As I've talked with many Americans about Russia, they don't seem to really understand the mindset of regular Russians. Many Americans assume that they should act as they themselves would, especially when it comes to questions of collective action and political expectations. This article speaks to this-- lots more could be written, but it's a start.

Vote Fraud? Next Question.
Why Russians Ignore Ballot Fraud

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
New York Times
Published: October 24, 2009

MOSCOW — Soon after polls closed in regional elections this month, a blogger who refers to himself as Uborshizzza huddled away in his Moscow apartment and began dicing up the results on his computer. It took him only a few hours to detect what he saw as a pattern of unabashed ballot-stuffing: how else was it possible that in districts with suspiciously high turnouts in this city, Vladimir V. Putin’s party received heaps of votes?

Uborshizzza, who by day is a 50-year-old medical statistician named Andrei N. Gerasimov, sketched charts to accompany his conclusions and posted a report on his blog. It spread on the Russian Internet, along with similar findings by a small band of amateur sleuths, numbers junkies and assorted other muckrakers.

Out went their call: This election was dirty! We demand a new one!

The country’s response, though, was to avert its eyes.

There was none of the sort of outrage on the streets that occurred in Iran in June, when backers of the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, were accused of rigging the election for him. Nor the international clamor that greeted the voting in Afghanistan, which last week was deemed so tainted that President Hamid Karzai was forced into a runoff.

The apparent brazenness of the fraud and the absence of a spirited reaction says a lot about the deep apathy in Russia, where people grew disillusioned with politics under Communism and have seen little reason to alter their view.

The thinking seems to be that Mr. Putin is in charge and the opposition is feeble, so there is no point in trying to get your voice heard, no matter that the country faces serious problems.

“People are passive because they feel that there is absolutely no opportunity to change the system,” Mr. Gerasimov said.

The election also highlighted the coarse political dynamic in Russia.

Mr. Putin, the prime minister and former president, is popular in part because he is given credit for the economic gains and stability of the last decade. He has also suppressed or co-opted the opposition. Fairly or unfairly, his party had enormous advantages in the Oct. 11 elections and was certain to triumph.

Yet the party, United Russia, chose not merely to defeat its opposition, but to crush it.

Such is the impact of the so-called vertical of power, a structure that is a defining trait of the Putin era. The Kremlin wields a concentrated authority and keeps tight rein over regional cadres, which always defer to those at the top.

Before the election, regional officials were told that they would be held accountable if United Russia fared poorly. They seemed to respond by doing whatever they could to ensure overwhelming victory — and preserve their own jobs.

The officials knew that they could act with relative impunity because of United Russia’s dominance of the government, as well as the public’s indifference. “It seemed as if the pressure to provide the necessary results overcame any fear of being caught,” said Sergey Shpilkin, 47, a Moscow resident and physicist by training who blogs as Podmoskovnik.

The official turnout in the Moscow city council election was 36 percent of registered voters, but Mr. Shpilkin was part of a team that estimated that the true figure was 22 percent, with the extra votes improperly assigned to United Russia.

United Russia won 32 of 35 seats, with 3 for the Communists. Mr. Shpilkin said two or three other opposition parties should have won seats.

(After the 2008 presidential election, Mr. Shpilkin did a novel study. He showed that a disproportionately high number of polling stations had figures for overall turnout that ended in either 0 or 5, suggesting that they had been made up. Moreover, stations with higher turnout reported unusually high support for the victor, Mr. Putin’s protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev.)

Another blogger who posted an analysis of the election this month said the public’s attitude reminded him of a Russian saying, “My hut is on the edge of the village; I know nothing,” that speaks to the reluctance to get involved.

“Unfortunately, in society, that sentiment now prevails,” said the blogger, who signs his posts “Capitan-Blood” and lives in St. Petersburg.

Opinion polls in recent years bear him out. One showed that 94 percent of respondents believed that they could not influence events in Russia. According to another, 62 percent did not think that elections reflect the people’s will.

Beyond staging a walkout in Parliament and a few demonstrations, opposition parties have done little to protest the election. Mr. Putin pronounced the voting generally fair, as did election regulators with close ties to the Kremlin.

Still, the evidence was hard to ignore.

Overall turnout was 18 percent in one Moscow district, and United Russia garnered 33 percent. In an adjacent district, turnout was 94 percent, and the party got 78 percent.

Sergey S. Mitrokhin, leader of Yabloko, a liberal party that lost both its council seats in the election, voted in District 192. So did his family and close friends.

On the district’s official tally, Yabloko was listed as having received no votes.

This is a very interesting line of argument-- something that is often overlooked in discussions of Russian politics in the USA.

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Freedom for Sale

John Kampfner, 9 September 2009

Round the world, people appear willing to give up their freedoms in return for the promise of prosperity or security. But why? John Kampfner explores this in his new book Freedom for Sale. One of the countries he studied was Russia.

