Russia and Rousseau
Many years ago the Israeli scholar Jacob Talmon wrote a celebrated book about how the political ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau led first to the French Revolution and then to the Terror. He called it The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Though coined for Citizen Robespierre rather than Citizen Putin, Talmon's phrase describes pretty well the political system in Russia today.
In theory the regime permits opposition parties to exist. In practice they are allowed no access to the press, no opportunity to campaign, no right to protest, and no redress in the courts. The suppression of peaceful demonstrations on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg resulted over the weekend in the arrest of two prominent opposition figures, Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov, leader of the Union of Right Forces. On Monday a Moscow court confirmed the five day prison sentence imposed on Mr. Kasparov last Saturday, the aim of which is to sabotage his chances of influencing elections to the Duma.
Russia's totalitarian democracy has much in common with Robespierre's republic, in which a Law of Suspects placed the entire French nation under suspicion. In Mr. Putin's state, active opposition to the ruling United Russia party is construed as subversion of the state. Before Mr. Kasparov could address his supporters in public, he was arrested. This is his second spell in prison. The third time may not be so brief.
Apologists for Mr. Putin are quick to point to differences between Russia today and the Soviet Union. It is true that the Soviet state owned all but a tiny fraction of the country's means of production, whereas today's Russian economy has largely been privatized. It is also true that the Soviet courts were overtly political, with no pretence that the judiciary was independent, whereas today Russia claims to uphold the rule of law.
Yet economic liberty, whether individual or corporate, in Russia today is tightly circumscribed by the state. Entrepreneurs, however large, who invest without first securing, usually by bribery, official patronage, do so at their peril. Similarly, the legal system is subordinated to raison d'état. The world has watched helplessly as those responsible for state-sanctioned assassinations are protected by the courts, while opponents of the regime are framed and persecuted — all in the name of the people.
In such a totalitarian democracy, Andrei Lugovoy — the man wanted for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London a year ago with polonium-210 — is likely to be elected to the Duma, thereby obtaining parliamentary immunity. The Russian courts have refused to extradite Mr. Lugovoy to Britain, and he has emerged as a leading figure in Vladimir Zhirinovsky's neo-fascist Liberal Democratic Party. Yet Mr. Kasparov, Mr. Putin's most charismatic opponent, is now languishing in a Moscow jail.
The grotesque symbolism of this contrast may be lost on a Russian electorate mesmerized by state propaganda, but it should not be lost on the governments of America and Europe. The Duma elections on Sunday will be followed by presidential elections in March. Neither free nor fair, these manifestations of Russia's totalitarian democracy deserve no recognition from the liberal democracies of the West but rather as Rousseau's ideas gone to their inevitable end.
