Putin at the Parade

June 25-July 1: Constitutional referendum

Starting June 13, Moscow residents began noticing a curiosity in bookstores around the city center: copies of a new constitution. Ostensibly, Russia did not yet have a new constitution: the booklets were being hawked nearly two weeks in advance of a nationwide referendum on the proposed new text. To pass, the referendum will need more than 50% of the vote. Voting will run from June 25 to July 1 — spread out over six days in an attempt to thin crowds and limit coronavirus infections — with Russians saying yes or no to the entire bundle of amendments.

Back in January, before the coronavirus swept the globe, Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled a surprise move out of his sleeve in his trademark fashion when, in his annual state-of-the-nation address, he suggested overhauling the constitution. His proposed amendments would limit the supremacy of international law, ban foreign citizenship for officials, change procedure for nominating the cabinet, and more, and would be ratified by a nationwide referendum. As the weeks passed, the list kept growing, from sweeteners for traditionalists — enshrining God in the constitution and defining marriage as between only a man and a woman — to social protections like inflation-adjusted pensions and a higher minimum wage. 

At the time, political analysts speculated that Putin, who was first elected to office in 2000 and has ruled Russia for the past 20 years (with a one-term stint as prime minister to get around the constitution’s two-consecutive term limit for presidents) was aiming to carve out a special role for himself outside of the office of the presidency. Putin’s current presidential term will end in 2024.

But in the weeks that followed, it soon became clear that Putin was not only laying the groundwork for a way to stay in power, but for staying president. On March 10, Valentina Tereshkova, a deputy in Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, and, symbolically, the first woman to go to space, suggested adding a new amendment to a list: Resetting presidential terms to zero after the constitutional amendments are passed, hence allowing Putin to run for president once again in 2024 and 2030. Few doubted that this suggestion was not actually orchestrated by the Kremlin.

Just a few hours after Tereshkova’s proposal, Putin himself crossed the street from the Kremlin to the State Duma building, where he addressed the deputies. “In principle, this option would be possible, but on one condition: if the Constitutional Court formally concluded that such an amendment would not contradict the principles and basic provisions of basic law and the constitution,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, the court, which rarely goes against the Kremlin’s wishes, approved the amendment six days later. According to legal procedure, the State Duma, the Federal Council — Russia’s upper house of parliament — and regional assemblies across the country also had to approve the changes. They soon did. All that was left to make the changes final was for Russians to vote on April 22.

The referendum was set to be a triumphant affirmation of Putin’s rule heading into his third decade at the helm of the Kremlin. Two weeks afterwards, on May 9, Red Square was slated to host a parade commemorating the 75th anniversary Soviet Union’s World War II victory over the Nazis, Russia’s most revered national holiday and a platform for projecting the country’s renewed military might under Putin. Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron were to attend.

But the coronavirus got in the way. Not only were the vote and the parade delayed for epidemiological reasons, but Putin saw his approval rating slip to its lowest level ever, at 59%. Discontent festered over Russia’s economic response to the pandemic, according to Denis Volkov, deputy director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent pollster. From late March through May, Putin conducted weekly video briefings from his country residence outside Moscow — which opposition activists referred to as his “bunker” — and his traditional strongman image began to weaken. “He looks like an old, sick wolf,” the political analyst Alexander Kynev told me last month. 

Putin soon decided that enough was enough. On June 1, before the first wave of the pandemic had fully receded — new daily infections remain in the thousands — he set new dates both for the vote and the parade. At the Kremlin’s behest, Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who doubles as the head of Russia’s coronavirus taskforce, abruptly lifted the city’s lockdown earlier this month. “The restrictions due to the virus are now the main reason for dissatisfaction,” an inside source told Meduza, “These sentiments will strongly influence the vote on the amendments.” (Last month, Sobyanin had said that the Russian capital would not lift lockdown restrictions until new daily cases were in the “tens or hundreds, not thousands.”)

As if on command, a soggy first week of June gave way to a record heatwave. Verandas soon filled up with Muscovites eager to escape their homes after over two months of lockdown, and Sobyanin himself was photographed at a cafe, sans mask, displaying a wide grin. Ahead of the vote, the jubilant mood Putin was looking for had been conjured.

In the lead-up to the referendum, the Kremlin has minimized the key amendment in the package, the one that would allow Putin to rule until 2036. A recent political ad focused on the scourge of same-sex adoption while roadside billboards have displayed all changes except for the elimination of Putin’s term limits. As the commentator Ilya Shepelin wrote in The Moscow Times last week: “What should have been a triumphant usurpation of power has turned instead into a timid attempt to write the onerous terms of a contract in letters so small that the borrower will sign without reading.” 

A history of manipulated elections has left nearly half of Russians, according to a recent poll, believing that the authorities will do whatever it takes to ensure a majority. Buttressing the belief in the lead-up to the vote, news began surfacing over the past week of various tricks to get out the vote — or to simply fudge the results. In St. Petersburg, librarians at state-run libraries have complained that they are being forced by their employers to head to the polls, while in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk election officials are luring voters by entering them into a lottery for a smartphone, a car, even an apartment if they show up to polling stations. This week Reuters reported that companies will be able to trace which of their employees voted by accessing unique QR codes produced for those who enter the raffles. The independent TV Rain television channel, meanwhile, found that dozens of Moscow pensioners are being registered for electronic voting without their knowledge, as well as a scheme to buy up votes.

There is also the fact that at least some opposition-leaning Russians will boycott the vote in an effort to delegitimize the referendum. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent Kremlin critic and de facto opposition leader, has called for this strategy. 

In a low-grade rebellion, around 350 polling station officials (of around 1 million nationwide) have signed a petition citing the coronavirus as a reason to boycott the vote.

But for Putin, waiting until the pandemic is over could prove detrimental. If the aim is not simply to get the vote passed, but with flying colors, delaying it too long could see discontent rise as the economic consequences of the coronavirus shutdown take effect down the line. 

So for his part, he has gone ahead and declared victory. On Wednesday, June 24 — the date the Soviets held their first World War II victory parade in 1945 — cities across Russia held the parades that had been delayed by the pandemic. In Moscow, the site of the showcase event, Putin still welcomed foreign leaders — although not the big names he had originally planned — as crowds gathered along the city’s main arteries to watch Russia’s military arsenal roll past. 

But the coronavirus did not stay far away from the proceedings. One of the foreign dignitaries, Kyrgyz President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, was forced to watch the festivities from his hotel room after two of his staffers tested positive for the virus upon landing in the Russian capital.