The Putin System: An Opposing View

1 THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF PUTIN’S RUSSIA AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR WORLD AFFAIRS

At the turn of the millennium, in the wake of a rapid and, in many ways, catastrophic collapse of the Soviet political and economic system, a peculiar social and economic formation became reality in the “new” Russia. What I am talking about are not any particular events or even trends that have been present in Russian political and economic life over the past two decades but rather the overall framework of entrenched economic and social relationships that now exist there. Having emerged gradually over this period of time, this problematic framework is now entrenched and normalized in Russia. This framework is what the Marxist tradition used to call the “social order”—a set of substantive relationships that shape the texture of social life for the long term, regardless of what people themselves say or think about these relationships.

In examining the problematic aspects of the post-Soviet Russian social order, my primary focus (perhaps because of my mind-set and range of interests) was on the economic aspects of the system, which I believe are a major cause of Russia’s current ills. To the extent possible, and based on my experience, I sought to grasp and to outline, in more or less scholarly terms, the property ownership and management relationships in post-Soviet Russia. For all the high drama of Russia’s political conflicts of the early 1990s, I believed, and continue to believe, that, in the end, this political turmoil was subordinate to those rather deep but not always evident economic developments that shaped the peculiar type of Russia’s “new” capitalism. This capitalism emerged not so much as a result of, but rather against the wishes and calculations of nearly all the individuals and interest groups involved in its formation—forces that were frequently opposed to each other by their objective interests as well as by subjective aspirations.

But what exactly is the peculiar new capitalism in Russia? Let me outline briefly what I considered to be the main features of the Russian version of the post-Soviet economic system. I will then compare it to the current situation, and thus we shall see whether its principal elements are still relevant today.

The so-called reforms instituted after the fall of the Soviet Union were in fact not reforms at all but rather the Russian government’s passive muddling along with the flow of uncontrolled developments. As a result of this, by the end of the 1990s we in Russia found ourselves hostage to an odd, eclectic system of economic relations. This system combined, in a bizarre fashion, elements of disparate phenomena, such as underdeveloped classic capitalism; institutions of modern postindustrial financial capitalism that were thoughtlessly added to the mix; relics of the Soviet-type administrative command economy and of the shadow economy embedded in it; semifeudal relationships rooted in Russia’s pre-Soviet history; and, finally, trivial economic crime, such as bribes and fraud, as part of everyday business life.

Back then, no one was disputing this analysis in earnest. The debate was merely about the degrees to which all these disparate elements were present and about the immediate prospects for the system’s further evolution. At the time, the so-called liberal reformers were, on the whole, optimistic and confident that this eclectic assemblage of different kinds of economic activities was merely a reflection of the economy’s transitional character in the 1990s and that the spontaneous course of events was bringing Russia’s economy closer to the mainstream of Western capitalism. For me, to the contrary, there was nothing in the state of Russia’s economy at the time that would spontaneously propel it, as if on autopilot, toward a mature competitive capitalist economy.

I also noted that these disparate types of relationships in Russia’s economy were not separated from each other by clear-cut boundaries. In other words, its economy was not neatly divided into segments dominated by specific types of organization, such as traditional, modern, postsocialist, and shadow economies. Instead, these ways of economic life were closely intertwined with each other, with the same economic sectors, the same companies, and even the same individuals pulled into these different economic orbits at the same time. As a result, each economic actor had to deal with a mixture of disparate norms, consisting of legal requirements, informal understandings, administrative dictates, violent crime (including violence that originated with government agencies), and a vast field of uncertainty, dominated by individual luck. In some of my writings, I characterized this state of affairs as an “economy of might and of happenstance.”[1] In this kind of an economy, actors have to rely upon rules of the game that emerge outside of anyone’s control, are rather volatile, and may change substantially, even within a single investment cycle, under the influence of changes in power relationships and of merely accidental factors.

Yet another thing that I considered to be very important was the assessment of the deeper roots of the Russian authorities’ failure to get its economic house in order. Although it was true that Moscow ministerial cabinets in the 1990s made specific mistakes in their economic policies and failed to combat economic crime to the extent that was necessary, these were not the root causes of the failures of “transition.” Rather, the primary cause was the poor understanding of the overall character of the social formation that emerged in the place of the Soviet economic system.

