If I recover from a bout of stomach illness by Sunday, I will cast my ballot in Russia’s presidential election. But there’s no need to rush to get well, because my vote will make no difference.
There was a day when it did seem that my vote mattered. In 1996, I found myself in Ireland on Election Day and made a huge effort to go to the embassy in Dublin and vote for Boris N. Yeltsin, because I feared that the Communists could return to power under his opponent, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, and I would again have serious problems. Mr. Zyuganov is running for president again this year, but I no longer fear him. He will lose.
This not only reassures me, but also leads me to think about how President Vladimir V. Putin, in his eight years in power, managed to destroy Communism. He finished it off so brutally that it’s silly to even think about the possibility of its return. Yet some people outside Russia believe that Mr. Putin did away with only the democrats, the liberal parties and the independent news media. No, he also threw out power-seeking oligarchs, who are very unpopular with the Russian people, and he rid the country of chaos and instability, which, he tells us, were rampant in the 1990s.
No matter how you look at it, President Putin also brought order to Chechnya: at least they’re no longer flying young Russian soldiers back in body bags every day. And if television is offering more humorous programs and songs from around the world instead of political discussions, people only welcome this. As for opposition parties, the real ones, they quarreled among themselves and became so indistinguishable in their radical demands that the people, with President Putin’s help, stopped taking note of them.
For the majority of Russians, Mr. Putin will enter history as a positive figure. That during his rule he actively relied on his K.G.B. colleagues doesn’t bother a lot of people. Whom else should he lean on in his struggle to impose order? He worked with the human material that came to him from the depth of Russian history, people who to this day drink, steal and consider politics a source of personal power and enrichment. If Mr. Putin preferred not to be trusting, it was because he clearly sensed the rot in the national gene pool.
That he went too far in some things, that he irritated Europe, that he was sometimes vindictive — these are separate matters. His friends in the K.G.B. were raised on hatred for the West. Now, at least, they limit themselves for the most part to negative rhetoric about the West. So there is progress. Mr. Putin gave his people faith in tomorrow: It’s no accident that Russia today is full of packed restaurants, game parlors, casinos, discothèques, cars and books about everything from Buddhism to homosexuality. Mr. Putin was lucky all eight of his years in office: oil prices rose, Russia grew rich and life became good. Private life remains remarkably free.
His biggest mistake was his longing to make Russia the successor to the Soviet Union: this gave rise to the imperial discourse that so frightened neighboring countries, his defense of the Soviet Union’s aggressive foreign policy and the damage to Russia’s image in the world. What’s worse is that our next president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, whom President Putin chose as his heir as if he were a czar, will have to deal with the Russian weaknesses that were hidden from the population under propaganda slogans. The failure to modernize industry or agriculture, the growing corruption in government, the ubiquitous drunkenness, the record numbers of murders and suicides, the terrible state of Russian health care and the problems that come with a shrinking population will fall on Mr. Medvedev’s young shoulders.
Nobody, probably not even President Putin, knows Mr. Medvedev’s real goals and values. He was never a public politician — though the talk on the street, not shared by dissidents, makes him out to be liberal, cultured, moderate and even pro-Western. As a young man he fought for democracy on the side of the future mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, and he was never noted for professional connections to the secret services. Yet his close ties to his current chief speak, at least, to limitless patience and self-limitation.
Whether Mr. Medvedev emerges as a new Khrushchev, ready for an ideological thaw, or a new Gorbachev, who also came to office without his own team, is impossible to say. Mr. Putin has not died, as Stalin and a series of aged Communist leaders did when they gave up power. He is there, smilingly holding Mr. Medvedev by the hand. The king is not dead, and it is too early to shout: “Long live the new king!”
Once again the future of Russia is wide open and unpredictable. Will there be dual rule? Will there be confrontation between two leaders or will they peacefully coexist? Might Dmitri Medvedev disappear along the way, leaving power once again to Vladimir Vladimirovich? I have no answers. But I will say this: For better or for worse, Mr. Medvedev is the last hope for me and for the Russia I love. If he proves to be a false figure of history, then Russia, no matter how hard it tries to look like a superpower, will sink to the depths like that submarine Kursk. Dmitri Anatolevich, the choice is yours.
Victor Erofeyev, the author of the short-story collection Life With an Idiot. This article was translated by The International Herald Tribune from the Russian.