As we sit in one of Moscow's fashionable neo-Tsarist restaurants, an old friend reminds me that there are only three Cs that matter: Chelsea, Cartier and Courchevel. The economic crisis has affected his real estate business, but not so much that he has to forgo life's many luxuries. In any case, the oil price is already beginning to rise and the economy is easing itself out of recession, so his confidence remains undiminished. For the past 20 years of globalised gluttony, Russia's embracing of conspicuous consumption has been the most pronounced of any emerging market. Some of its manifestations are particular, notably its unhealthy mix of nationalistic hubris and resentment of outsiders, what I have long called "the politics of envy".

Yet Russia's embrace of materialism to the detriment of so much else, shares many characteristics of other countries. In a year of travelling to research my book, "Freedom for Sale", I looked at eight countries, four of them notionally authoritarian - Singapore, China, Russia and the UAE - four notionally democratic - India, Italy, the UK and the USA. Why, I wanted to know, is it that so many people are willing to give up their freedoms in return for the promise of either prosperity or security? Why are people so reluctant to cause trouble, even where they have legal protection for free expression? Or to put it another way: why are the middle classes so easily bought off?

I first went to Russia in the late 1970s. I have been a regular visitor since, including two spells of working as a correspondent, in the mid 80s, and during the heady years of the early 90s. I saw the Soviet Union in stagnation and not-so-blissful isolation, when the verb "to buy" was less important than "to get hold of". The joke was "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". In the Yeltsin years, as Communism collapsed and uncertainty was the only certainty, Russians enjoyed unprecedented freedoms.

Of the people I know, those who have dealt with money have largely done well. Those with talent in other areas, from science to the arts, teachers and doctors, have seen not just their living standards collapse but their sense of pride and identity wither. They had invested many hopes in the new order, and had felt let down. Political liberalism allowed itself to be identified with uncaring shock-therapy capitalism. Lilia Shevtsova, a veteran chronicler of the era, summed it up to me like this: "Never had Russia been so free," she says. "But ordinary people wearied of their unprecedented freedom to criticise the government because it had brought no improvement to their real lives."

By contrast, in his eight years as president from 2000-2008, Vladimir Putin presided over the greatest period of economic growth and political stability his country had seen for a generation. Not everyone benefited, by any means. Most pensioners struggled to make ends meet; some people had their homes snatched from them by various developers' scams; others had failed to recover from the pyramid schemes of the last economic crash. Vulnerable members of society continued to suffer, as they had done in the 1990s.

But what mattered was that enough people were doing sufficiently well and considered themselves to be sufficiently free in their personal lives. Those doing well did extraordinarily well. Sports cars, designer shops and expensive restaurants had, by the mid-2000s become the norm for a small, but significant proportion of the population in the big cities. Moscow was said to have the best sushi outside Japan. It boasted more 6-series BMWs than any other city in the world. This wealth helped foster a revival of self-confidence - the belief that Russians could once again hold up their heads high in international company.

Putin therefore delivered. The concentration of authority in the hands of a small cabal of politicians and their business associates, and the elimination of alternative sources of power, allowed him systematically to curb public freedoms. Elections became a sham; parliament became a rubber stamping body. Small pockets of independent media were allowed to survive (the newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the radio station Ekho Moskvy), but investigative journalists, lawyers and politicians who caused trouble were either persuaded to think again, imprisoned or found dead at the bottom of stairwells or ditches.

But many of the people I knew opted for a quiet life. Why the rock the boat when you can enjoy the good life, paying little more than 10 per cent of tax (at least that part that was declared), take your holidays in Cap Ferrat and live inside one of the many gated "villages" that were springing up on the outskirts of the city?

Putin's Russia resulted in an overwhelming indifference towards politics and atomisation of society through consumer goods. In so doing it was merely reflecting a broader trend. I call it the anaesthetic of the brain. In the UK and US, much of this decade has been dominated by a low-tax and security agenda that saw unprecedented intrusion of the state into people's lives, from surveillance and eavesdropping to pre-trial custody and other curbs on civil liberties. How many people complained? In Italy, what mattered far more than his sexual antics was Silvio Berlusconi's assault on the independence of the media and judiciary. How many times has he been voted into power?

The model for this new world order is Singapore, the state in which I was born, and which has long intrigued me. I am constantly struck by the number of well-educated and well-travelled people there I know who are keen to defend a system that requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a good material life.

This is the pact. In each country it varies; citizens hand over different freedoms in accordance with their own customs and priorities. Cultures and circumstances may vary; systems can be radically different. We have all colluded; in the West we have colluded most. Unlike Russia, unlike China, we had the choice to demand more of our governments, to rebalance the relationship between state and individual, but for as long as the consumerist going was good we chose not to exercise it.

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Freedom For Sale by John Kampfner is published by Simon and Schuster.