The only surprising thing about Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory in this weekend’s presidential elections was the scale of the electoral fraud at work. However, Putin is not the new Stalin many are calling him, though he may become Leonid Brezhnev 2.0.
According to the official tally, he received 87 per cent of the vote – the highest figure in any Russian election since the end of the Soviet Union – on the basis of an equally record 74 per cent turnout. This is in stark contrast with polling beforehand, which quite consistently was showing him likely to receive 60-66 per cent. Indeed, at one of the few polling stations with genuinely independent monitors, Number 205 in the Moscow Airport district, they recorded a 65 per cent vote for him, but the official returning officers gave Putin 80 per cent.
With another six-year term of office, he will have ruled Russia directly or indirectly for 30 years, surpassing even Joseph Stalin’s time in power. With the death in prison of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the exclusion from the ballot of any real opposing candidates, increasing censorship and oppression, it is perhaps understandable that many fear what Putin will do with this new mandate. It has also become common to draw parallels with his fearsome predecessor.
Putin is no Stalin, though. Stalin was a monster with a dream of breathtaking audacity and ambition, the total remodelling of a ramshackle agrarian country into a disciplined industrial totalitarianism. In the name of his vision and, above all, his personal power, millions were killed, millions more were herded into the Gulag labour camps.
By contrast, Putin is a smaller man. He has had people murdered, and fought brutal wars against his own people – the Chechens who dared rebel against Moscow’s rule – and now against the Ukrainians. Nonetheless, his goals have consistently been simpler: asserting Russia’s status as a “great power”, holding on to power, and ensuring that he and his cronies can embezzle and indulge themselves to their heart’s content.
This is not in any way to exonerate him for his undoubted crimes. Rather, it is to provide a basis on which to consider what he will do now that he has awarded himself another mandate to rule. The election does not so much mark a new phase in the evolution of Putin’s regime as reflect its continuing descent into the shabby and banal thuggery of the banana republic – or the late Soviet Union.
Under Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party for 18 years (1964-82), dissidents were arrested, sometimes even confined to mental hospitals. The economy stagnated, not least under the pressure of unsustainable defence spending. Corruption became the norm, and ordinary citizens lost any faith in their system and their rulers, but with the vigilant and vicious KGB watching them, responded with apathy and disengagement. Brezhnev even led the Soviet Union into an unwinnable imperial war, invading Afghanistan in 1979.
Brezhnev was conservative, but aggressive when he felt his interests and those of the USSR were under threat. Likewise, having largely avoided talking directly about the war during the election campaign, in his victory speech, Putin brought it to the foreground, saying that it was his first priority.
We may see a further escalation in Ukraine, but to a degree this will depend on whether he is emboldened enough to countenance a new mobilisation wave now that the election is over.
Deeply unpopular and divisive with the country, a mobilisation could nonetheless give the Kremlin the forces to take further advantage of Kyiv’s current lack of troops and ammunition. Either way, he is giving no signs that he is willing to talk peace on anything but his terms.
Likewise, we can expect more political repression, and the end of the remaining small spaces left for civil society. The regime seeks to avoid mass crackdowns when it can, to avoid the risk of sparking a wider public backlash, as we saw during Navalny’s funeral.
But that was because there were tens of thousands involved: as under Brezhnev, any individuals daring to challenge the regime can expect to be treated as “traitors”.
Brezhnev remained in office until his death, but left a country that was less prosperous, secure, stable and happy. Putin looks set to bequeath Russia the same toxic legacy – but may well not care.
Dr Mark Galeotti is the author of Putin’s Wars: from Chechnya to Ukraine, released by Osprey