PRIME MINISTER Vladimir Putin of Russia was only stating the obvious recently when he dropped a strong hint to foreign reporters that he would, indeed, consider another term as president when his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, completes his term in 2012.
The next Russian president will be the first to serve six years, which would take a second Putin administration through to 2018. And since the constitution lets you have two terms, he may be sticking around until 2024. That’s nearly a quarter-century for the Putin years, which would be more than enough for any czar or general secretary.
It is a common bit of Russian folk wisdom that a country as big and wild as Russia is must have a “strong hand on the tiller.’’ It is a catch-all assessment used to justify the excesses of everyone from Peter the Great to Stalin, and seems proved by its absence in the 17th century’s “Time of Troubles’’ and the difficult post-Soviet transition in the 1990s. Russians don’t trust outsiders, nor do they trust themselves much.
America, too, is a big and wild country, but it seems to have the opposite inclination, of trusting its innate stability so much it can accept high levels of dysfunction.
The sudden downward spiral of the health care debate over the summer offered a clear example of a country slipping out of control. There is an opposition party with no stake in effective governance, the fast spread of nonsense, distortions, and lies, the sloppy use of terms like socialist and fascist. And add to this the alarming fact that many people think it appropriate to tote assault weapons to public debates.
It feels distinctly that America has become an ungovernable place, where the question about whether every American deserves health care is a matter not so much for debate as for the contortions of professional wrestling.
Russia in the past decade has created an elaborate structure for insulating itself from this kind of chaos.
The political culture has ginned up a host of jargon to justify its heavy-handed top-down structure (“the power vertical’’), immunity to international standards (“sovereign democracy’’), and the dark arts of media manipulation and messaging (“political technology’’).
The ruling United Russia Party has done an amazing job of protecting Russians from themselves by ratcheting up its control of each layer of government. The courts are still only nominally independent, and all regional governors are appointed by the president. The Legislature remains in firm control - the party’s legislative point man, Boris Gryzlov, recently noted that “the Duma is no place for debates.’’
The electoral system is literally hopeless - legislative elections are every four years, and are based on party lists rather than individual candidates with specific constituencies. So the Duma’s ranks are full of loyal party hacks, complemented by compliant lounge singers, models, and former athletes. What’s left of the opposition, those who haven’t been sent to prison or into exile, has been co-opted or marginalized.
When the Duma’s three opposition parties walked out last month to protest the massively flawed local elections that solidified United Russia’s hold, the speculation was about whether the Kremlin had approved this anemic cry for attention.
Most Russians are peculiarly willing to accept their place. There is the case of the old peasant Dron in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.’’ After Dron has played an unwilling role in an aborted revolt, a nobleman appears and apprehends the leaders, issuing orders that seemed “could not possibly be met with any opposition.’’ From the crowd, “two more peasants began binding Dron, who took off his own belt and handed it to them as though to assist in the operation.’’
This is a horrifying idea to most Americans, who have deeply absorbed our sense of a Jeffersonian democracy. Our readiness to rebel is fundamental, even if often in the sort of unthinking way that makes words like “freedom’’ and “liberty’’ become unmoored. It is enshrined like civic religion in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. So it is a forehead-slapping shame that we don’t do more with what we have been given.
Christopher Marcisz is a Williamstown-based writer who lived in Moscow from 2007 to 2008. 
