The Russian vote and what it means

One of the founders of Russia’s Pussy Riot rock band, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, was interviewed at length on the BBC this past weekend.

She has no time for President Vladimir Putin. When the group played inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour she was sent to jail for two years for “religious hatred”.

She doesn’t seem bitter but she seems damning. She thinks that last week’s referendum on a new constitution was only held to cement Putin in power for another couple of decades.

She barely dis-cussed the other articles of the constitution.

Even other opponents of Putin find her a bit hard to take. She finds little good in the present order.

The band may not have millions of followers as she would like but rightly she drew attention to the fact that 34 percent of the people of Moscow voted against approval of the new constitution.

In St Petersburg the vote against was 22 percent. (Turn out across the country was 68 percent, so one can assume most of those not voting a third are not exactly excited about their government.)Besides the issue of term limits for Putin there were 200 other items in the constitutional package. No doubt, for example, many older people voted “yes” because of the provision that would index pensions.

Free speech. Yes, Russia does have a degree of it. The Moscow and St Peters-burg votes were significant because they possess between them around one third of European Russia’s population.

The two cities contain (I’m guessing as there are no statistics on this) 70 percent of Russia’s people who are academics, doctors, lawyers, writers, directors of theatre, ballet and opera companies and their stars, publishers, journalists, social workers and businessmen.

Putin can’t be happy that so many influential people voted against him. If Russia published an annual Who’s Who I would surmise that more than half of the people in it would have voted against approving the new constitution. But that is just a guess. Putin’s strength lies in the working class and lower middle class of the cities, the inhabitants of small town and villages, those who live off state budget funds and those who live east of the Urals.

Russia’s freedoms are circumscribed, but less so than the Western media project. You can walk into a bookshop and find plenty of books by critics and dissidents.

You can read a couple of Moscow-based newspapers that have a good degree of freedom as does the nationally broadcasted radio station, Echo, even though it is owned partly by Gazprom which in turn is partially state-owned.

(However, it has been warned by a government watchdog over its reporting in Ukraine.) There are magazines and a TV station that are not influenced by owners who have close links to the Kremlin, and some smaller ones in the provinces. Russia Today, regarded in the West by people who never or rarely watch it and think of it as a propaganda broadcaster is a serious and reasonably objective station, albeit with a Russian accent.

The BBC, CNN and count-less other TV and radio stations can be easily accessed. The internet is free, so if one wants to read the New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian or post critiques there is no penalty. Face-book and its Russian equivalent are very rarely censored. However, one of the beacons of the outspoken part of the newspaper world, Vedomosti, is going through a turbulent and worrying period after its purchase by a pro-Kremlin businessman.

Nevertheless, if you want to know what’s going on in Russia and abroad you can find it quite easily.

Demonstrations are per-mitted although those that are highly political can be stopped and its leaders arrested. Jail terms range from a night to a week and very occasionally to two years as happened with the Pussy Rioters. In a Western church they’d have been arrested too but probably have got off with being sentenced to a period of community service.

Liberty is not up to Western standards, but neither is Russia a dictatorship. I would describe Putin’s regime as “soft authoritarian”.

Treated with sympathy rather by hostility by the US and the EU it could evolve into a better state of being.

Western observers also overlook that the BBC and France TV are state-owned. They overlook that big time capitalists such as Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos have a disproportionate hold on parts of Western media.

Jewish owners likewise, with their understandable pro-Israeli favouritism and anti-Islamic bias. Facebook, the most powerful of on-line fora, refuses to censor the often blatant lies told by politicians mainly Republicans even though much of the mainstream media would at the very least question them.