At the time of Russia’s transition, I widely used the term “peripheral capitalism” to describe the country’s economic system. I believe this reflects not only Russia’s position in the global economy, of which the Russian economy became an inseparable part after the collapse of the Soviet-era “developed socialism,” but also the characteristics of the new social system that emerged from its ruins. My point was that many aspects of these types of economic relationships, however regrettable, were a norm not just for Russia but also for the peripheral parts of world capitalism in general, regardless of the many country-specific distinctions that might be of great significance. The features of the socioeconomic framework that characterized Russia in the late 1990s can also be found in many “transitional” polities outside of the core of the contemporary world economy.

Accordingly, my forecast differed from that of forecasters who were essentially optimistic about the allegedly approaching completion of the transitional period and who envisioned a young and energetic Russian capitalism about to take the country’s future into its mighty hands. For my part, I claimed that a transition from the state of affairs that had emerged in Russia’s economy by that time to an economy like that which characterized developed countries was not going to be smooth or “natural.” Rather, it was a rare historic opportunity that required persistent, intentional efforts by Russia’s entire political class. I reasoned that, in order to achieve this, Russia needed a new social contract and the establishment of fundamentally new institutions that would be used to implement genuine rather than fictitious reforms. Many of my critics dismissed this as tedious lecturing, as a justification for my alleged reluctance to assume responsibility for taking part in the transformation of Russia, which they viewed as perhaps complicated but, overall, “moving in the right direction.”

In quite a few of my writings, I pointed out that the system of peripheral capitalism that was rapidly taking shape in Russia had an internal resource for survival and could sustain itself for decades without major changes, especially in the absence of external threats challenging its durability.[2] This system relied upon its own social base among those strata and groups in society that were able to extract bureaucratic and criminal rents from their current position, in spite of the volatility of the rules of the game—and that could sometimes bend those rules in their favor. Moreover, vast reserves of raw materials, first of all hydrocarbons, enabled the Kremlin not only to guarantee the long-term well-being of the privileged class (that is, those who could take advantage of their position in society to extract rents) but also to provide jobs and incomes to the fairly large strata of those who were able to capture, in one way or another, the flows of income and demand resulting from the extraction and the utilization of these natural resources. This kind of a system has a high probability of stabilizing itself for an extended period. Such a system, no matter how ugly and inefficient, has no rigid internal constraints that would impede its stabilization. Moreover, in the medium term it can coexist with economic growth, a rise in incomes and consumption, and a prevailing sense of increasing prosperity.

Accordingly, I believed that only politically driven, intentional actions, with the support of the majority of economic elites, would be able to pull Russia out of this ill-fated equilibrium of a stagnation-prone system. I saw as questionable the idea of a spontaneous evolution of the country’s mind-set and institutions, which was touted by many back then. That was why I repeatedly called for a broad-based nongovernmental coalition of forces in support of reforms and, as a matter of fact, for imposing a new economic policy agenda upon the authorities. This agenda included the legitimation of state authority and property ownership in Russia through their broad-based recognition by the public, based on the principles of the rule of law, justice, and social responsibility as well as the inseparability of the rights and obligations of property owners. It required preventing the concentration of power in anyone’s hands and the establishment of mechanisms for a legally impeccable replacement of those in power, through pressure from below. Finally, my agenda called for greater transparency in decision-making by government agencies, political parties, lobbying groups, and so on. As a means toward these goals, I proposed to develop a broad-based agreement to be signed by representatives of the government, big business, and civil society. Such an agreement would lay out a road map of practical actions toward these goals.[3]

Today, as I evaluate the course of events since the turn of the century, I do not see much change to the picture that I have outlined, or anything to indicate that the solutions I originally identified need much revision. Due to the growth in export revenues and their subsequent redistribution via market mechanisms and through the federal budget, Russia experienced, until 2008, an undeniably substantial increase in incomes and wealth. Yet this did not lead to changes in the essential characteristics of Russia’s society.

Russia’s capitalism was and remains a typical (while, at the same time, rather distinctive) example of the periphery of the world economy. It is economically as well as technologically dependent on its core, which is the developed countries of the West. It also has preserved vast enclaves of archaic economic and social ways of life and is devoid of internal engines of growth and development in the form of an autonomous accumulation of capital built on a technological foundation that would have the ability to renew itself.

