happening in the country they use the word stagnation which is the word they used about Brezhnev in the '70s. And it's not so much that people don't say yes, the 2000s were better than the '90s overall What they're saying is we want more than that. 

So it's about their relative expectations. They're looking at eastern Europe and they're looking at China, and they're saying you look to the east, you look to the west, and everybody's doing better than we are. So we have gained but there should be more. And people have this sense of stagnation, and they want a change in leadership because of that. And that's one of the reasons why the switch of Putin/Medvedev and back to Putin/Medvedev was so disappointing to people. Not that they doubted Putin's political power, but they said it's clear they have no vision for the future. They have nothing to offer but the same thing that they've been doing before. The state is much weaker now even though the executive and legislature are under one-party control. You can see even from the Duma elections in December that they have a much lower majority than they had before. Even though oligarchs are civil society remain relatively limited and weak, the level of legitimacy in the government, that is the right to rule to people on an every day basis say yes, these people deserve to be in power, that level of legitimacy is very low right now. 

That's something that I think is almost going to be impossible for Putin to regain, especially when so many of the younger educated active people do not believe in the regime. So this low level legitimacy is a very important factor in the overall strength of the state. And then, finally, I will just say that this issue of nationalism remains a big question because who is going to capture that nationalist sentiment before Zhirinovsky's LDPR party had been the so-called nationalist party, but an interesting thing happened since December which is that the nationalists and the liberals have come together in these opposition protests. Not everybody is happy about that. Some of the liberal opposition do not like being associated with these, in some cases, really neo-fascist elements, but they have come together to protest the regime. And an interesting figure in this is this Navalny again, who, in his youth, made various anti-Chechen, sort of nationalist remarks. Now that, on the one hand, makes him suspect against liberals, but on the other hand gives him enormous credibility amongst these youth nationalist movements. So he is a very important figure to watch. I think Prokhorov, I might not have mentioned, he's the owner of the New Jersey Nets. That's how most people in America know him. 

He also is the kind of person that has a lot of support from young educated people, so I think he's another person to watch. And I think I'll leave it at that. And we have time for questions now. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] >> I have a question on the role of the press. We read about so many reporters being murdered, does social media have a greater impact now than the reporters? Could you just enlighten us a little on that? >> Yeah, that's a very good question. The media actually, it's sort of a multi-faceted issue in that you have TV, you have print media, and you have the internet. So TV is almost totally controlled by the state, and that happened early on in the end of the '90s, early 2000s. The newspapers remained in a little bit of an ambiguous position in that they weren't as controlled as TV stations, but also there was some control there, and there was this murdering of journalists who worked primarily for print media and who did exposes and things like that. Now what people would say about some of the print media is they'd say, well, in Moscow, these newspapers, who reads those, they're not that important. 

So even if there's a little bit of freedom of the press, they are, overall the regional newspapers are very controlled. And then the internet, a lot of people just thought a lot of people don't have the internet so it's not that important, social media doesn't matter that much, but I think that there is a kind of confluence of forces here in that what social media is doing is saying everybody can be their own reporter. So there's power in numbers. So instead of the journalists on the front lines going out and exposing fraud and being the only person to talk about it, it's hundreds of teenagers all over saying we're going to go to our schools, and we're going to look our teachers in the eye and say are you going to stuff ballot boxes. So it's a different understanding of reporting, of saying, really, are you going to do that because these are our fellow citizens. So I think that that changes the idea of what reporting is. And when you have videos that are posted online that lots of people see and it's hard to even get rid of them even if you wanted to take them off, that kind of gives stories a little bit of a life of their own. So it remains a difficult place for journalists, although there are a lot of journalists that operate. For example, -- is a pretty well known opposition journalist. She has a magazine called New Times. 

And she's one of these leaders in this opposition movement, and I asked her, well, aren't you afraid of being shut down? And she said, how are they going to shut me down? Are they going to steal my laptop? Because everything is on a cloud server. Are they going to go into our offices and take this or that? We have things everywhere All of our material is in different places. We have people working for us in different places. And short of actually jailing her or worse, she said I'm going to keep going with my magazine. And so there is a threat of violence against journalists and that's definitely there, but I think that was a little bit more of a problem when there was less decentralization of media. But now with this opening up, I think that, hopefully, that would provide a little bit more cover for the journalists that are working. Yes? >> Party of crooks and thieves, please say that in Russian. >> [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] There is some debate over whether it should be crooks or swindlers. Vor, I think, is clearly thief, but - could be, I don't know. Some people will say swindlers, some people will say crooks, some people will say some other term. 

