In Putin We Trust

Judging by its political ads, Russia’s ruling party doesn’t need ideas. It has Putin. by Galina Stolyarova 22 November 2007 ST. PETERSBURG, Russia | The streets of Russian towns are cluttered with billboards urging passers-by to "Be with Putin" or "Support Putin's Plan!" and vote for the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.

I see them every day and I can’t shake off one persistent thought. What if Vladimir Putin suddenly disappears? What if he dies in a car crash? Will the posters still be luring the massed ranks of Russian voters to be "together with Putin"? For the party has never really explained what his "plan" entails.

Perhaps, given the president's huge approval ratings, the United Russia spin doctors reckon that Russians will happily follow their leader anywhere, to heaven or to hell, with no questions asked.

That might be what Vladimir Ryabovol, head of the St. Petersburg office of a Russian ad agency, meant when he said recently that most ordinary Russians "don’t need to know more" and that it would be "unwise to overload the ordinary people with excessive information that they would have difficulty digesting."

"For many people Putin's name says it all," Ryabovol said. "They’ve lived under his presidency and as long as they’re happy, there’s no need to go into details."

But Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee advocacy group, says United Russia's approach is an insult to Russian citizens.

"It’s not that the United Russia people behave as though privileged, it’s rather that they treat the rest of the people with contempt, as if they were unworthy of discussion," Kabanov said.

As a voter, what I find annoying is the assumption by United Russia operatives that it is for the party bosses, not the voters, to decide how much, or how little, we need to know about the candidates and their programs.

In this campaign United Russia has even refused to participate in political debates. Instead the party said it will concentrate entirely on advertising, a move that is widely seen by its rivals as arrogant.

The party has been criticized for repeatedly peddling the same empty slogan, "Putin's Plan, Russia's Victory," while failing to elaborate on the plan's content. Nor does it show us any face except that of Putin. And the noise made by critics has not been loud enough to get the party to divulge more.

Ask United Russia supporters what this Putin plan involves, and they find themselves at a loss, or begin to mumble something about government spending programs, schools, or building roads and bridges.

But these things come out of the federal budget, taxpayers' money, so how come United Russia is trying to claim the credit?

INFORMATION VACUUM

Political advertising in Russia, despite the vast sums of money spent on it, is disappointing in content, and may be turning the voters off.

In a recent poll by the St. Petersburg-based Agency for Social Information, 49 percent of respondents in the city said they react negatively to political advertising. A further 25 percent claimed they do not pay any attention to it, while only 8.5 percent said they trusted it.

It is amazing they have any reaction at all to political advertising, given the lack of meaningful content in most of what they see.

TV commercials, for whichever party, are almost interchangeable. They show images of Russia's socially vulnerable groups and promise them a better life, without specifying at what cost and with what resources.

Igor Burenkov, a political strategist since the early 1990s and general manager of the Rosbalt media group, says if viewers saw this campaign’s TV ads with the sound turned down, they would fail to distinguish among the parties, or even whether they were on the left or the right.

"One would easily confuse Nikita Belykh, the leader of the Union of Right Forces, with the Communist boss Gennady Zyuganov," Burenkov said.

“From this point of view, the prize for the most efficient TV advertisement goes to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the [far right] Liberal Democratic Party. His short clip, accompanied by the slogan ‘Do Not Lie and Do Not Scare’ delivers a succinct message, even without the audio.”

The current election campaign ought to be an exciting contest between rival political platforms. Instead it is an increasingly arid debate revolving around Putin. In response, the main opposition parties look for holes in United Russia's defenses, rather than emphasizing their own strong points. United Russia has dictated the tone and theme of the campaign, and the rest of the parties have conformed.

Then there is the current campaign’s lack of any face to look at on the billboards other than that of Putin, for which the stronger opposition parties, the Communists and the Union of Right Forces, must take some of the blame as well. Their TV commercials, like United Russia's, repeatedly show images of the poor and the sick accompanied by pledges to improve health care and welfare programs. Nowhere do they offer an alternative leader.

The parties have clearly decided that they no longer need to advertise their politicians or to show them discussing specific issues. Instead they are simply going for general slogans. That approach, combined with a change in this election to a proportional representation system, instead of one that allows independent candidates to stand, leaves regional voters with no one to identify with.

United Russia's relentless focus on Putin shows that it has short-term tactical goals but no strategy. It also shows that the party’s bosses have learned nothing from Russia's tragic experience of idolizing its leaders in the past.

Putting the voters in a situation where they are either with the president or against him creates pressure to conform and to back him that many people will find hard to resist.

In Russia it seems the need for a strong leader has gotten into people's blood like a hereditary disease, condemning our political system to decades of torpor and misery.

The country was a monarchy for almost a millennium, and, in the old days people believed that the czar was always good but the court unfailingly corrupt. Likewise these days it seems most people see Putin as without sin but those who surround him in the Kremlin as bad.

The mentality of Russians has not changed. If it had done, voters would surely have begun to protest about a campaign that revolves around a personality cult and treats them as peasants.