AARON MAT: It's The Real News, I'm AaronMat. Russian politician Alexei Navalny is calling
for a series of protests and a boycott of next year's presidential election. This comes after Russia's Central Election
Commission barred Navalny from running because of a conviction on fraud and corruption charges. Navalny says the case against him is politically
motivated.
He is often described as President Vladimir
Putin's strongest challenger, even though polls show he has just two percent support. This comes as Putin has formally registered
for the March 2018 vote, where he will seek a fourth term. Stephen F. Cohen is Professor Emeritus of
Russian Studies, History and Politics at New York University and Princeton University.
Professor Cohen, welcome. Let's start with Navalny. What is the significance of him being barred
from running in the election? The way it's being talked about here is that
Putin is trying to sideline his strongest challenger. STEPHEN COHEN: Well, it's not clear he is
his strongest challenger.
As you said Aaron, the polls, and these are
not Kremlin polls, but fairly independent polls, give Navalny, if the election were
held tomorrow, somewhere between two and maybe six percent. That would make him fourth or fifth. No, that's not right, it would make him third
behind a guy named Zhirinovsky, who heads a very Nationalist Party and has run against
Putin four or five times. He usually gets about that.
And the Communist Party candidate, who will
not be this time next year the leader of the Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, but a stand-on. And my guess is the Communist Party would
probably get, if given half a decent fair shake, that is some television time, probably
10 percent. So Navalny, at least based on the polls, is
not the strongest candidate. What he does have is a constituency that alarms
the Kremlin, and that is young people, particularly educated young people, who like Navalny's
kind of in your face, you're all corrupt, assault on the Kremlin.
So, he has real appeal in the country. Personally, as a student of Russia, and having
spent so many years following Russian politics, I wish they would put Navalny on the ballot
because I'd like to see what he gets. It would be very interesting to know what
voters really think of him because polls as we know don't give you an accurate picture. They're using as a reason not to put him on
the ballot, that a person who is a convicted felon cannot run for, I don't remember whether
it's any office, but cannot run for federal office.
He has one, maybe one and a half felony convictions. He says they were political frame-ups. Here's an interesting sidebar and then I'll
let this go. The woman who is head of the Electoral Commission,
her name is Ella Pamfilova, is a much-venerated civil rights democratic activist in Russia,
with a long history.
Putin made her the head of the Electoral Commission
and she was the one who, yesterday or very recently announced, occluding to Navalny that
he could not be on the ballot because of the convictions. But she added, because she has a humane element
to her, "I wish I could put you on the ballot because I would like to see how many voters
support you. But according to law, I cannot because your
convictions stand." So, formally and legally that's the reason
he's not on the ballot. Let me just end by saying it would not surprise
me if the Kremlin figured a way to have his conviction reheard, the felony set aside and
put him on the ballot because Putin would have reasons to want him on the ballot.
That is, to get a bigger turnout, to infuse
some excitement in an election that appears rather ho-hum. So, I don't think this story is over yet,
or possibly not over. AARON MAT: But then, that raises the question. Do you think Navalny is right when he says
that the initial charges against him were politically motivated, designed to keep him
off the ballot? STEPHEN COHEN: Well, the original charges
were a number of years ago.
My memory may not be accurate on this but
I think this goes back six, seven years before there was any talk of him running for the
presidency. So, I don't think the answer is they cooked
up these charges against him so that four or five years later, he couldn't run for the
presidency. As for the second question, I have a firm
rule: What I don't know, I don't evaluate. I don't know if the charges were legitimate
or not.
I didn't follow the case that closely. I know it was upheld in the Russian appellate
system. You may say that means nothing but sometimes
convictions are struck down. But I also know that the European Court of
whatever it is said it was a political conviction.
AARON MAT: Hmm. And you mentioned the Communists. So, they've chosen as their candidate Pavel
Grudinin, if I have that name close to right. STEPHEN COHEN: I think it's, Ive never
heard of him but I think it's Grudinin, but it doesn't matter.