So there's some debate over the translation. >> I've read that there's corruption at a local business level so that if somebody wants to be an entrepreneur they have to pay in order to stay in business. That was quite some time ago that I read that, but is it still true? And if it is, to the extent that it is true, what can they do with their economy to establish a culture of production rather than living off of resource taxes? >> Yeah, this is a really important question. A lot of people try to figure out how you can combat corruption. What's the answer? Why are people corrupt? For example, why do people take bribes? Do they take bribes because of some kind of moral weakness? Do they take bribes because they need the money? Do they take bribes because it's not really a bribe, it's just sort of a gift? Let's say school teachers in America get gifts from students around the holiday or the end of the year, is that a bribe or is that just a thank you? So you could say it's just a thank you, it's not a bribe. Well, some people would take that further to say when a government official does something for you, you give them a gift. This isn't a bribe. This is just saying thank you for your help. Some people would say, well, maybe, like you go to a doctor and they say you have to bring your own medicine. It's not quite that bad like it was in the '90s, but you had to bring your own food into a hospital, bring your own medicine, bring your own this or that, and that's because they had a lack of supplies. 

So there's not quite such a situation like that. And then there's just plain thievery, of somebody saying I'm sitting in this position, I control who gets a building permit or not, and I want you to give me money in order to do what I should be doing for free. So there's a whole range of why people accept bribes. And there's not a good answer as to how to stop it. There's some interesting examples, say, in Georgia, in the state of Georgia, the country of Georgia, where they have really reduced greatly corruption and bribery among judges by paying judges a lot more money and giving judges a pension with a no tolerance policy. Saying if you accept a bribe, you lose your pension. And for most judges this pension and their pay is so great that they're not interested anymore. And they've done quite a lot toward reducing bribery and corruption amongst judges. But traffic cops in Russia, for example, remain this kind of paradigmatic case of bribery, of just stopping people, this idea of selective enforcement of the law. You're driving down the street and you're stopped and they can just come up with a hundred different rules to say that you have broken. 

And you either pay on the spot or you have to spend a lot of your time fighting it or something like that. Now, they have tried to do something about that, but they haven't been very successful. I would say one thing that's interesting is there's a lot of variation across government agencies in how corrupt they are. So you just take fire inspection versus sanitation inspection. So there's a lot of variety in the bureaucracies. But it is also the case that it's not just the state taking bribes but it's also other firms. So some firms have become very interested in secure property rights, not because they fear state predation, but because they fear other firms. So they want a strengthened government and system of laws to protect other firms from stealing from them. But it's not, I don't think, and I'm not sure others have a good answer as to how you can change that overall. But it's very important, especially in the case of education. 

For example, there's just widespread corruption in passing college entrance exams and grades and things like that. That's very undermining of, not just people having to pay extra money, but it's completely undermining of the educational mission. >> I wonder if you have a take on the relationship between Medvedev and Putin? Whether Medvedev is really any different or how he felt about being, in effect, demoted to prime minster and whether, in fact, the prime minister has influences likely to be substantially reduced or the same or what? >> Yeah, this is a good question. Medvedev is picked largely because of his sort of internal constitution of loyalty. He's incapable of standing up to Putin. That's one of the reasons Putin picks him. So some people thought if he only stood up to Putin last year, but yes, if he was a different person he might have done that. But being the person he is, it's very unlikely that he can stand up to Putin. Now Putin sort of went, I think, a step to far in that he had held out the possibility that Medvedev might have a second term, and then he decided against that and forced Medvedev to make the announcement that Putin was going to replace him as the presidential candidate which people saw as an extra level of humiliation that was not really called for. But Medvedev has virtually no legitimacy and no support anymore amongst any segment of the population in Russia. 

But he is, technically, the head of United Russia. So he has an office as head of United Russia which makes him the normal candidate for the prime ministership. Now Putin could choose somebody else, but it's not going to be that easy to get rid of him even if he did want to get rid of him. And some people think, well Putin could do something interesting like pick his old finance minister, Aleksei Kudrin, to become prime minister. This would be sort of a bold move to show, okay, I get the message, we should do something different. But, again, there's no evidence that Putin has really gotten the message. There's no evidence that he's saying, I think he's worried, but there's no evidence that he's saying yes, it's true, I've made mistakes. He's not really this kind of a self-conscious, oh, I understand what needs to be done sort of person. So I think that probably the country would be better off if, like as a short-term solution, if Medvedev were not appointed prime minister. If they were to pick somebody else who had some better ideas about doing something about corruption, about managing the economy. 