Over these years, the structure of Russia’s economy has not become more complex. To the contrary, it has come even closer to an economic model that is oriented toward external demand, a narrow circle of traditional products, and external sources of investment. Moreover, in the past few years the situation has become worse, in that labor-intensive sectors, such as construction and services, have become increasingly reliant upon the importation of a workforce from abroad (despite all the rhetoric to the contrary and even the administrative actions intended to curb this trend). Meanwhile, a large part of Russia’s own human resources are being eroded through open and covert emigration of its youngest and most capable workers, along with the downward social drift of its able-bodied population in the economically disadvantaged and the so-called unpromising areas of the country.

Furthermore, as the years of the global military and ideological standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States recede further into the past, the perception of Russia—both by its own people and by the outside world—increasingly reflects its present condition. It holds the status of a weighty but peripheral and relatively insignificant part of the world economy. Its global role has been reduced to, on the one hand, supplying other countries with oil, gas, and some other raw materials, as well as the “mass consumption” products of its military industry and the provision of some transport services, and, on the other hand, the importation of foreign goods to satisfy domestic demand. While Russia’s huge nuclear stockpiles certainly protect it from the threat of a direct foreign invasion, it cannot secure it an image of a highly developed country, capable of claiming a seat among global economic, technological—and, thus, political—leaders. The perception of Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union—a great power that had laid claim to technological leadership in at least a few key areas—has gradually morphed into the image of an economy that, while promising, is incomparably more humble in every sense, being in the same category as India and Brazil. In Russia, there has been a growing sense of a yawning gap between the developed world, primarily the countries of Europe, and their own country, which has gotten rid of the label of a “postsocialist” and “transitional” economy but has not succeeded in becoming a part of this developed world. Strictly speaking, this feeling has been one of the foremost reasons for the abrupt growth of anti-Western sentiments among Russia’s elite during these years.

But the worst (though perhaps the most important) news is that—due to the peculiar character of the reforms implemented in the 1990s, and of privatization in particular—Russia did not produce a class of autonomous and socially responsible wealth owners capable of collectively assuming the role of the advocate, organizer, and driving force of active institutional transformation. Only such a transformation would have put an end to the spontaneous reproduction of the flawed and stagnation-inducing post-Soviet forms of economic organization. Of course, Russia does have a few entrepreneurs of this kind, but they ended up without a unifying, powerful, and effective organization, a suitable political consciousness, or even a sense of solidarity as a class. And without such a class, which would be endowed with financial, organizational, and political resources, the building of a broad-based coalition in support of the reforms becomes virtually hopeless. Meanwhile, in the absence of this kind of a pressure from below, the authorities behave as an indifferent spectator at best, and at worst are actively blocking any changes in the status quo that would be unfavorable to them, viewing such changes as a threat to their own political stability and to the perpetuation of their privileged status.

Thus, it is rather obvious that the issue of far-reaching institutional reforms has been effectively taken off Russia’s political agenda—partly, and perhaps primarily, for the reason that I have outlined. This means, in turn, that Russia is now firmly trapped in its peripheral capitalism for the long haul.

This is essentially what led me to address in greater detail the flip side of this complex phenomenon, the political order of Russia’s post-Soviet capitalism. I see at least three reasons for the need for a more attentive analysis of these political dynamics. As noted earlier, one distinctive feature of the system of peripheral capitalism is that its economy has no internal, autonomous incentives for its development. While it may grow under the impact of external demand for its goods and services, or because of favorable short-term trends in its economic environment, it is intrinsically incapable of developing toward higher complexity, of finding new venues and engines for its internal development. It is in a state of semi-stagnation and unilateral dependence upon the leading industrial nations. The prospects for overcoming this condition and for changing its position in the global economy, even if only in the long term, hinge entirely upon the intentionality of government policies, upon the authorities’ political will and their readiness to undertake strenuous efforts in this direction and to incur personal risks and even sacrifices for the sake of achieving the goals that are important for society at large. This leads us to consider whether a political system should provide such incentives and such opportunities to its political class in the first place.

The second reason is that Russia’s public consciousness is marked by the actual presence and even the domination of a plainly simplistic approach to the analysis of its political realities and their causes. In most of the debates, the issues are presented in an overly simplistic manner and contradictory developments are ignored. Meanwhile, the motivations and intents behind the actions of the key players are attributed to unsophisticated, a priori explanations rather than being determined through careful analysis. In this process, the widespread use of stereotypical jargon and abstract, quasi-scientific reasoning utterly detached from realities more often leads away from the substance of the issue rather than contributing to its understanding. Of course, having a grasp of the gist of the type of governance that has taken shape in Russia by now, and of the limits of its reach, is of paramount importance in assessing its prospects and the possibilities for its transformation.

