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Volume
53, Number 2 · February 9,
2006 Review The
Emperor Vladimir Putin's
Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy Putin's
Russia Virtual
Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World 1. "This book is about Vladimir
Putin," says Anna Politkovskaya, a leading
Russian journalist, "but not, as he is normally viewed in the West, seen
through rose-coloured glasses." Which may seem a puzzling way to start. There is a lot of
indifference toward Putin in the West. There is a lot of disappointment. But
there is not much admiration, especially now that Putin's strongest ally
among European politicians, Gerhard Schroeder, has gone as chancellor of
Germany-- and has taken a job on Putin's payroll as chairman of a pipeline
company. Most Western governments would
probably agree by now with the gloomy verdict of Putin's long-serving
economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, who resigned
on December 27, saying that he had joined Putin's team in 2000 "to
pursue an economic policy of broadening economic freedoms," but that
Russia had "essentially ceased pursuing that policy a minimum of two and
a half years ago." It was "difficult, if not effectively
impossible," he said, to identify any decision taken in 2004 and 2005
which had not reduced "economic freedoms, indeed political freedoms
too." He added that Russia's reassertion of state control over its oil
industry, which had included the renationalization of two big producers, Yuganskneftgas (the main production arm of the Yukos group) and Sibneft, was
damaging the economy, even though the damage was masked for the moment by
high oil prices. The Kremlin's policy, he said, was that "energy could
and should be used as a political weapon." As if to bear out Illarionov's point about political freedoms, on the day
of his resignation, the upper house of the Russian parliament, the Federation
Council, approved a bill curtailing the rights of nongovernmental
organizations in Russia. Ostensibly, this was for fear that they might be
used as vehicles for terrorism or subversion. The law was slightly softened
after fierce foreign and domestic criticism of a first draft, but it still
gave Russian officials "an unprecedented level of discretion in deciding
what projects, or even parts of NGO projects, comply with Russia's national
interest," said Human Rights Watch, and would allow them to close NGOs
which disobeyed. The law closes off the possibility that NGOs might ever
serve as rallying points for effective political opposition in Russia, as
they did before democratic revolutions in recent years in Serbia, Georgia, and
Ukraine. Few people think Russia could face a similar revolution anytime
soon. But it is part of Putin's character to want to bring any independent
organization, anywhere on the Russian political landscape, within the scope
of his control, just in case. And as if to bear out Illarionov's warnings on energy, Russia also chose the
holiday season to use energy as a political weapon against Ukraine. Gazprom,
Russia's state-run gas monopoly, raised fourfold its
price for gas exported to Ukraine, then shut off supplies on January 1 when
Ukraine refused to pay. The aim was apparently to undermine Ukraine's
pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko. But the
effect may have been more to undermine the fragile reputation of Russia as a
reliable energy supplier, especially among countries in Western Europe that
rely on Russia for one quarter of their gas supplies. Most of this gas
travels via Ukraine. When Russia cut supplies to Ukraine, Ukraine cut the
pressure in the pipelines sending gas on to Europe, sowing panic. Western
governments protested; Russia agreed to a much more modest price increase,
though one that still produced a storm of protest in the Ukrainian
parliament, leading to a no-confidence vote in the government; and supplies
were restored on January 3. Even so, European countries that
were happy until recently to rely on Russia for energy will be looking
harder now for alternative sources in the future. Politkovskaya's presumption that Putin is well regarded in the West may
therefore sound odd-- but that is only because the West has moved a little
closer to Politkovskaya's own, much more skeptical,
point of view, since she was writing her book. It appears only now in an
American edition, but it was completed in May 2004, save for a postscript
written later that year, and deals mostly with Putin's first presidential
term. Putin could still count then on some lingering indulgence from foreign
governments that were willing to minimize public discussion of his
authoritarian instincts in the hope that, if people were nice to him, his
more liberal instincts would prevail. Now, with his second term well
underway, his limitations are more apparent, and the ranks of his admirers
have thinned. Many see him as a competent leader, even an effective one, by
Soviet and Russian standards. But he is also a dour, cagey, somewhat sinister
man who often looks as if he is in thrall to some deep private anger or
bitterness, and who has never escaped the shadow of his KGB past. He inherited a Russia which,
chaotically and corruptly run as it had been under Boris Yeltsin, still
seemed to be open to Western democratic values, if only for want of any
others. He closed off that possibility by recreating a monopolistic political
system that captured and confined power within a heavily militarized
bureaucracy. This Russia, stronger and more confident, has become an awkward
neighbor for the West. It sells nuclear technology to Iran, sponsors lawless
