Behold post-Putin Russia

Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Russia marked the beginning of the end of the Putin era. It won’t feel like it for another few years, as the Russian strongman ascends to the nation’s Presidency again and bestrides the international stage. But when future historians come to examine post-Putin Russia, the end of 2011 will be seen as the point at which the transition began.

Exit polls showed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with less than 50 per cent of the vote. United Russia held a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma. The significant drop in support for United Russia — despite electoral fraud and with only tame parties standing in opposition — reflects that fact that ordinary Russians are increasingly weary with Putin’s one-man rule. Opinion polls show a decline in Putin’s popularity, from 83 per cent in October 2008 to 61 per cent in November 2011. And, for the first time, the Russian leader was booed at a recent televised martial arts event.

The reasons for the weariness are manifold. Russia suffered the worst recession in the G20 in 2009. Growth is now back at a projected 4 per cent for 2011 (down from 8.5 per cent in 2007), which is enough to keep going but not to emulate the dynamism of China, Brazil or India. The trade-off that Putin offered — social control in exchange for economic progress — doesn’t work if people only get the first half of the equation.

As Russia experts Ben Judah, Jana Kobzova and Nicu Popescu note in a new report, ‘Russia is now post-BRIC. It no longer believes it shares the same power-trajectory as Brazil, India and China; instead, it thinks it is in relative decline with the West.’ In a devastatingly apt summary, they note:

‘Instead of modernising, Russia in 2010 was as corrupt as Papua New Guinea, had the property rights of Kenya and was as competitive as Sri Lanka.’

The crisis has also prompted a foreign policy rethink inside Russia: post-BRIC Russia is ‘now aiming for a low cost sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space and is increasingly nervous about China’. Once he becomes Russia’s president again, Putin will no doubt swagger across the international stage and pick fights with the West. But even he will know how weak his nation really is.