The third and final reason that more attentive analysis is needed is the unpleasant fact that, at least in the past two decades, and perhaps over a longer period, the international community at large has been losing its sense of direction, principles, and purpose, while the search for new ones has so far not been terribly successful. Too much has changed in world affairs since the end of the Cold War, when the governments of leading Western countries acquired more freedom of action compared to the peak of the military and political standoff between the Soviet bloc and NATO. The formerly established goals and rules of behavior have lost their relevance, but defining new ones has become a protracted exercise and has led to acute disagreements among the once consolidated Western elites. Moreover, changes in the structure and the characteristics of Western economies, along with the spread of qualitatively new digital technologies in those countries, have substantially altered the functioning of their political systems (as shown, for example, by the financial and economic crisis of 2007–2009).

All of these changes have affected not just the group of countries known as the West but also their relationships with the rest—the nations on the periphery of global capitalism. To conceptualize the potential impact of these changes upon Russia and its position in the world, we need to get a better grasp of what Russia’s political class is and how it relates to the political regime that has taken shape in the country. All of this constitutes the purpose of this book.

Let me make a few additional remarks of a general nature before moving on to this book’s main argument. First of all, it is obvious that not everything in a given society is reducible to its economic foundations. While, at least in theory, Marxism leaned more toward economic determinism than any other school of thought, even Marxists allowed for considerable variations in the relation of the “political superstructure” to its “economic basis” (even though the meaning and the functionality of the superstructure in Marxism was extremely narrow and was reduced to servicing and sustaining the dominant property relationships in a given society).

As for the present-day notions of the political structure of society, they tend to posit merely indirect or the most general causal connection between the economic relationships and institutions prevalent in a given society and the principles and practices of its political governance. Thus, for example, there is a widespread assumption that economic competition has an inherent relationship to the existence of political competition in society, while economic rights and freedoms closely correlate with civil liberties and political freedoms and are guaranteed or preconditioned by them. It is also widely held that attributes of a political system such as universal voting rights and the separation of powers guarantee the free development of the markets and their mechanisms, while also counteracting excessive concentration of property ownership in the hands of the few and the emergence of monopolies. Finally, it is explicitly or implicitly accepted that competition always and everywhere leads to improved efficiency, both in the economy and in political governance.

Undoubtedly, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, all these relationships apply. A great number of scholarly works establish these relationships with “scientific validity,” using mathematical frameworks to perform analysis of carefully selected and suitably interpreted statistical data. Yet such causal relationships are more a matter of worldview and are largely theoretical. To assert that a classical market economy with a prevalence of private property ownership and a liberal political system of free and unregulated competition among ideas, citizens, and their associations are two sides of the same coin would be a stretch and would greatly oversimplify the tricky and at times less than fully rational configuration of societal relationships in real life.

The economic relations and the political system of a given society have an impact on each other, but in reality this impact is not so simple. First and foremost, it is never as rigid and unequivocal as some claim it to be. The causal relationships noted earlier are not deterministic but rather probabilistic; further, they can be found only across large samples of units of analysis, selected according to intentionally specified criteria. Thus, in spite of the efforts to prove the validity of these relationships with sophisticated math, they essentially remain hypothetical. And they may very well prove to be false, if the set of data used for the analysis is selected and prepared in a different way or if an attempt is made to test them over a longer period of time.

In this regard, a lot depends upon the interpretation of the meaning and the functioning of specific institutions, and this interpretation, in turn, greatly depends upon the interpreters’ interests and biases. This is even more the case when we deal with such intrinsically subjective notions as freedom or the lack thereof, democracy, legitimacy, and so on. Besides, political and economic institutions influence each other, and not necessarily in any one direction. Thus, economic factors may be objectively pushing political institutions to develop in a certain direction, but these institutions themselves may, for whatever reasons, be developing in the opposite direction, while exerting a pressure on the economy to place it in the framework of a different kind of relationship. Otherwise, we would not be observing such a wide variety of disparate and eclectic models of political governance as we see today, with the coexistence of heterogeneous principles and mechanisms that at times operate in mutually incompatible directions.

