If Vladimir Putin does not win reelection this weekend, the following may happen: hundreds of political parties will be formed and nationalists and liberals from the 1990s will struggle for power. By May, Russia’s nuclear arsenal gets transferred to American control for security. A year later, the republics of the North Caucasus secede as a single emirate. If that wasn’t bad enough, Georgia will hold the Sochi Olympics in 2014 and ban Russian athletes from the event.
This is a snippet from “Russia Without Putin. Welcome to Hell,” a YouTube clip that appeared early this year in an online contest, where users took an audio clip describing Russia’s slide into anarchy without Putin and created a video using stock footage.
The ad is not connected directly to Putin’s camp, but it highlights the same message of stability that Masha Lipman from the Moscow Carnegie Center said is the keystone to Putin’s reelection campaign. “A key point in Putin’s campaign is that there is no alternative to Putin and without Putin, the country will collapse,” she said. “Putin is the guarantor of stability and his campaign comes down to this. Some of his campaigners and loyalists may be more vulgar, some may be subtler. Putin himself tends to be subtler.”
“Russia without Putin” (and there are many variations – the most popular version, “Russia Without Putin. Apocalypse Tomorrow!” racked up 800,000 views on YouTube) ran into trouble with the video-sharing site, and a version of the video was blocked early last month. According to the creator of the contest and the moderator of the “Russia Without Putin Is Russia Without a Future” group on the social network VKontakte Kirill Romashov, politics was behind the decision. “There is nothing that could be qualified as ‘indecent content,’ there is no trace of either gore or nudity!” Romashov told a Moscow tabloid. “It’s possible that what might have been shocking for some people was the fact that Russia without Putin will be like what is described in the clip. But the truth hurts.”
The trend has not been limited to the Internet. Argumenty i Fakty and Komsomolskaya Pravada, two of Russia’s most popular newspapers, released a weekly insert with a run of 5.5 million copies titled “God Forbid!” with the tagline: “We are unhappy with the authorities, but we didn’t ask for a revolution.” Articles in the paper include “How Not to Turn March 2012 into February 1917” and “[Ksenia] Sobchak Is Against Putin? Then I’m for Him!” with the subtitle “Paradox: the more the opposition tries, the greater [Putin’s] ratings become.”
“God Forbid” is a throwback to a newspaper released in 1996 during Boris Yeltsin’s heated presidential campaign against Communist Party Leader Gennady Zyuganov (running this year as well), who looked set to beat Yeltsin after a difficult four years of shortages and separatism. At the time, the paper threatened the breakout of civil war in case of a communist victory – today, the anti-opposition message in “God Forbid!” is similar, but there is greater focus on foreign interests: Putin has alluded to the U.S. State Department underwriting the protest movement in Russia and stirred up anti-Western sentiments at a rally with more than 100,000 supporters last week. “We ask everyone not to look abroad, not to run to the other side and not to deceive your motherland, but to join us,” he said, reported the Financial Times. “We won’t allow anyone to meddle in our affairs or impose their will upon us, because we have a will of our own.”
The message is resonating among voters. A Levada poll released last week shows that the United States is falling out of favor with Russians. In November 2011, 18 percent of Russians had a poor opinion of the United States – in just two months that number jumped to 31 percent. Whereas five percent of Russians earlier had an extremely poor opinion of the United States, that number rose to nine percent.
Which is to say nothing of television: Arina Borodina noted in Kommersant that six specially produced documentaries – one of which was aired almost simultaneously on supposedly competing Channel One and NTV – shared one same message with voters: “For the last 11 years Russia has become an enlightened country with a highly developed economy, and the merit for that belongs to only one man – Vladimir Putin.”
Is Putin reaching voters? Denis Volkov, a sociologist from the Levada Center polling agency, told Russia Profile that the economic crisis showed that Russia’s steady economic growth during the early 2000s could not continue. It fueled concerns about a backslide into the 1990s. In terms of reaching his constituency, Putin has done so already: “Putin has already reached his own voters. Mainly these are people who watch television, because even for those who use the Internet for news, television is their first source of information,” said Volkov.
The opposition is also ratcheting up its rhetoric. As Lipman noted, “the closer the elections, the more the protesters are becoming anti-Putin [instead of pro-free elections]… there’s a lot of quite aggressive, insulting material both in signs [at rallies] and on the Web as well.” Alexei Navalny told Dozhd television this week that protesters needed to show the authorities they were willing to escalate the protest movement on March 5, and he supported a campaign to distribute tents for protests set after the presidential elections. But with images of Kiev’s Maidan Square and the “Orange Revolution” still a hot topic, the opposition may be positioning itself as the straw man that Putin's supporters make it out to be.