rebel provinces inside Georgia and Moldova, bullies Ukraine and the Baltic
states, and makes no great distinction in its foreign policy between
democrats and dictators, save that it often seems to get along more easily
with dictators. It remains, for all that, a necessary partner of the West. It
has huge oil and gas exports, and a booming economy. Its cooperation is often
useful in world affairs. But there can be few illusions left on either side
of the relationship. Or so you might think until you
read further into Putin's Russia, and you see what Politkovskaya
has in mind. She says, in effect, that even if the West may think it has
Putin's measure, the reality is far, far worse. She portrays Putin as the bad
master of a bad system, a bleak and cruel man who will leave Russia an even
bleaker and crueler country. "Why do I so dislike Putin?" she asks
rhetorically, and supplies a generous range of answers, of which these are
only a few: I
dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than
felony, for his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies, for the gas he used
in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of
the innocents [in Chechnya].... I dislike him because he does not like
people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the
achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that. As a writer for Novaya gazeta, the most honest and outspoken newspaper in
Russia, Politkovskaya has been a brave critic of
presidents, gang leaders, generals, bureaucrats, and other powerful people in
Russian life. The essays and reflections in Putin's Russia deal mainly
with the army, organized crime, the war in Chechnya, and Putin himself. They
make for depressing and often terrifying reading, backed up by Politkovskaya's dogged reporting. You can argue about her
sense of proportion, perhaps even her sense of fairness. Her book is one of
the few that seem too hard on Putin. But her accuracy and sincerity are
beyond dispute. So too is her gift for narrative. Here is one of her tales of
army life, in its entirety: Back
to Moscow province. It is the morning of May 4, 2002. Army Unit 13815, in the
village of Balashikha. Two boilerwomen
working in the plant that provides heating for the unit hear cries for help
from nearby. They rush out and see that a trench has been dug in the middle
of the courtyard, in which a soldier has been buried up to his neck. The
women dig down, cut the rope binding him hand and foot, and help him out of
the pit. At
this moment an army major appears in a towering rage. He shouts at the women
to leave the soldier alone. He is teaching Private Chesnokov
a lesson, and if they do not go back to the boiler house immediately, he will
have them sacked. Private
Chesnokov, having escaped from the pit, deserted
from the unit. In this book and in Novaya gazeta, Politkovskaya's
writing returns obsessively to Chechnya, the Russian republic in the northern
Caucasus where Russia has fought two wars in the past twelve years trying to
subdue increasingly radical secessionists. It now claims to be restoring
basic civil order and handing local government back to Chechens, but in
practice this has meant allowing a private militia run by Ramzan
Kadyrov, Chechnya's pro-Russian deputy prime
minister, to pursue a reign of terror using torture, kidnapping and murder.[1]
Politkovskaya gives a disturbing account of Chechen
civilians killed, wounded, displaced, and impoverished by the years of
fighting. She fears for the corrosive effect on Russian public and private
life when the army and the state become habituated to the brutalities and illegalities
of prolonged warfare, saying: We
seem to have become very primitive in the last few years, even rather
ignoble. The change in moral values is increasingly noticeable as the war in
the Caucasus continues and broken taboos increasingly become familiar facts
of life. Killing? Happens every day. Robbery? What of it? Looting? Perfectly
legal in a war. It is not only the courts that fail to condemn crimes, but
society as well. What was regarded in the past with repugnance is now simply
accepted. So fierce is the hatred between
Russians and Chechens, she says, that "only a madman could envy the
Chechens who live in Russia now." The same, presumably, holds true for
Russians who live in Chechnya. That hatred has been stoked not only by the
war within Chechnya, but also by horrific terrorist attacks carried out
across Russia over the years by Chechen separatists and their allies,
including the seizing of a theater in Moscow in 2002, and of a school at Beslan in North Ossetia in 2004. Politkovskaya's insistence on judging Putin's Russia by its policy and
behavior toward Chechens is honorable, even heroic in view of most Russian
attitudes toward them. But it is also misleading, in the sense that most
Russian life is not like that at all. It would be like judging America today
by its behavior in Iraq, or Britain in the 1970s by its behavior in Northern
Ireland. These are vital parts of the story, they must be told, but they are
not the whole story. The focus on Chechnya leads Politkovskaya
into damning generalities about Putin which require more detailed argument
than she has the time or the disposition to supply here. It would be one
thing to say that Putin has been overly timid about military reform. It is
another thing to say, as Politkovskaya does, that
he is "entirely to blame for the brutality and the extremism endemic in
the army and the state." In fact there were plenty of both under
Gorbachev and Yeltsin. But still, her anger is honest anger. And it serves to
