The Putin regime used that parliamentary majority to change the political system. Arguing that a plethora of small parties can lead to political instability, in 2001 the Duma passed the government-sponsored ‘Law on Parties’ which restricted electoral participation to ‘national parties’—that is, those which not only had a minimum number of members, but which had branches all across Russia. The goal was to empower a few national parties and to eliminate small parties representing a particular region, ethnicity, confession, and the like. That same logic underlay the decision to replace the 1993 electoral system, which allocated one-half of the Duma seats to ‘single mandate districts’ (with the election of individuals, regardless of party affiliation), and the other half by ‘proportionate representation’ (allocated on the basis of a party’s share of the general vote). At Putin’s suggestion, in May 2005 parliament made proportionate representation the sole basis of the electoral system, thereby reinforcing the power of registered national parties. To marginalize small parties still further, parliament raised the minimum share of votes (from 5 to 7 per cent) as a precondition for representation in the Duma. The changes were controversial; critics complained that it denied some voters any representation, while advocates argued that these rules precluded the representation of radical fringe groups, promoted the formation of viable parties, and thereby ensured political stability and a productive parliament.
The ongoing war in Chechnya, which initially raised Putin’s popularity, began to arouse mounting criticism, especially from Western governments and human rights organizations. Although Russian forces established some semblance of control, they failed to crush all resistance or to end devastating terrorist acts. And the war took a heavy toll—on the Russian military (at least 4,572 killed and 15,549 wounded, with other counts running much higher), insurgents (at least 13,000), and civilians (low-end estimates ran between 30,000 and 40,000). This carnage eroded popular support in Russia itself (with 69 per cent, by 2005, favouring an end to the fighting and peaceful resolution), impelling the Kremlin to ‘Chechenize’ the conflict by putting pro-Moscow Chechens in charge and relying on Chechen, not Russian, forces. Moscow arranged for Ramzan Kadyrov to succeed his father (killed in a terrorist attack) as the president of Chechnya; the young Kadyrov quickly earned a reputation for brutality and the ‘disappearances’ of 2,000 to 3,000 fellow Chechens. The repression in Chechnya, even if provoked by criminal acts of terrorism, elicited sharp criticism in Western circles and reinforced criticism of Putin for ‘authoritarian’ tendencies.
Criticism of ‘human rights’ violations also gained currency from the well-publicized prosecution of leading oligarchs. The most sensational cause célèbre commenced in 2003, when Mikhail Khodorkovskii, the richest man in Russia and the sixteenth richest in the world, became the target of police investigations and prosecution. Khodorkovskii, by all accounts, had amassed his fortune during perestroika and the Yeltsin years by dubious means; during the ‘loans for shares’ phase, he acquired the oil company Yukos—worth billions of dollars—for a fraction of its real value. But it was not Khodorkovskii’s past but his political ambitions—including financial support for oppositionist forces—that reportedly triggered a full-scale investigation by the procuracy. In October 2003 he was arrested by a squad of special forces as he boarded a private jet and brought to Moscow for prosecution on charges of fraudulent privatization, use of an illegal offshore company to conceal profits, and corporate and individual tax evasion. Authorities claimed that Yukos owed 15 billion dollars in back taxes and fines, and that Khodorkovskii personally owed another 2 billion dollars. Convicted in May 2005, he was sentenced to nine years in a corrective labour camp—triggering outcries by Putin’s critics, at home and abroad, that the prosecution was purely political.
The Khodorkovskii case also seemed to substantiate fears that Putin wanted not only to silence oligarchs but to muzzle the media. In the Yeltsin era, as oligarchs acquired television channels and prominent newspapers, the result was not so much a free press as a media dominated by special interests, kompromat, and scurrilous gossip. That kind of journalism, especially when directed against those in power, did little to endear the media to authorities. Putin himself was incensed by negative coverage of the Chechnya war and criticism of his failure to respond personally to the sinking of the submarine Kursk in August 2000; he also took exception to the caricature of his persona in a popular TV show ‘The Puppets’ (Kukly). He gave vent to his vexation in a public speech where he said that ‘sometimes [the media] turn into means of mass disinformation and tools of struggle against the state’. His government deliberately acted to bring the media under control. That was dramatically evident in May 2000 when masked security officers raided the media giant owned by Vladimir Gusinskii; state pressure (and debts) forced Gusinskii to relinquish his media assets (most importantly, an influential TV channel); Gazprom, the state natural gas monopoly, gained control of Gusinskii’s holdings and, in short order, virtually all other television stations. Putin’s government also dealt harshly with individual journalists, such as Andrei Babitskii, who worked for the American-financed Radio Liberty and dispatched highly critical accounts of events in Chechnya. Nor did the regime do much to protect investigative journalists; the murder of Anna Politkovskaia in October 2006 (which Putin dismissed as ‘insignificant’) was but one of eighty-eight journalists slain between 1996 and 2006. The annual ‘World Press Freedom Index’, compiled by Reporters without Borders, placed Russia in the bottom quintal of surveyed countries (141st of 173 countries, just above Ethiopia and Tunisia).
Equally controversial—and fodder for charges of ‘authoritarianism’—was the government’s decision to regulate and restrict the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which had proliferated in post-Soviet Russia. By 2001 the government had registered some 400,000 NGOs; that number swelled to 500,000 by 2006. In the view of many Westerners, the NGO gives voice to civil society, performs essential services, and lobbies states and international organizations for ‘good causes’. But the murky legal status of the NGO in international law invites abuses, especially by ‘GONGOs’—‘government-organized NGOs’, funded by states and only masquerading as representatives of civil society. Russian sensitivity to foreign-funded NGOs intensified when these played a salient, sometimes decisive role in the ‘colour’ revolutions—in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), all the more when (as in Georgia and Ukraine) they brought to power regimes seeking ties with the West, not Russia. Moscow’s suspicions were not unfounded; in 2005, for example, the US government awarded 85 million dollars to a variety of organizations in Russia with the goal of promoting ‘democratization’. Private organizations, such as George Soros’s ‘Open Society’, also provided financial support for Russian NGOs. Putin complained about the subversive role of foreign-funded NGOs and in 2006 initiated legislation requiring NGOs to register, indicate the source of funding, and refrain from activities detrimental to Russian interests. Western observers, especially in the United States, denounced these measures as an attempt to throttle a burgeoning civil society and democratic forces. Increasingly, the Western media and specialists discerned a resurgence of authoritarianism; the Economist Intelligence Unit, for example, ranked Russia 107th of 167 states in terms of its democratization.