But I wouldn't say it's a zero chance, zero percent probability that that could happen, but I would say it's probably more likely than not that Medvedev will nevertheless remain prime minister even though he's unpopular and even Putin probably doesn't support him that much. Oh, I think they want the microphone because they're taping. >> With oil prices remaining pretty high right now, I would presume then that we'll see some pretty good economic growth or economic growth would at least continue there, and with that economic growth, more legitimacy. That's my first question. >> Well, I think that's right. I think, for example, I'm sure Putin is saying I hope there's a war with Iran because anything that would drive up oil prices is going to be good for his regime and good in some ways in the overall economy of Russia. So it's true that an economic crisis would have a very destabilizing effect on the regime. But I would say even though the government is going to benefit in some ways from high oil prices, I think in some ways the genie is out of the bottle in that a lot of people are looking around and saying hey, I'm not going to give you credit for high oil prices. I'm going to look at the economy and say what have you done besides oil? Where is the diversification? Where is the modernization? So I think it does help them, but it's probably not going to be enough to satisfy the substantial criticisms that are out there. >> But doesn't that take a certain level of sophistication among the electorate? >> Yes it does, but it's the most sophisticated people who are against the regime right now. 

So that's right. But these charts that I showed you, for example, on the fraud, these are charts posted by people on the internet. These are not western social scientists who have done this. So the thing is, Russia has a lot of smart people, has a lot of technically talented, qualified people, and these are the same people that are saying hey, why do I have to go abroad to get a job? What's wrong with the scientific and educational infrastructure in this country? And why are we falling behind when we have both the resources and the talent in terms of the population? So it's true that it's a sophisticated argument, but I would say that there's quite a lot of, it's the middle class really, the upper educated middle class that is the most dissatisfied with the regime. >> And second, relations with the United States, can you briefly talk about that. >> Oh, sure. Under the Obama regime there was a reset which was trying to reestablish sort of friendly relations between Russia and the United States which had really gone south, especially after the short Georgia war between Russia and Georgia, and some of the aftermath of the presidential campaign rhetoric, etc. o the Obama Administration came in with the idea of a reset in Russian/US relations which, in many ways I would say, had some concrete successes. It had some concrete successes in the New START Treaty and also very critically in negotiating the Manas Air Transport Center in Kyrgyzstan. So not everybody knows that every single troop going in and out of Afghanistan goes through Kyrgyzstan, through the Manas Transport Center. Thirty percent of the fuel in Afghanistan goes through that transport center. 

That fuel is largely purchased from Russian, and now via Kyrgyz, companies. So that Manas Transport Center in Kyrgyzstan is absolutely critical to the US effort in Afghanistan, and Russia played a big role in agreeing to various aspects of that arrangement there. Kyrgyzstan has its own problems. It cannot ignore Russia's interest in the region even though it's an independent state. So there were some significant successes, I would say, in the reset. Putin and Medvedev sort of each would play, they would sort of have a good cop/bad cop routine when things would happen. So for example, in the bombing of Libya, Putin would go to a car factory and say, oh, this is so terrible, this is illegal and horrible, and Medvedev would go on the internet and say, well, Gaddafi's a bad guy, something had to be done. So they would give these kind of mixed messages. A lot of people thought there's going to be this return to negativity with Putin, and this is going to be a way to shore up the regime. But as I mentioned with this nationalism factor, it's not really clear that that's going to work as well as it has in the past because a lot of the people who are against the regime are very pro-western. 

So just saying you're against the United States or against Europe or against that, you're kind of giving this anti-modernization message which is exactly one of the things that people wanted. Now, I will say the current ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is actually a political scientist from Stanford University. He was on the National Security Council. From a scholar point of view, from a political science point of view, we think this is fantastic to have an ambassador who is very smart, very on top of the scholarly literature on democratization, on parties, on regime change, etc. o I think in terms of who we have in place as an ambassador, and somebody who speaks Russian and knows quite a lot about Russia, that's a very important aspect of the relationship which I think is good. The US was very muted in its response to the presidential election. There was a short statement congratulating the Russian people, which I was puzzled about that. You can read it in different ways. Congratulating which people? The people who won, the people who protested? [LAUGHTER] It's hard to say. So I think it's a little bit early to tell what is going to happen. Probably people will try to see what happens in the US after this year's election, and that may have a bigger effect on US/Russian relations. 