remind us that for all Putin's public polish, his early career in the KGB and
his oversight of the last Chechen war must give him a dark and scary
hinterland. Indeed, if there is anybody who
does see Putin through rose-colored glasses, you might say, it is the
Russians themselves. He enjoys a huge and authentic popularity at home. That,
understandably, makes Politkovskaya herself a touch
uncertain where to assign blame for what he does. Toward the start of her book
she says that "as president, [Putin] is the person who shapes policies.
In Russia, people imitate the man at the top." Toward the end of it she
says: "[Putin's] people follow society's responses very attentively. It
is wrong to imagine they aren't bothered. It is we who are responsible for
Putin's policies, we first and foremost, not Putin." The second of those positions is
certainly the more constructive. But it is not necessarily the more
reassuring. 2. Lilia Shevtsova,
a Russian political scientist who has worked for the past ten years with the
Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, is no great enthusiast for Putinism
either, but she diverges from Politkovskaya's
approach by trying to see Putin's good points as well as his bad ones. She
catches well his elusive character when she warns that we must not underestimate Putin by denying him the capacity
for reflection and doubt.... He is not a linear personality lacking internal
vacillations.... Most of his decisions are marked by inconsistency and,
apparently, doubts.... The ruler of an exhausted, chaotic country that is
continually torn between conflicting options and developing by
trial-and-error has to be a complex person.... This politician has to keep
turning one face, then the other, to the public. Even so, the accumulation of
Putin's decisions forces Shevtsova toward an
increasingly harsh conclusion. The first edition of her book came at a time
of relative optimism in 2003, when, as she now says, an "amazing
macroeconomic consolidation and friendly relations with Western powers
appeared to confirm that [Putin] was on a good course, that he had finally
found what Russia needed." But as she takes the story up to 2005, in a
much revised and expanded second edition, she worries that the picture has
changed markedly for the worse: The
slowing pace of economic reforms in 2003–2004, deepening social
problems, the continuing war in Chechnya and the danger of spillover to
other North Caucasus republics, and finally the tragic escalation of
terrorist acts in Russia together tested Putin's leadership-- and he
failed. This Russian leader has been confronted by new challenges, and
his reaction has been the traditional answer for all Russian and Soviet
rulers: He has embarked on the path of centralization, clamping down on
all autonomous actors and political freedoms. She dwells on the state's campaign
against one such actor, Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
former boss of the Yukos oil company, who is now
serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian prison. Most of Yukos has been renationalized. There are many theories
about Khodorkovsky's downfall, and probably all of
them have some truth. The affair served many different interests. It pleased
an envious public; it reversed the rigged privatization of Yukos ten years earlier; it punished Yukos
for buying votes in parliament; it cowed other businessmen into keeping quiet
and paying their taxes; it enriched the state; and, very probably, it also
enriched a wide range of state officials as they harassed Yukos
with tax inspections and lawsuits, dispossessed Khodorkovsky,
and, finally, transferred the main assets of Yukos
to a public company, Rosneft. Shevtsova implies, surely correctly, that Putin was also jealous of
Khodorkovsky's reputation in the West as the man
embodying the bright future of the Russian oil industry and with it the whole
Russian economy. After September 11, when oil prices stayed high, the Middle
East looked ever more volatile, and Russian oil exports were increasing, Khodorkovsky seemed in some ways a more vital figure for
American interests in Russia than did Putin himself. He intensified his
contacts with Western companies and Western governments. He spread his money
around think tanks abroad and politicians at home. He was, moreover, much
keener than Putin on the full-scale Westernization of the political and
economic systems of Russia; such a trend would raise the market value of his
oil company. He was thought to have political ambitions of his own. As Shevtsova puts it, "he openly challenged not only
the leader, but also the way that Russia was ruled." Khodorkovsky's downfall marked a watershed in a contest between state
power and business influence in Russia which had got underway in Yeltsin's
day-- a contest, we might say, between guns and money, both interpreted
broadly. Under Yeltsin, the people with guns could get money, and the people
with money could get guns. By sending Khodorkovsky
to Siberia, Putin showed that the people with money could no longer get guns.[2]
The cost of that victory was probably higher than he expected. The
expropriation of Yukos shocked the United States, which
had expected Putin's Russia, whatever its other failings, to respect private
property and to maximize oil production. Here it defied both expectations. At the end of 2004, the Yukos affair was followed by the Orange Revolution in
Ukraine: Viktor Yushchenko won a presidential
election with American and European support, despite Russian efforts to rig
the vote in favor of its own candidate, Viktor Yanukovych.