AARON MAT: Grudinin. Okay well, so in terms of their platform,
you're suggesting that they have the strongest chance of challenging Putin, even though it's
widely assumed that Putin will win. What kind of platform will they be running
on to challenge Putin's agenda? STEPHEN COHEN: Well, let me sum it up. It will be social democracy plus Russian nationalism.
That's been the Communist Party's attempt
to build its electorate. The social democracy. Or let's put it in plain terms. The old Soviet cradle-to-grave welfare state
is much-desired and much-missed by a very large segment of the population, but mostly
an elderly segment.
The nationalism is, of course a rising force
throughout Russia. This was the case before the Ukrainian crisis. So, the Communists, even though it's not really
compatible with Marxism but they're Marxists but of a special kind, have latched onto this
nationalism. And they fuse the two.
Here's the thing Aaron. Back in the '90s, you're probably too young
to remember this but the communists actually got, in a number of parliamentary elections,
the most seats of any parliament in the Russian Parliament. They didn't have a majority but they had the
most seats. I vaguely recall about 27 percent.
Putin comes to power in 2000 and essentially
he steals the nationalism from them because Russia's in crisis, there's the Chechen War,
Russia's in depression-driven collapse. So, Putin steals both the welfare state and
the nationalism from the communists. And they've never done anywhere near as well
as they did in the 1990s. My recollection is that in recent years, they
got about 14 percent but fell to about seven percent.
I don't believe that number. All elections in all countries are more fair
to some people than they are to other people. In our country, if you've got really a lot
of money, they're fairer to you. In Russia, they're fairer to the people who
have what's called state resources, television and things like that.
The communists have not had none. I think if the communists were to get a completely
fair shake, which would mean access to television because as in this country, television drives
elections, turnouts, preferences, that they would probably get close to 20 percent of
the vote. Putin would still win. Let me end by saying on this point, that the
fact that they're not running their titular long-time leader Zyuganov, but a guy who's
known in the country but not well-known, suggests to me that the communists have given up on
the presidency and they see their base as, their future as in the Russian Parliament.
And probably they're correct to do so. AARON MAT: So, Professor Cohen, in the second
part of this conversation, we're gonna talk about the dynamics right now between the US
and Russia. But since we're talking right now about the
internal Russian situation, I'm curious your thoughts on how Russians are viewing this
whole Russiagate so-called controversy right now. You were recently in Russia.
You studied the country closely, how are Russians,
the ones you speak to, looking at this national obsession here in the US and this widespread
view that it was their president Putin, who got Donald Trump elected? STEPHEN COHEN: Well, the kind of anecdotal
wise-guy view in Russia is They can't fix the roads, but they could chose the American
president. In other words, utter disdain for this story. But it has a serious consequence. I just read, and your viewers might wanna
read, a long article by Nadezhda Azhgikhina, that's just been posted at thenation.Com I
think yesterday or today, about the impact that this Russiagate story and the media malpractice
in this country, which is absolutely I think, unprecedented in modern times, is having on
Russian liberal democratic journalists.
It's utterly demoralizing them. They look to our media, they probably shouldn't
have done so but they have, as a model for them. And now they see the American media and not
just the media, but the so-called avatars of professional journalism, The New York Times,
The Washington Post, CNN, wallowing, wallowing in the mire of media malpractice. And it completely demoralizes them, partly
because they lose their model and partly because the people who can control journalism in Russia
in a negative way, say to them, "See, what are you complaining about? It's even worse in America." More generally, there probably are some people
in Russia who believe the story that Putin, you know, the story that our so-called intelligence
agencies gave us.
Though we now know it was just a few guys,
maybe a few women, hand-picked by Clapper and Brennan, that Putin issued an order to
hack the DNC, take the emails, give them to Wikileaks and make Trump president. Or the story varies, just creates chaos in
America because he really wants chaos in America. It's all preposterous. There are no facts, no logic to this.