One way or another, in reality, the system of relationships in any given society is always complex and can never be precisely and adequately described with two or three commonplace labels or characterizations. Trivial as it may sound, life is indeed always richer, as the expression goes, than can be captured by any schematic representation. And the direction of the dynamics, let alone the long-term developmental trends, cannot be grasped or identified in the short term but only from a sufficient historical distance.

Going back to our discussion of Russia’s capitalism in its post-Soviet “edition,” it is notable that, even now, more than two decades since it began taking shape, the prospects of the further evolution of its political superstructure and of its capacity to ensure the country’s economic and social development are still far from clear. It is true that a lot is now clearer than it used to be, especially in comparison to how things looked around the year 2000 or 2005. Some of the potential directions and opportunities available back then were not utilized. Many of them have entirely disappeared from the horizon, forever—or at least for a very long time. Others, to the contrary, have turned into the most plausible and even unavoidable scenario of Russia’s prospective political development, which is going to mold and adjust the road map of Russia’s potential options and developments at any given time. And yet the country’s future is still not fully clear and is still indeterminate.

I certainly anticipate many objections to this statement. Critics will point out that, throughout the past decade, Russia’s political institutions have evolved in a rather clear direction. Namely, genuine political competition has been increasingly curtailed; the checks and balances, to the extent and in the forms that they existed in Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century, have been eliminated; and the activities of political parties and of the legislature and the everyday implementation of the laws have degenerated, if viewed from the standpoint of the norms of parliamentary democracy and rule of law. Meanwhile, the authorities have been paying less and less attention to the opinions and the interests of the many different groups and strata of Russian society when passing new laws; the extent of subjective and arbitrary interpretation of legal norms and the selectivity of their implementation have been increasing; the role of the central authorities in regional decision-making has grown, while the extent of their ownership and control of several fields of economic activity, including mass media, has markedly increased; and the room for competition has noticeably shrunk—not only in politics and public affairs but also in many industries, first and foremost in the resource industries and in export-oriented businesses.

Indeed, the past ten to fifteen years saw many changes in this direction, occurring with different degrees of intensity. I will be discussing them repeatedly in the rest of the book. And yet I believe it would be wrong to portray the turn of the century as a critical turning point, when these trends allegedly supplanted something entirely opposite that had prevailed in the course of the preceding decade.

It is true that the 1990s were indeed characterized by deeper contradictions and the fragmentation within the power elite as well as by the absence of a cohesive, dominant group tightly knit together through rigid internal discipline. It is also true that Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s chief executive at the time, relied—had to rely—to a greater extent upon political maneuvering among various interest groups. This created an illusion of a genuine political pluralism, not only in public life but also in the process of determining government policies in a wide range of areas.

Nevertheless, it would be disingenuous, if not outright shameless, to present the 1990s in Russia as a time of the blossoming of parliamentary government, under which the next team of key officeholders is determined through elections whose outcome has not been fixed in advance. Back then, just as in today’s Russia, the composition of these teams was decided by the arbitrary will of one man who had been brought by the course of events (and to a large extent by happenstance) to the top of the government hierarchy. And just as in today’s Russia, the correlation of power among different groups and factions within the system of government had nothing to do with the results of an election. Instead, it reflected the personal considerations and calculations of that sole individual—Boris Yeltsin—taking into account objectively available opportunities as well as risks. And when one speaks of the “antidemocratic” trends in the first decade of this century, we must keep in mind that these trends did not reflect some kind of a metamorphosis of the political machine and of the elite that was using it. Rather, it represented the ongoing consolidation and simplification of this elite in response to the government’s offer of less disruptive and historically more familiar foundations and frameworks for its functioning.

In other words, for Russia, the turn of the twenty-first century was no turning point. There was no switch from one set of principles and one system of governance to a different one. What happened around the year 2000, instead, was that the system of rule that had already taken shape by then had become structured and, in its own way, accomplished, having acquired a clear internal logic for its functioning, and then transitioned into a new stage of its existence. This was the stage of the system’s greater maturity and, so to speak, overtness. At this new stage, the basic principles of the organization of governance became fully expressed in accordance with the logic of those principles, in the relatively undisguised form of the institutions of a more fiercely authoritarian state, operating in a capitalist environment but on the periphery of the global capitalist system. To put it differently, the past two decades of Russia’s socioeconomic and political development produced a system that is by and large reflective of the characteristics and the global role of Russia’s peripheral capitalism. This is what I call a political system of peripheral authoritarianism, and it has had adverse consequences for Russia to this day.