Criminal vs. criminal in Russia’s presidential election

Come Russia’s presidential elections in March, lucky Russians may get to choose between a convicted war criminal and an accused war criminal. The smart money is on the latter, not because he’s merely accused, but because he’s Vladimir Putin — and Putin never loses, especially to an equally unhinged opponent, the currently incarcerated right-winger Igor Girkin.

If you think this choice is a commentary on the sad state of Russian politics and political culture, you’re right. The only person who might admire such an election is Hungary’s Putinite prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

To be sure, Girkin — who was Putin’s man in Donetsk in 2014, and was convicted in absentia by a Dutch court of murdering 298 people for his role in the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger plane — has announced only that he’d like to run, and any number of intervening variables could disrupt his campaign. Incarceration is one. An accidental fall from a prison window is another. A knife in the belly is a third.

Whatever happens to Girkin in the next few months, the case for Russia being as criminal as its institutions and leaders will have been made, whether intentionally or not. No one doubts that Putin will win smashingly in March. But for his main opponent to be another war criminal is just too rich.

Americans fret about the likely unsavory choice they’ll have to make between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but at least one of them is sane — and neither is a war criminal. That may not sound like much, but in an age of low expectations, it’s actually quite a lot. In any case, the American choice beats that facing Russians by a mile.

Unfortunately, too many Russians are unlikely to appreciate the profound sadness of the choice they face. An authoritarian political culture abetted by decades of Soviet propaganda and Putinite brainwashing has inured them to dictatorship masquerading as sham democracy. Choice? Who needs choice?

The irony of two war criminals duking it out will be both delicious and obvious, at least to people with a sense of humor. Putin’s acolytes within the Russian masses won’t see it, of course, since they’re blinded by the great man’s radiance. And Russia’s useful idiots and agents of influence in the West, especially those who make a habit of attending Putin’s annual love fest in Valdai, will pretend not to see it. Ditto for Putin’s democracy-loving supporters in the Global South, such as North Korea, Syria, Venezuela and, of course, Hamas.

Girkin, though smart and remarkably incisive in his analysis of the Putin regime (by the way, he believes Russia is losing the war), is also unlikely to see the irony, if only because he surely views his conviction for murder as a source of pride on the one hand and a case of Western moralizing and cultural hegemony on the other. Girkin’s public persona also evinces no sense of humor, which would appear to be a prerequisite of appreciating irony.

Putin does occasionally crack a smile in public, but his ability to laugh at himself appears to be severely circumscribed. After all, if you are Russia and Russia is you, laughing at yourself would be tantamount to laughing at Mother Russia and the fascist regime that sustains her. Besides, dictators rarely laugh at their own foibles for an obvious reason: they have none.

Orbán seems to be equally humorless, at least in public. Which is exactly what one would expect from a tinpot dictator free-riding on European Union largesse while simultaneously biting the hands that feed him and his country. In that sense, Putin and Girkin are far more consistent with their core values. Both men hate liberalism and democracy and therefore shun the West. Orbán, in contrast, obviously hates liberalism and democracy, but sees no problem with accepting huge handouts from Brussels. That’s dishonest and hypocritical.

If Orbán genuinely believed in the traditional Hungarian values he claims to champion, he’d challenge the EU to a duel and defend his honor. But no, Orbán appears to understand that he has no honor to defend. Opportunists and demagogues never do. So why not make a quick buck?

To be fair to Orbán, he hasn’t gone quite as far as Putin in dismantling democracy. But he’s well on the road to doing just that. Russians have no choice but to vote for Putin — or Putin’s more radical clone, Girkin. And there’s little the West or anybody else can do to affect that choice.

Not so with Hungary. The EU could finally flex its muscles and, following a somewhat cumbersome procedure, move to deprive Hungary of voting rights. It could also stop funding Orbán’s nascent dictatorship. Orbán won’t laugh, of course. But he just might cry.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”