But Russians regard this, some Russians who
want to believe that Putin is all-powerful, probably take pride in this. You know, the Americans have pushed us around
for 25 years, now Putin gave a taste of their own medicine. And since we helped Yeltsin rig his reelection
in 1996, that's what comes to a Russian mind and we did do that. I was there, I watched it.
There's even a movie about it, there are books
about it, Clinton administration boasted on it. But I think most Russians who are educated
and there are a lot of them, critical-minded, and who can process the evening news, even
if it is Russian propaganda, think the story's preposterous. They think it has to do with American internal
politics, and nothing really to do with Russia. That's the educated opinion in Russia today.
AARON MAT: You know, Professor Cohen, in
the time we have, let's get into a little bit of the history that you mentioned. The focus right now is how Russia has allegedly
been meddling in the US but you've pointed out that even if all the accusations against
Russia are 100 percent true, the hacking of the emails, the so-called social media accounts
and the troll army that posted messages on Facebook and Twitter. Even if all that is true, it would not be
a fraction of what the US has done in Russia over the past 25 years, as you've been saying. Can you, in the brief time we have, can you
sum that up for us as best you can, 'cause obviously it's a very long history? STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I'm not sure I formulated
it the way you did,in beginning by saying if even all the allegations were true because
I can't find any of the allegations that have been factually verified.
So, I'm not sure I would go for a counter
hypothesis like that. But with the end of the Soviet Union and I
wrote a book about this called Failed Crusade. I published it in 2000. Large parts of it appeared in The Nation Magazine.
The subtitle was America and the Tragedy
of Post-Soviet Russia. The book detailed, and there were other books
on the subject not just my own, that essentially swarms of Americans went to Russia and decamped
in government offices, in universities, at everywhere imaginable. And Americans wrote Russian legislation, wrote
Russian textbooks or funded them, meddled, interfered in a tangible sense, not in this
vague sense that we say Russians meddled, not sure what means. But I was there in the '90s.
I saw the Americans there. And this culminated in 1996 when Yeltsin ran
for reelection. He was sick, he was faltering in the polls,
polls showed him with very little chance not only of winning, but making the runoff because
you have to get 50 plus one vote in a Russian federal election to avoid a runoff. It looked like he might not even make the
runoffs.
Clinton administration mobilized people that
we call, I guess like Paul Manafort and people like that who ended up in Ukraine, election
experts. They decamped at the presidential hotel. They were fully visible. Clinton arranged for Yeltsin to get, I don't
remember the number, maybe five billion dollar loan from the IMF to pay back pensions.
And Yeltsin squeaked through. He would not have won, I think, without the
American intervention. Now, at that time it was considered a patriotic
thing to do because his primary challenger was the one and same Zyuganov, head of the
Communist Party. But the stakes were very high.
The Clinton administration had vested heavily
in Yeltsin. Had he lost, that would have been the end
of Clinton's Russia policy. I think it would have been a good thing but
it would have been a catastrophe for Clinton and for American foreign policy. So, we did everything possible to get and
keep Yeltsin back in the presidency, and he lasted a few more years until basically his
health gave out and then came Putin.
But that was the most vivid, observable case
of truly intervening in another country's presidential election. And by the way, they boasted on it. HBO made a feature film with actors and all,
I think it's called Spinning Boris or Saving Boris, which
you can get on HBO On Demand and still watch, taking great glee in how we had done this. And there have been books about it.
So, there was no shame, only pride and Russians
remember this when there are these vague allegations that somehow Russia was involved in Trump's
election. Unlike Americans, Russians have a very acute
historical memory. They remember these things. AARON MAT: Well, on that note, we'll leave
it there and in part two we're gonna talk more about this current situation between
the US and Russia, and how Russiagate is impacting relations between these two countries.
Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian
Studies, History and Politics at Princeton University and New York University, thank
you. STEPHEN COHEN: Thank you, Aaron. AARON MAT: And thank you for joining us
on The Real News..
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