>> Could you go on and explain the relationship between the EU and Russia and China and Russia? I'm just trying to see who are the friends, who are the enemies of the Russian state. >> Yeah, well you're really pushing me a little bit out of my confidence, but I'll try to give you an answer. So the EU and Russia, the EU is very important to Russia in terms of trade. Now, one interesting development that's happened in Russia is that Russia's major gas company, Gazprom, has made a number of deals with French, German, and Italian energy companies. And this is happening on a firm to firm level. So German, French, and Italian companies want gas, and Gazprom wants to sell it. So Gazprom is interested in selling gas to Europeans because they're paying a world rate; whereas, Gazprom's gas that it sells internally is at a highly subsidized rate. So, in many ways, this firm to firm action is what is determining a lot of the infrastructure of economic relations there. So, for example, this Nord Stream, which some in eastern Europe called renewed Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the sense that they thought Germany and Russia are going around the interest of eastern Europeans in putting together this pipeline, that is going through despite the protests of people in eastern Europe. That's still happening and that's largely because of this firm to firm connection. 

So what's interesting there, I would say, is that it's not so much what does the government of Russia want, what does the EU executive or parliament want, what do the leaders of particular European governments want, but what do the firms want? I think that's a very important thing to think about in this context. Even in the case, for example, of the US fuel supply to Afghanistan. Even in difficult periods of US/Russian relations, Russia was still supplying the fuel, and from what I talked to with people in the Manas Base, they said they fulfill the fuel contracts. They deliver on time and what they're supposed to deliver, and that's what we care about. So to some extent, some people on the ground are not so concerned about whether the governments are getting along. Firms are concerned about whether they're selling their products and getting paid and making money. So with Europe, you can look at the overall trade situation. Russia just joined the WTO, the World Trade Organization, which has been something that's been a sticking point for a long time. So there is some debate over whether Russia will actually benefit from that or how it will exactly play out. But, clearly, China, in some ways, is a rival to Russia. 

On the other hand, if you believe in balancing international relations, you should think that Russia and China should get together against the west. That did not happen during the Soviet split, the height of the Cold War. I'm not sure we should expect it to happen now if it didn't happen then, and we probably have to look at other factors that are going to determine those relationships. Russia doesn't have any, you can't point to any super tense issues between Russia and China the way, for example, Russia with Japan has this issue with the Kuril Islands which Russia took during World War II. Japan wants them back, and until that's resolved there's not going to be a really great relationship between Russia and Japan. So there's not something like that with China, but Russia is weary of the huge economic resources that China has, the population, the immigration and migration into the far east. There's a lot of distrust between the two countries, I would say. So you can't look around and say, oh, here is the natural ally of Russia. It's not clear that China would be more of an ally than the United States, for example. So it's a fluid situation, I would say. 

>> We have time for one really quick question. >> I read that there's been some movement in Russia toward asking Syria to make some changes. Can you say what you think the possibilities are for getting the Syrian situation resolved. >> Yeah, that's a very good question and an interesting case. So Russia currently supplies weapons to Syria and Syria has a pretty good army. And Syria is an important conduit for Iran into Lebanon and Hezbollah. Syria's a very important country in the region. Now, a lot of the rhetoric during the protest in Moscow and in other parts of Russia in December up until March and after had to do with this Arab spring Some supporters of Putin would say we don't want to have an Arab spring here. And they're looking around saying we don't, in general, want people on the streets to kick leaders out of power. We don't really want that example. 

So we'd prefer for the existing leadership to maintain their power. So you can see just from that point of view they don't have a huge interest in seeing the Assad family overthrown. Right? So that's one factor. On the other hand, do they want to be seen as supporting a really brutal crackdown? No, they don't necessarily want to be seen that way. On the other hand, do they want to send some kind of subtle message to their own people to say, hey, if we're willing to support Assad in Syria, you draw the conclusion about what we would do here. Now I don't actually think that the Putin Administration would have the support of the military to have the legitimacy to have any kind of military crackdown on young people in the streets of Russia. So I don't think that's a big possibility. But I think sending a message of support for other dictatorships is probably the more likely message that they want to send. But I wouldn't rule out some kind of negotiated deal between the US and Russia, and not necessarily so public but something that would be some kind of middle ground where maybe Russia wouldn't have to come out and say they support the opposition in Syria but they maybe quietly stop supplying arms. But of course there's a financial cost to that too because they're making money off of those arms sales. 

So I think it's a very complicated situation, but the deck is a little bit stacked in favor of continued Russian support for the regime, I think. >> Well, great. Thank you very much. >> Thank you all for coming. [APPLAUSE]