Mission accomplished, dictatorship intact: Russia’s CEC and Myanmar’s enduring junta

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When in 1782 Bodawpaya ascended the Burmese throne after overthrowing and executing his young nephew, Phoungka Maungmaung, many began to doubt the legitimacy of the new monarch. Coups in Burma were a common way of transferring power — just days before being deposed, Phoungka Maungmaung himself had seized the throne from his older brother. Still, the takeover of the crown required some justification that the claim to supreme authority was lawful. Seeking to head off possible discontent among the elite and uprisings among peasants, Bodawpaya hastened to proclaim himself a reincarnation of the Buddha. After all, who if not the Enlightened One himself should rule a state that was among the first on the planet to embrace the religion he had founded?

A country of juntas and coups

The tradition of regular coups persists in Burma, renamed Myanmar several decades ago, even if it has been centuries since any pretender to the throne resorted to reincarnation tricks to justify their rule. Now the only way to prove the legitimacy of power is through elections, even if these, like coups, are closely intertwined.

Generals have ruled Myanmar for most of its post-colonial history and have repeatedly tried to use elections as rituals rather than as actual competitions for popular favor. The first junta seized power in 1962 and rewrote the constitution to suit itself, entrenching a one-party system of governance that assembled a pocket parliament made up only of carefully selected lawmakers who had proved their loyalty. By the late 1980s the military government had brought the economy to collapse, and nationwide protests broke out, with people demanding the democratization of the state.

These demonstrations, which were brutally suppressed, taught the generals a lesson: popular voting does not confer legitimacy if the ballots contain no one except the candidates they approve. This is why the new elections held in 1990 admitted parties independent of the junta as well. For the authorities, the results proved disastrous. After promising to win a majority of votes, the military secured only 10 out of 485 parliamentary seats.

After that, the generals decided such games in democracy were not for them. Soon after the final results were announced, the junta declared that parliament would have no real power and that the lawmakers’ only task would be to draft a new constitution. All deputies with even mildly opposition-leaning views were arrested and either forced to give up their seats or driven into exile.

As a result, only about one hundred people remained in parliament, and their voices were diluted in a chorus of six hundred “constitutional experts” personally selected by the officers and tasked with helping lawmakers prepare a draft of the basic law. This assembly — maximally dependent on the junta’s wishes — took nearly twenty years to write the constitution. At first the process stalled because the few remaining independent deputies declared a boycott. Later, the junta itself dragged out the process, evidently realizing that a lengthy imitation of a constitutional drafting process served the military better than the adoption of a new supreme law of the land ever could.

It is unclear how much longer the generals would have stretched things out had new protests not erupted in the country in 2007, sparked by a fivefold increase in fuel prices that led to a catastrophic decline in an already low standard of living. The protests became known as the Saffron Revolution — after the color of the robes worn by Buddhist monks who took an active part in the anti-government demonstrations. The protests were so widespread that The Economist, like many Western commentators, saw in them a sign of the junta’s imminent collapse.

But the generals held onto power — largely thanks to promises to democratize the country based on a draft of the new constitution, which was finally completed in 2008. The document allowed multiparty politics and promised freedom of speech and assembly. At the same time, however, it gave the military far more power than one would expect from a genuinely democratic basic law.

Active-duty officers were allotted 25% of the seats in both houses of parliament and in regional legislatures. The heads of the ministries of defense, home affairs, and border affairs were appointed not by parliament but by the commander-in-chief, who also received the authority to impose a state of emergency at his discretion. One of the two vice presidents had to be an active-duty officer, and the military as a whole was designated as the institution holding the “leading political role” in Myanmar.

Public discussion of the constitutional draft was banned. People could familiarize themselves with it only by buying a 194-page book version that was sold in a very limited number of shops. The document was not translated into minority languages. Journalists who dared to criticize the draft were arrested.

Burma’s Gorbachev

In May 2008, a referendum was held. According to official figures, almost 99% of voters took part, and 92.4% of them supported the draft constitution. The document was adopted and became the foundation for preparing the first elections in many years. They were held in 2010 and were, unsurprisingly, far from exemplary in honesty or transparency. The military secured an overwhelming majority of seats in parliament, and General Thein Sein, who resigned from the army for the occasion, took the presidential post, formally becoming the first head of state in half a century who was not on active military service.

Thein Sein inherited a far-from-prosperous country. Because of endless repression against opposition figures, Myanmar was isolated from the democratic world. On the country’s outskirts, fighting with local separatists had dragged on for decades. The economy — run for generations by officers who had no understanding of it — lay in ruins. Trying to fix the situation, the president did not obstruct the rise of a free press and attempted to start a dialogue with the West and with separatists. For this he was even dubbed “the Burmese Gorbachev.”