These rows over Yukos and Ukraine helped bring
Russian– American relations to their lowest point since George W. Bush took
office, perhaps even the lowest since the breakup of the Soviet Union. At
around the same time, Russia's relations with the European Union were
deteriorating for additional reasons. Russian wanted easier trade
arrangements and visa-free travel, which the EU refused to give. The lack of
any progress in Russian–American and Russian–EU relations since then suggests
that Russia is moving even further away from its supposed goal, under
Yeltsin, of integration with the West. Putin replaced the idea of integration
with one of mere interaction. Now he seems willing to forgo even interaction,
save when interaction is clearly going to serve Russian interests-- as it does
when Russia takes its turn in the chair of the G8 group of rich industrialized
countries this year. Russia cares little now about pleasing other people,
much more about emphasizing its autonomy of action and of ideology, a
position somewhat like China's. Russia could easily be in much
worse shape. But with a bit more imagination and a bit more effort it could
be in much better shape. This, in the end, is where Shevtsova's
critique of Putin comes to rest, and mine too. It is a matter of squandered
opportunity. Putin came to power with broadly based political support, huge
popularity in the country, a growing economy, and a West suddenly keen-- after
September 11-- to have Russia as a real ally. This, if ever, was the time for
Russia to make its historic choice in favor of Western liberalism. As Shevtsova says: It is unlikely that Putin could have overturned the entire
old system. But he could have initiated a systemic breach, which would have
facilitated the building of a new state. For instance, he could have chosen a
government of parliamentary majority, responsible to the Duma, and therefore,
to the voters. This would have been the start of a way out of Russia's
regime, which is totally irresponsible; [under the current system] parties
cannot influence policy, having no chance to form the government.... But
Putin did not take the chance. He chose the simplest variant for himself-- he
picked the bureaucracy as his major ally.... He must not have believed that
Russia was ready for modernization without the tight hold of
authoritarianism. She hopes that Putin's clear bias
against liberal democracy will mean "less deception and fewer
illusions" about his rule, and in due course a reaction against it. The
public, she says, "will see the results of his authoritarian rule and
will stop hoping that the 'iron hand' will save Russia." Perhaps, but I doubt it. For one
thing, the material results of Putin's rule must look pretty good to many
Russians right now, thanks mainly to high oil prices. Life is better for them
now than it has been for at least twenty years-- perhaps better than ever
before, and certainly more hedonistic. At the same time, the reputation of
liberal democracy has taken some hard knocks. The moral compromises and
political misjudgments made in the name of fighting terrorism have left
neither America nor Europe in much of a position to lecture Russia about
anything. Putin is, moreover, a man for the dull and the gray in government. That is a handicap for a democrat, but probably an advantage for an authoritarian. He is not installing a fierce dictatorship that might provoke an equally fierce reaction. Horrible things may be happening in Chechnya and some other places, as Politkovskaya shows. But Putinism means mainly the exercise of power through a vast and featureless bureaucracy which existed long before him, and whose control of the courts, the parliament, and broadcasting he has merely restored or strengthened. That could prove to be a Russian model of government with plenty of staying power, whatever the price of oil.
