Free The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy by William J. Dobson Page B

wasn’t necessary: “Nothing can stop us. I have not lost my commander’s voice.” The election was six months away, but the matter appeared to be settled: Putin was back—if indeed he had ever left.
    In retrospect, Medvedev’s years seemed to be destined to become a historical footnote, a bridge connecting one chapter of Putin’s rule to another. But what could Putin claim to be returning to do? When he first took office in 2000, he had promised Russians stability and certainty. He had promised Russian families that they would be able to plan for their children’s future “not one month at a time, but for years and decades.” But eleven years on, those promises rang hollow. Indeed, on the eve of the announcement of Putin’s return, an independent Russian poll indicated 75percent of Russians still did not plan more than two years ahead, and 22 percent of Russians wanted to move abroad, a threefold increase from four years earlier and the highest percentage since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    Although Putin remained more popular than any other political figure, his poll numbers had been in decline for months. Russians began to draw unflattering comparisons between Putin and the eighteen-year reign of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. (Two additional presidential terms would make Putin the longest-serving Russian ruler since Stalin.) The sentiment was probably best captured bya Photoshopped image that quickly went viral on the Internet: it was of an aged Putin wearing one of Brezhnev’s old Soviet uniforms, the chest covered in military medals. Putin may have promised stability, but it increasingly felt like stagnation.
    But in December 2011 the stasis that had long settled over Russian political life was unexpectedly shaken. On December 4, Russians cast ballots in the country’s Duma elections. As in recent contests, the vote was rigged. In the hours after the polls closed, videos of ballot stuffing, multiple voting, and other violations were posted on YouTube and spread quickly. However, unlike past elections, the Russian people were no longer mere spectators to the fraud. Tens of thousands of citizens poured out into Moscow’s streets for two massive antigovernment rallies before the month’s end, the largest protests in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like almost all of the popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in 2011, the movement lacked a clear leadership. It was, in some sense, a “power horizontal”—perhaps the perfect antidote to Putin’s carefully crafted “power vertical.”
    The Kremlin advisers and members of United Russia I had spoken to had stressed the regime’s ability to manufacture stability and keep a close watch on public sentiment. But Putin and his team proved to have a tin ear. The gross manipulation of the Duma elections, following close on the heels of the brazen announcement that Putin intended to return to the presidency, had provoked an educated, middle-class public long considered apathetic. It is, in fact, a familiar pattern in authoritarian systems. Where the results are manufactured and the outcomes are largely predetermined, a regime’s officials will overreach or commit gaffes, sometimes extremely embarrassing ones, in an attempt to prolong their power. The danger for the regime is that these mistakes, when they are revealed, serve as sparks for greater opposition or protest to the legitimacy of the government’s rule. It was precisely this chain of causation—regime insecurity, a stolen election, and public outrage—that inspired the Green Movement to take to the streets in Iran in 2009 and helped stoke the fires that ultimately toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
    Indeed, stealing elections has been a trigger for the end of many dictatorships. Activists will tell you the reason is simple. The public often feels removed from the struggle between an opposition and aregime, inclined to view both sides with suspicion. The contest