Thein Sein loosened the reins so much that in the next elections, held in 2015, he allowed the democratic opposition to win. Its main party — the National League for Democracy (NLD) — took 235 of 330 seats in one chamber of parliament and 135 of 224 in the other.

The newly elected parliament then chose the president according to the following procedure: each of the two chambers and the military bloc nominated one candidate, after which a vote was held. The candidate who won a majority became head of state, while the other two became vice presidents.

The strongest odds were with the NLD’s longtime leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But the law bars people whose spouses or children hold foreign citizenship from running for the presidency, and the opposition leader’s husband and sons were British citizens. As a result, the party nominated Htin Kyaw while creating a new “state counsellor” position for the opposition’s actual leader. Htin Kyaw handed control of the cabinet of ministers over to Aung San Suu Kyi, making her the de facto head of state.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, had been one of the founders of Burmese independence movement, even fighting against the British colonizers while serving in the ranks of the Japanese army during WWII. But Aung San quickly realized that Japanese occupation was far worse than British rule and switched over to the British side. He had every chance of becoming head of state after the British departure in 1948, but just months before Burma gained independence the general was assassinated on the orders of his main political rival, U Saw. British police reports said that at the moment of his arrest, U Saw was drinking whiskey from the barrel of the submachine gun used that had been used to kill Aung San, celebrating the elimination of his opponent.

Her father’s daughter

Aung San Suu Kyi was not yet three years old when her father was killed. Educated in India and the United Kingdom, she spent many years working abroad and married the British historian Michael Aris. In 1988 she returned home — officially to care for her ailing mother — arriving in Myanmar just as the first mass protests against military rule swept the country. She supported the protesters and, holding a portrait of her murdered father, delivered a half-hour speech at the country’s main Buddhist shrine – the golden Shwedagon Pagoda.

Aung San Suu Kyi said the demonstrations against the junta were a continuation of the struggle for the country’s independence, that her father would have wanted to see Myanmar democratic and free, and that as his daughter she could not stand aside and therefore was joining the opposition. Her ability to inspire people, along with her lineage, instantly made Aung San Suu Kyi the leader of Myanmar’s democratic movement — and just as swiftly turned the military against her. The opposition figure was placed under house arrest for years.

Locked within the walls of her own home, Aung San Suu Kyi maintained an active correspondence with fellow opposition members and with Western politicians. She published multiple articles and manifestos abroad, urging for peaceful resistance to the military’s absolute power. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but refused to travel to the ceremony, fearing the generals would not let her return. Eight years later, when her husband — who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer — was denied entry to Myanmar by the military, she sacrificed her last chance to travel to the UK to see him, instead remaining in her homeland to continue the political struggle.

Finally, in 2015, the junta (which was seeking a way out of international isolation and hoping to ease Western sanctions) allowed the opposition leader to take her party into elections. Both the junta and the democrats benefited from the resounding victory of the National League for Democracy. The military demonstrated to the West the reformist commitment needed for sanctions relief while still maintaining control over key ministries and holding onto a prominent presence in parliament. The NLD, in turn, gained the opportunity to end the semi-underground existence it had endured for many years and become part of the political mainstream.

Accomplice to genocide

Soon after the democrats’ triumphant election victory, the long-simmering conflict between the junta and the Rohingya people escalated into a full-scale war. Muslim Rohingya were not recognized as citizens of Myanmar at the official level — they were denied education and medical care, refused employment, and treated as second-class people. From the junta’s perspective, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were nothing more than illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. For years the military had carried out localized intimidation campaigns, but in 2017 they went much further, launching massive shelling and bombardments of Muslim villages. During the massacre — recognized internationally as genocide — at least 9,000 people were killed. About 700,000 fled the country.

“We openly declare that there are no more Rohingya in our country,” Myanmar’s commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing wrote on his official Facebook page a few months after the fighting began. Similar statements were made on behalf of the country’s government — already headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, who denied the fact of ethnic cleansing in the country, insisting that both Muslims and Buddhists were suffering equally from the violence. Moreover, she hinted that some foreign Islamist forces might be behind the massacres. In other words, she was justifying the military’s actions.

For a politician who had earned the nickname “the Burmese Gandhi,” such a shift could not go unnoticed. The West grew disillusioned with a heroine who, not long before, had inspired songs and poems. Petitions demanding that her Nobel Peace Prize be revoked circulated. The prize was not revoked, but Aung San Suu Kyi lost many of her staunchest supporters in the democratic world.

