The west’s derisive reporting of Vladimir Putin’s election victory this week was a mark of his success. It was described as an abuse of democracy, “rigged”, “fixed” and “a sham”. The other candidates were shadows, while Putin’s true opponents were imprisoned, exiled or dead. According to this narrative, the 87% who voted for him were mere victims of coercion, the queues of silent protesters were the stars.
Putin’s vote had nothing to do with democracy. It was a rerun of his 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, a global dressing-up, a rallying of support. As he celebrated his win to an adoring crowd in Red Square on Monday, we saw Putin as the new Ivan the Terrible against a backdrop of Ivan’s St Basil’s cathedral. He even made an offhand quip about his murdered rival Navalny. The image was of absolute power smilingly defying the enemy. Two years ago, he was supposedly crippled by western sanctions. We don’t hear that now.
I sometimes think what fun it would be to spend a month as the London correspondent for a totalitarian state newspaper. The evidence of relentless failures by the British government would fuel my daily contrasts with the order and stability back home. I would ponder when these bickering politicians and their corrupt donors would fade to nothing. I would report on the excluded populists – the Johnsons, Andersons, Farages and Galloways – waiting in the wings to pounce, while Rishi Sunak twists and turns frantically to avoid an election.
How we describe other countries matters when our concern is not how it seems to them, but how it feels to us. Almost half a century of George Kennan’s policy of containment and cohabitation with communism has given way to a shrill new agenda. Not just Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria, but states across Asia and Africa are regularly castigated as tyrannical, terrorist or genocidal. They are made victims of economic aggression through sanctions, distorting global trade and impoverishing millions. There is no evidence this castigation has advanced the cause of democracy an inch – quite the opposite.
One survey suggests the number of democracies has declined since 2015. Political bookshelves heave with predictions of democracy’s decay and death. Most alarming was last year’s polling from Open Society Foundations. Surveying nations across the globe, it found that only 57% of 18 to 35s regarded democracy as their preferred form of government, against more than 70% for those over 56. Each successive younger generation has a lower respect for democracy. More than a third of the world’s under-35s would today support some sort of “military rule”, by a “strong leader” who did not hold elections or consult a parliament.
When I asked a Russia expert what he thought would be the true tally of electoral support for Putin’s dictatorship, his view squared with this survey. He suggested it would be about 60%, though lower in Moscow and St Petersburg. This sounded much like my visits to Moscow in the post-communist 1990s. Russians would concede the virtues of western democracy, but they pleaded the more urgent need for order, security and prosperity.
To vote for Putin, you did not need to support his regime or his war with Ukraine. You might well be content with the one thing he promises: security and a patriotic response to western abuse. Nato’s escalation of its logistical aid to Ukraine into an all-out economic war on the Russian people enabled Putin to construct an anti-west coalition. It now extends from China and India to embrace a stage army of authoritarians across the globe. This economic war has clearly been counter-productive. The Economist reports this week that the sanctions have in fact “juiced the [Russian] economy”. Russian GDP growth of approximately 3 % in real terms last year outstripped Britain’s. Western policy is actively helping Putin retain power.
As the historian of modern Russia Mark Galeotti points out, Putin’s defiance of his western critics has entrenched his “shabby police state”, possibly for his lifetime. We can hurl abuse at him, as we can at Xi, Modi and the rest. It may make us feel better. And perhaps we should, not least on moral grounds: these are not regimes we would cast as admirable. But let’s be realistic. There is not the slightest evidence that in doing so we are making the world a safer place for democracy; probably the reverse.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
