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Friday December 7, 2007

For Jews, there’s no refutin’ Putin

by matt siegel
jta

moscow | Although largely absent from the opposition rallies preceding Russia’s parliamentary elections, many Jews chose the polls to quietly register their discontent with what they see as a period of eroding freedoms across the country.

Millions of Russians defied chilling winds and steady snowfall to vote Dec. 2 in elections seen largely as a referendum on the policies of President Vladimir Putin.

And while Putin’s United Russia easily rode a wave of oil money to a landslide victory, some Jews opted for parties that had no realistic chance of gaining seats in the Duma, the lower house of parliament.

Inna Ioffe, a 23-year-old manager in Nizhniy Novgorod, said she voted for the liberal SPS party because of Putin’s support for terrorist groups dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

“United Russia is the party of the president, and the president supports Hamas and Hezbollah,” she said. “I can’t vote for the people who support people who kill my people.”

In July 2005, Russia raised the threshold needed to secure seats in the Duma to 7 percent from 5 percent of votes, making it effectively impossible for small parties to win seats in the legislature. This set the stage for sweeping electoral gains by parties sympathetic to Putin.

Critics have accused the government of using the measure to stifle opposition groups and limit political involvement, leading many to conclude that voting simply is not worth the effort.

While many tuned out the elections, some held rallies across Russia last week to protest the Kremlin’s tightening grip on power, at times clashing with riot police. One opposition leader, Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion (whose father is Jewish), was arrested after his party declared that Putin is turning the country into a dictatorship.

For Russians averse to authoritarian political movements, these elections were just one more example of the backward trend to the single-party politics of the Soviet era.

A high-ranking Jewish community member who declined to be named said there is a rising tide of anger at the withering political pluralism in Russia. As a result, some Jews have fled the country. Others have turned inward, embracing Orthodox Judaism as an outlet for their desire for change, the community leader said.

One positive consequence of the new election rules has been to sideline parties that appeal to anti-Semitic and xenophobic sentiments. They will find it virtually impossible to meet the minimum threshold for participation in the Duma.

“It’s a case of the marginal groups in the political spectrum becoming more marginal,” said Moscow Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt.

But in an otherwise predictable election, surprisingly some Jews said they were turning to the Communists as an outlet for their protest vote.

According to a recent poll by the independent Levada polling center in Moscow, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or KPRF, was likely to be the only party other than United Russia to clear the 7 percent threshold needed to gain Duma representation.

The Communists placed second with about 11.6 percent of the vote.

Inna Frenkel, a 23-year-old democracy activist, said she wouldn’t have voted for the Communists if she had more choices.

“Last time I voted for Yabloko and they didn’t help,” she said. “I didn’t want to make the same mistake.”

In the quavering monotone of a mourner, Frenkel described what she sees as Putin’s monopoly on the organs of Russian society.

“Roughly speaking, I don’t want to have a one-party system in the country, and a monopoly in both the political and economic sphere,” she said. “I want to be able to make sure that democracy works in the country, I guess.”

It wasn’t just disaffected youth who were drawn to the KPRF, however. Even some who remembered the Soviet Union said they chose the enemy they know over the unpredictable future of a virtually unconstrained Putin.

Vladimir Moiseivich Tsentsiper, 70, recalled how hard life was under the Communists. In 1991 he helped defend the Russian White House for Boris Yeltsin against a failed communist coup. But his disgust with the politics of the current regime overcame the weight of distant memories.

“I voted for them even though my parents were repressed, Tsentsiper said. “I was born in 1937 in very difficult conditions. I’ve never voted for Communists before in my life.”

Tsentsiper, believing that the Communist Party might represent the only opposition voice that will be heard, added, “I hope, and this is a very weak hope, that the KPRF can afford some kind of resistance to United Russia.”

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