3. Andrew Wilson, a lecturer in
Ukrainian studies at the University of London, offers a very different
perspective on Russia, and on Putin's rise to power, which serves,
nonetheless, to complement the work of both Politkovskaya
and Shevtsova. His interest lies in the structure
of politics, not in the impact of policies. He shows how far the
authoritarian habits of the Soviet era continue to shape the political
culture of post-Soviet countries, in ways which will rarely be conducive to
good government. He finds a general expectation that power will be wielded
without accountability; that values and beliefs will play little if any part
in determining who holds power, save that they may be exploited for cynical
and tactical ends; and that politics will be conducted as a sort of warfare
in which the aim is to destroy the enemy and capture the terrain. When post-Soviet political habits
collided fifteen years ago with the demands of the democratic world in which
Russia sought to play a leading part, the results were confused, not to say
chaotic. Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, rewrote the constitution,
ordered artillery to shell his parliament, and signed away his nation's oil
companies to a clique of bankers in exchange for a relatively trivial amount
of campaign financing. The country veered from one deep crisis to another.
There was little chance of progress toward formation of a stable system of
political parties, or toward a division and a balancing
of powers among federal and regional institutions, or toward a shared sense
of national values and national interests. But if they never quite got around
to putting in place these deeper foundations of democracy, Yeltsin and his
contemporaries found that a seemingly democratic superstructure could be
lashed together much more easily, and could appease or fool Russia's new
Western friends, as well as many Russian voters. The essential activity, they
saw, was to stage elections and election campaigns, making generous use of
advertising and broadcasting to give the idea of a Western-style contest.
Since Russia had no strong and independent political parties or other
political and judicial institutions, elections could be manipulated easily by
anybody with the power and the money to do so, usually the Kremlin and its
friends. The purpose of the people around Yeltsin was, as Wilson nicely puts
it, "to legitimate power, but not to provide any real threat to
it." Even for elections like these, however, expertise was useful. A new
profession for Russia, the "political technologist," was born, approximating
to the job of a political consultant or campaign manager in America, but with
much more creative scope. Yeltsin's presidency, and
especially the parliamentary election of 1995 and the presidential election
of 1996, was a golden age for these Russian spin doctors. The Kremlin had
administrative and financial resources, but little idea how to use them in
electoral politics. It relied on the "political technologists," who
used techniques imported from the West or revived from the Communist era to
develop arguments exaggerating and demonizing the power of the Communist
Party; to run television advertisements claiming that Yeltsin was a strong
president when, much of the time, he was too sick to speak clearly; to invent
dummy parties and dummy candidates to confuse and divide voters; to bribe or
bully journalists into filling the press and television with pro-Yeltsin
stories. Wilson quarrels with the use of
the term "spin doctor" to describe these post-Soviet fixers. Their
job, he says, was not merely to refine the image or the message of a
candidate or a party at election time. It was to stage-manage an election
from beginning to end, including the creation of candidates, and of parties,
and of issues. A Ukrainian analyst, Volodymyr Polokhalo, explains to Wilson that, on election day, Western observers are looking for attributes of, or departures from, normal democratic procedures. But
our elections are different. The big falsification is the falsification of
the whole electoral process, the falsification of almost all the participants
in that process. There are no real political subjects, no real independent
political actors. To voters who lack sufficient information, they are not
false, they are real; but most parties are only the creation of various
donors looking for a suitable façade. This is what Wilson calls
"virtual politics." He writes briskly and clearly, paying some heed
to all the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, but arriving
mainly at a study of Russian political models and Russian political methods,
with occasional digressions into the application of those models and methods
in Ukraine. He talks to practitioners of political technology such as Gleb Pavlovsky, a one-time
dissident described by his rivals as "a major expert in contaminating the
political environment," and as "nothing but a charlatan [who has]
mastered the black art of self-mystification"; and Pavlovsky's
one-time sidekick, Marat Gelman, a "master of
provocation" who leads a second life as one of Moscow's leading dealers
in modern art. The result is a systematic and
intelligent discussion of a generally neglected or misunderstood part of the
post-Soviet political process. So lucidly does Wilson explain the operations
of the stage managers, their ideas and ambitions, that his account risks at
times redressing the balance too far in their favor, allowing them to claim
more credit than they deserve for shaping basic policy. Wilson is generally on his guard
against his subjects' exaggerations. He has put political technologists at
the center of his study, he says, "not because they are the only people
who count in post-Soviet politics, but out of a desire to change the
perspective from more traditional accounts that take the public performance
of politics at face value." But the political technologists are, needless
to say, pretty good at creating a wider view of their own importance.
