MOSCOW: A campaign by Russian President Vladimir Putin to tighten control over wayward provincial bosses has backfired, whipping up squalls of public protest in regions across the country, analysts said.
Putin last year abolished direct elections for the country’s 89 regional leaders, instead making them Kremlin appointees in a reform he said would allow him, over time, to sack incompetent and corrupt local bosses.
But the immediate effect has been to bring voters out onto the streets because with no elections they believe protest is the only route left to them for getting rid of their unpopular governors, the analysts said.
“Instead of getting more effective control over the situation (in the regions), the Kremlin has achieved exactly the opposite,” said Nikolai Petrov of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think tank.
“Deprived of the opportunity to… wait for elections and express their opinion of their governor, people are staging mass acts of protest to grab the Kremlin’s attention and get it to fire the governor,” he said.
Now, the Kremlin has had to shelve plans to fire badly failing governors because it fears if it gives in to the protests it will set off a wave of copycat demonstrations across the sprawling country, said Petrov.
BOTCHED REFORMS: If the appointment of governors is deemed a failure it will join a list of missteps — a bungled benefits revamp, the messy legal onslaught on oil firm YUKOS and backing the loser in Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” — attributed to Putin’s circle.
So far this year there have been street protests demanding the ousting of the local leaders in the Ural Mountains region of Bashkortostan and in the Caucasus regions of Ingushetia and North Ossetia.
In two Siberian regions the opposition has tried to vote no-confidence in their local bosses.
Last autumn there were large protests against local bosses in Kalmykia, on the Caspian Sea, and in Karachayevo-Cherkessia, in the North Caucasus.
The protests have been largely peaceful and focused exclusively on local issues.
But they are unusual by the standards of Putin’s five-year-old rule, in which economic growth and a tightly controlled media have kept a lid on popular discontent.
Some of the biggest demonstrations have been in Bashkortostan.
On Feb 26, several thousand protesters in the capital, Ufa, demanded the resignation of Murtaza Rakhimov, saying he ran an autocratic police state.
Human rights groups say police who answer to Rakhimov went on a brutal rampage in December in the town of Blagoveshchensk that injured dozens of innocent people.
BESLAN MASSACRE: Putin has so far used his new powers to fire two local bosses — in regions where there were no protests demanding their sacking — and reappoint about a dozen others who were approaching the end of their terms as elected governors.
“In my view the new system for electing regional governors is working very well,” Putin’s chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev was quoted as saying this month by Expert magazine.
The Russian president announced the reform days after the hostage-taking at a school in Beslan in which 330 people died.
Half of them were children.
He said the reform was part of a package of measures to strengthen state power.
Some policymakers in the West said it was anti-democratic.
“The concentration of power in the Kremlin to the detriment of other institutions is a real problem,” said Condoleezza Rice, now US Secretary of State.—Reuters
