Window on Eurasia

Putin Said Exploiting Religion to Control Electorate

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 27, 2006 – Religion plays a major role in Russian elections, not so much by energizing the population to vote for one or another
candiate but rather by “sacralizing” the existing power structures
and thus reducing the chances that Russian voters will select someone
that those in power do not approve.

That is the conclusion of a new book by Sergey Mozgovoy and Sergey
Bur’yanov on “Religion in Russian Elections” (in Russian, Moscow:
Institute of Freedom of Conscience, 2005, 198 pp.) that was reviewed on
the Credo.ru web portal yesterday
[http://www.portal-credod.ru/site/print.php??act=tv_reviews&id=178].

Up to now, Mozgovoy and Bur’yanov report, most analysts have
dismissed religion as a factor in Russian elections because explicitly religious
parties have seldom been able to garner even one percent of the vote.
But votes for such groups is only “the tip of the iceberg” as far
as religious influence on elections there is concerned.

The real impact, the two analysts note, lies elsewhere. “The current
government,” they write, needs religion as a certain in its views
universal instrucment for retaining power in order with its help to
avoid democratic procedures by the mechanism of sacralization” of the
existing government.

Obviously, the Russian government can use only certain extremely loyal
religious denominations such as the Russian Orthodox Church and to a
lesser extent some of the most traditional Muslim Spiritual Directorate
(MSD) leaders like Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin of Ufa, but these groups and
individuals play an important role.

In run-ups to elections, Mozgovoy and Bur’yanov show, the Putin
regime plays up its ties with religion in order to suggest that those in power
deserve to be there for more reasons than just earthly and democratic
ones, a suggestion that has an especially strong impact on many
Russians who have little democratic experience.

They site in support of this conclusion a detailed study prepared by
Mozgovoy on the way in which the regime used religion in this way in
advance of voting by soldiers and officers in the Russian Army that was
published in “Voenno-sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya,” no. 4
(2003).

That study and others that the authors cite indicate that by using
religion during political campaigns, those in power are in a position
to present themselves as being on the positive side of “ours” versus
“the alien” and thus win over voters who might otherwise view the
election as simply a choice among various options.

Mozgovoy and Bur’yanov argue that such use of religions during
campaigns “not only violates the constitutional principles of freedom
of conscience, secularism and the equality of various religious
denominations” but also has “the character of ‘government
political corruption’” given the ways it influences outcomes.

In the short term, the authors suggest, this approach may bring
electoral and other political benefits to President Vladimir Putin and
his party of power. But over the longer term, such playing with
religion for political purposes almost certainly will pose a threat to
Russia’s democratic development.

That is because, the two insist, “the raw materials economy” he and
his government have promoted is simply “too unstable in an
information society” and “playing with ‘the religious factor’ is too
dangerous in a multi-national and ply-confessional country.”

And both to warn others of these threats and with luck to prevent them
from being realized, Mozgovoy and Bur’yanov say, the Moscow Institute
of Freedom of Conscience where they work has created an
Anti-Fundamentalist Committee for the Russian Federation as a whole.