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| PUTIN LEADS IN POLLS | |
 March 24, 2000  |
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Russian polls have acting president Vladimir Putin ahead of 10 other candidates leading into the country's presidential election this weekend. Special correspondent Simon Marks reports.
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| More like a coronation than like an election | ||||||||||||||||||||
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SIMON MARKS: A coronation of a man who, at the age of 47, suddenly
found himself at the center of world attention after Boris Yeltsin's
unexpected resignation on New Year's Eve and his endorsement of Mr.
Putin, his then-prime minister. Mr. Putin's popularity soared in the
polls, thanks to his Mr. Putin argues he had to act tough in Chechnya, not just to protect the nation from the activities of alleged terrorists, but for broader reasons. He's called Chechnya "the place where Russia's fate is being decided," a symbol of national humiliation that he told Russian troops could reduce a once-great nation to the status of a minor European power. VLADIMIR PUTIN: (Translated) It's not only about restoring the honor and dignity of the country. No, it's about much more serious things. It's about bringing an end to the breakup of Russia. That's your main task, and Russia appreciates that.
The acting president is so confident of victory that he hasn't spent a single ruble on paid political advertising, even at one point crudely dismissing the whole concept.
SIMON MARKS: His opponents charge that Mr. Putin doesn't need to spend money on advertising because a pliant Russian media is doing the job for him. Communist Party Leader Gennady Zyuganov -- likely to place second on Sunday -- claims that for every two-and-a-half hours of coverage devoted to Mr. Putin, Russian television gives him just eight minutes.
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Most importantly of all, he's vowed to strengthen the Russian state and reintroduce the rule of law. A strong state he says is part of "Russia's genetic code." It's a message that has left his opponents in the dust. Liberal opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky, the standard-bearer for Russia's young democrats, finds himself outmaneuvered, trailing with around 5 percent in the polls.
SIMON MARKS: Since Boris Yeltsin's departure from the Kremlin on New Year's Eve, Mr. Putin has steadily hinted that once elected, he plans to overhaul Russia's democratic system. He's suggested that presidential terms to be extended from four years to seven. He's proposed that the country's 89 regional governors should be appointed, not, as at present, elected. And he's called for the creation of a smaller number of political parties in Russia, all actions that have led some observers of the political scene here to claim that Mr. Putin is going to be an authoritarian ruler who is indifferent to democracy. The question of who exactly Mr. Putin is, and what he might do in power, is the subject of open debate in Russia, raised at the very start of this reverential television biography of the country's new leader broadcast last weekend. The film portrayed Mr. Putin as a child of the swinging '60s, and was full of nostalgic images of the Soviet heyday. It showed a clip of a Soviet spy thriller that is said to have inspired a young Vladimir Putin to seek a career with the KGB, an organization he loyally served for 16 years, five of them in communist East Germany.
LILYA SHEVTSOVA: I think that Putin is not an absolute mystery anymore. |
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LILYA SHEVTSOVA: We know that he's a straightforward guy, that he has this can-do approach. We know that he knows how to function in a market economy environment. We know that he wants to be very friendly with the West, and we know also that he is absolutely indifferent to political democracy. SIMON MARKS: Anton Nosik is one Russian who thinks, or perhaps hopes, that he understands Vladimir Putin. He's the editor-in-chief of Lenta.Ru, Russia's most popular Internet news Web site. He's the epitome of the young, cutting-edge entrepreneur who has thrived under Russia's market conditions. And he and his staff have heard rumors that after the election, the Kremlin plans to crack down on Internet access and monitor people's online activities.
SIMON MARKS: Nevertheless, Mr. Nosik says he's cautiously optimistic about that future. Last December he and other online industry leaders were invited to Russia's White House for a closed-door meeting with Mr. Putin. At that meeting, Mr. Putin refused to sign legislation placed before him by members of his cabinet on the regulation of Russian Internet domain names after Mr. Nosik and his colleagues protested it. ANTON NOSIK: He's pragmatic to the extremes. I don't think he is a pathetic idiot who is ready to ruin the country's economy and the country's stability for the sake of a handful of slogans. That, he definitely isn't. The question is what would he do to preserve balance of powers.
In a further bid to tell the public more about Mr. Putin, an information center has been set up in downtown Moscow where voters can write letters to the country's new leader and read a book about him. It's an attempt at outreach that raises a further question: Whether Mr. Putin himself knows exactly what he's going to do after the votes are counted on Sunday night.
