Democracy & Dictatorship

The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival premiered a documentary about Russia’s fake democracy last night that was really a paean to dissident Garry Kasparov, who was in attendance. The film is an amateurish muddle and provided no context about the situation in the country, but the images were gripping and fairly self-explanatory, the street protests eerily reminiscent of their Chilean counterparts that I witnessed during the 1980s.

The film does Kasparov, the world’s top chess player for 20 years, no favors by its uncritical fawning, but you gotta hand it to a guy who is rich enough to be stroking his thighs in Monte Carlo and instead fights for democracy back home surrounded by bodyguards to ward off the screaming Putinist thugs, including gaggles of pimply, adolescent mercenaries sneering at him as a turncoat for opposing Lord Vlad.

Kasparov’s allies highlighted in the film looked a little peculiar too, to my mind, but one can’t be choosy in politics, and Kasparov looked indulgently open-minded about them while doing his best to keep the fractious coalition in line.

In the Q&A period following the screening, Kasparov had interesting things to say. He compared the Russian process with Iran and Chile and assured us that though the demonstrations shown on screen (dating from 2006-07) were small, much bigger ones will surely follow. He asserted that the economic conditions faced by the Russian masses are so dire that they will be hitting the streets soon and that the Putin brigades in the streets could even turn against the regime. For example, he said that only a dozen of Russia’s 83 regions were solvent and meeting their salary and pension obligations.

Kasparov’s main criticism of U.S. policy is the tendency to swallow what he says is a completely phony political process. No one pretends that China is a parliamentary democracy, he said, why can’t they see through ours? ‘We’re not trying to win elections’, he equipped, ‘We’re trying to have elections’.

Our countrymen so eager to award wiretapping privileges to the federal government—such as presidents Bush and Obama—might have been sobered by Kasparov’s comments on the Russian way of doing things. Not only are all cell phone and email communications fair game, Russian consumers actually pay for the state’s privileges through a tax added on their mobile charges.

It was sad to hear this otherwise thoughtful and intelligent man wind up his remarks with an endorsement of the invasion of Iraq in the name of ‘action against dictatorship’. I can’t imagine that will win him many points among his countrymen. But in a normal state he would have the right to his opinions and not be hauled before a judge every time his party wants to march down a Moscow street. Meanwhile, I’ll be curious to see if the massive discontent he predicts for Russia in coming months or years comes to pass.