"So much-- the political system, the state-- in modern Russia, was built by
political technologists," says one, Efim Ostrovsky, for example. Alexei Sitnikov,
the head of a political consultancy called Image-Kontakt,
claims credit for "conducting the voluminous research and creating the
necessary profile" which led Yeltsin to make Putin his successor, by
appointing Putin first as prime minister and then resigning to leave him as
acting president. Wilson himself offers a view that the "real credit for
Project Putin" should go to Gleb Pavlovsky, together with Valentin
Yumashev and Alexander Voloshin,
who served at different times as chiefs of staff in Yeltsin's Kremlin. All this may well be part of the
truth. Doubtless Pavlovsky and Sitnikov
did write political analyses that helped to identify Putin as a possible
successor. But they probably conceived of other political schemes as well,
and plenty of other people probably had a hand in recommending Putin,
including some who must now regret their choice. Nor should the reasons that
Putin got his chance at office be conflated with the reasons that he
prevailed once he got there. He had the confidence of the army, and the
security services, and big business, compared to which the political managers
were small fry. As Putin's administration has
gained in experience, so it has pushed the spin doctors further down the
influence chain. They can still run the show in local elections, but at the
national level, the Kremlin does its own strategic thinking, even if it uses
hired hands to execute the strategies. Putin's deputy chief of staff,
Vladimir Surkov, is probably the most skillful
political manipulator in Russia today. The Kremlin has also learned to use
the courts, and the public prosecutor, and the tax police, to frighten or
ruin anybody that might get in its way long before an electoral campaign has
even begun. Thus Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, has found himself
under investigation for fraud soon after he began hinting at running for the
presidency in 2008. Marat Gelman says to Wilson
that this sort of approach "is far more effective than any that people
like me can propose." Putin has contrived, in the words
of Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, "not only to establish a
monopoly of power, but also to monopolize competition for it."
Opposition is allowed only where the Kremlin feels it would be useful-- for
example, to make Putin's own positions look good by comparison or to float
trial balloons. Accidents may happen. The Rodina
("Motherland") party, though a Kremlin creation, has given the
impression of slipping its leash once or twice to challenge Putin from the
nationalist right. But that, too, may fall within the Kremlin's calculation. The question now is to what degree
the current regime's monopoly on power, and on the competition for power,
will be sustained. Putin's second term ends early in 2008. It is his last
under the current Russian constitution, and the argument is well underway about
what to do next. If Putin wants more presidential terms he can have them
easily by arranging for parliament to change the constitution. But he seems
for the moment to have some other option in mind-- perhaps, the gossip says, to
have himself appointed prime minister, and to try shifting his power to the
parliament; or to have himself appointed chairman of the state gas monopoly,
Gazprom, and also of a board managing the country's fiscal reserves. In
either case a protégé would take the presidency. If Putin were to quit tomorrow, he
would go down in history as the leader under whose regime Russia reversed its
post-Soviet economic decline. As for his political legacy: here, as the
Russians like to say, history can be very unpredictable. Measure Putin against
Boris Yeltsin, and Putin has been an efficient
reactionary, a disappointment to democrats. But measure him against the last
Russian leaders to have enjoyed sustained and uncontested power-- Brezhnev,
say, and before him Stalin-- and Putin looks much more like a step in the right
direction. We can only wish that he had made the historic choice Shevtsova described, and broken with such company
altogether. Notes [1] See Arkady Ostrovsky,
"Kadyrov's 'Legalised
Bandits' Bring Lawlessness to Chechnya," Financial Times, January
4, 2006. [2] I owe this formulation to Edward Lucas. |