SIMON MARKS: As Vladimir Putin ponders the era that lies ahead of him, he inherits an office that is enormously powerful, and within days will have a mandate to do whatever he chooses. |
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SIMON
MARKS: This man is not campaigning in Russia's presidential elections
-- at least that's what the Kremlin says when asked about Acting President
Vladimir Putin's hectic schedule of appearances that have taken him
in recent days from one side of Russia to the other: Not campaigning
at this oil and gas plant in a remote northern region of the country;
not campaigning at this textile factory in southern Russia; not campaigning
with his pet poodle in this appearance on Russian television; and certainly
not campaigning in this fighter jet en route to the war-torn region
of Chechnya. 
He
is merely, say Kremlin officials, engaged in a series of "working
visits" in connection with his role as Boris Yeltsin's successor.
The Kremlin acts as though Mr. Putin's outright victory in Sunday's
election -- in which he needs more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid
a runoff -- is a given. Analysts and the opinion polls say it may be.
LILYA
SHEVTSOVA, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: This election
is the most boring election in our Yeltsin and post-Yeltsin history.
It's more like a coronation than a real election. 
prosecution
of the war in Chechnya, a war that continues to attract the support
of the vast majority of Russians, despite growing evidence of mass human
rights violations on the part of Russian forces, and ongoing guerrilla
warfare that's already causing more casualties and could pin the army
down in the region for months, if not years to come. 
SIMON
MARKS: The tough talk, sprinkled with occasionally salty language, has
helped Vladimir Putin maintain an enormous lead over his opponents in
this election. Most polls put him at least 35 points clear of his nearest
rival. Some of his former foes who once seemed significant presidential
candidates themselves, like the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, have
found themselves endorsing Mr. Putin after their reputations were tarnished
and their aspirations shattered during last December's parliamentary
election campaign. 
VLADIMIR
PUTIN: (Translated) Videos are nothing but advertising. Trying to figure
out what is more important during the election campaign -- Tampax or
sneakers -- is out of place. So I'm not going to get involved in that.
GENNADY
ZYUGANOV, Communist Party Candidate: (Translated) It isn't that he's
popular. They've simply pumped up his popularity, and the media has
become very good at this over the last 10 years. Nobody knew of him
just a year ago, and now he's got no program, no team, just a bloody,
frightening drama in Chechnya -- that's it. It's just a lie, a big,
well-organized lie. 
SIMON
MARKS: On his visits across the country, Mr. Putin has taken a leaf
out of Boris Yeltsin's election playbook, making a slew of promises
that he says are firm plans, not campaign rhetoric. He's pledged to
raise pensions by 20 percent, raise wages for all state workers by 20
percent, increase government purchasing from state-owned factories by
50 percent, and pay all back wages owed by the middle of next month.
GRIGORY
YAVLINSKY, Yabloko Party Candidate: He is a man which is ready to pay
thousands and thousands of lives for his political success. The price
for his political elections is the thousands of Russian soldiers in
the Northern Caucasus, and also the thousands of civilians which were
killed there. Look at that -- nine months, no one positive step -- only
the war in Chechnya -- in economy, nothing. In foreign policy, nothing.
In internal policy, almost nothing. 
And
it focused on his work since the collapse of the USSR, in his native
St. Petersburg, where he became a close adviser to the city's influential
reformist mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. When Mr. Sobchak died of a heart attack
last month, Mr. Putin led the nation's mourning, the image further underlining
a career spent first serving the KGB, then the post-Soviet reforms,
seemingly competing forces in political life here. 
SIMON
MARKS: The Carnegie Endowment's Lilya Shevtsova says Vladimir Putin
is a curious combination of old-style apparatchik and new economic thinker.
ANTON
NOSIK: You know, Russia is not exactly the place to feel comfortable
about the future. 
SIMON
MARKS: Others, like liberal leader Grigory Yavlinsky, think the risks
are enormous. In this TV ad, Mr. Yavlinksy's campaign postulates a return
to the gulag as two prisoners of the future think back to the March
2000 election. "I was told there was no alternative," says
one prisoner. "But there was," says his cellmate, "if
we'd voted for that guy Yavlinsky, we wouldn't have wound up here."
LILYA
SHEVTSOVA: Well, there is no real Putin. You know, he resembles to me
a personality, a man who has been caught in the elevator between the
floors. He's still connected to the previous floor, and something has
been broken in the elevator and he can't, you know, get to the next
floor. But he desperately wants, and a lot depends on the pressure.