Without opposition, but with Beijing and Moscow

By the time the next elections were held in 2020, the NLD had entered into what was almost an open conflict with the generals. One reason was the government’s refusal under Aung San Suu Kyi to set up separate polling stations on military bases and in closed military towns, where civilian observers would have been unable to monitor the voting process. In addition, the party openly promised to steadily reduce the officers’ influence on politics, even setting a specific date for ending all legislative privileges that guaranteed the military a role in politics: the year 2035.

The NLD scored another sweeping victory and again secured a majority in both houses of parliament. The generals then chose not to take any chances and decided to reclaim full power. In early 2021 the commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s armed forces, Min Aung Hlaing (the same man who had boasted on Facebook about eliminating the Rohingya) declared that Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues had rigged the elections. The head of government was deposed and arrested, and the military took control of administrative buildings and media outlets. The commander-in-chief assembled a new governing body — the State Administration Council of Myanmar — and placed himself at its head. After several years of flirting with democracy, the country returned under the rule of a junta.

Aung San Suu Kyi was sent to prison on charges of attempting to seize power, but after the Rohingya episode, the Nobel laureate from Myanmar could no longer expect real support from the United States or Europe. The junta, however, quickly found partners abroad — primarily in neighboring China, which had previously backed separatists but in recent years had invested billions of dollars into building and developing industry and infrastructure in Myanmar. Risking the loss of those investments, Beijing worked to establish common ground with the military.

Another partner was Putin’s Russia, whose economic interests aligned with those of the generals in Myanmar. Since Soviet times, Moscow had been one of Naypyidaw’s main suppliers of weapons. Even in the years of relative democratization, Russians dealt not so much with politicians as with the military, who controlled the portion of the budget allocated for purchasing equipment and arms.

The future junta leader Min Aung Hlaing traveled to Russia repeatedly to sign contracts for aircraft, air defense systems, and other weapons. Many of these agreements were still in force when the civilian government was overthrown, and once the junta explicitly backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, relations with Moscow shifted from merely warm to outright friendly Min Aung Hlaing visited his Russian partners nearly every six months, and the two countries — separated by 2,500 km — began holding joint military exercises. Official delegations from Russia started arriving in Myanmar regularly.

Close friendship with the Kremlin helped the generals solve several important problems: it prevented Myanmar from sliding into full dependence on China alone, ensured reliable diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council, and guaranteed continued arms supplies. But none of these foreign allies could give the junta legitimacy. No one believed the generals when they claimed their coup was needed to save the country from Aung San Suu Kyi’s conspiracy, just as no one believed the usurper Bodawpaya, who in the eighteenth century had proclaimed himself a new Buddha.

Kremlin-style elections

Today, Myanmar is engulfed in a civil war in which tens of thousands of the country’s residents are fighting against their own army. The military has banned opposition parties, dissolved all bodies of authority not under its control, and installed loyal people everywhere. At the same time, almost 80% of Myanmar’s physical territory is controlled by opposition forces, separatists, or very small armed groups.

In these difficult conditions, the junta once again attempted to legitimize its rule via elections. Preparations lasted for at least a year, and Russia played an active role. The head of the junta held talks with the speaker of Russia’s State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, and afterwards promised a more honest electoral process than in 2020. Officials from Naypyidaw who would be responsible for the voting procedure traveled to Moscow to study the experience of Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC), and representatives of Russia’s CEC themselves worked with the military in Myanmar.

The elections in Myanmar, which ended on Jan. 25, closely resembled those in Russia, albeit with regional specifics. At the national level, six parties have been admitted — all of them were either created by the junta or else allowed the generals to regulate their activities in exchange for entry into parliament. Small parties competing for seats in regional legislatures are also controlled by the junta.

The country has at least 22,000 political prisoners, and many thousands of people have been forced to flee to escape persecution. These emigrants and political prisoners cannot take part in the elections — not even as voters. They are either stripped of their rights or unable to return home.

Given the circumstances, the European Union declared even before polling stations opened that the vote in Myanmar had been staged and that its results would be illegitimate. Only three countries — Russia, Belarus, and China — agreed to send official observers to this simulated process.

The U.S. position is telling as well. Until quite recently Washington unequivocally condemned the junta and demanded the country’s immediate democratization. Now the White House is making overtures to the generals, and refugees are even being denied protection on the grounds that the elections indicate an “improvement in the situation in the country,” meaning their lives are supposedly no longer at risk.