The Putin System: An Opposing View

2 RUSSIA TODAY ^{The History of How and Why It Came to Be}

My take on the political system of present-day Russia is that it is an authoritarian country of a peripheral, or marginal, type. Let me clarify: for me, this characterization is not a means to denounce the country or to slap Russia’s government with a negative, op-ed-style label. I see it as first and foremost an accurate and unbiased assessment of the realities of today’s Russia. Such an assessment is not intended to give rise to emotions and value judgments. Each of us lives within a certain frame of reference, a sociopolitical environment that we need to comprehend in order to take advantage of it, rather than ignoring it as a priori defective.

This is not to say that we ought to eliminate our personal bias toward such a system and simply accept today’s Russia. To the contrary, I continue to think that a thorough political reform would be in Russia’s interest as well. The kind of reform that I envision here would lead to the following outcomes:

• altering the principles upon which Russia’s institutions of government are currently formed;

• establishing a governance structure that would include, perhaps for the first time in Russia’s history, a significant element of political competition and the devolution of power;

• transferring a significant part of the resources controlled by the authorities from the present single center of power in the Kremlin to various lower layers and to other branches of government; and

• affirming the requirement for a regular alternation of political forces in government, as well as creating a mechanism of overall accountability of all government institutions to each other and of responsibility for any violation of established procedures.

Clearly, such a reform would imply a comprehensive dismantling of the relations of authority that are currently in place, even though it would not involve revolutionary upheavals and a breakdown of the institutions of government as such.

Nevertheless, I believe it is more appropriate first to gain a clear and precise understanding of how Russia’s machinery of governance works today, to trace the path of its formation, and to make sense of the mechanisms that are currently in place. We need this knowledge as the basis for steering the course of events in the country at least to safety, if not in the ideal desirable direction. And for this we need to address our recent history, beginning first and foremost with the developments of the first decade of the twenty-first century, which was also the first decade of Vladimir Putin’s rule.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not view the year 2000, when Putin was elected to Russia’s presidency for the first time—or, as many others do, the first years of his term (2002 or 2003)—as a watershed moment. It was not really a turnaround of any kind that changed the direction of the development of Russia’s political system from a putatively democratic track toward something opposite, toward the dismantling of the institutions of democracy and the restricting of political freedoms in every possible way. To the contrary, I believe that the entire period since the collapse of the Soviet state has seen a continuous consolidation of the authoritarian power of the bureaucracy, operating under the distinctive conditions of Russia’s peripheral capitalism. But, to substantiate this argument, we first need to sort out the terminology and the notions behind it, as is necessary for a truly meaningful analysis of any political system.

Before turning to terminology, let me add a few caveats that will put subsequent discussion on a more solid ground. First, any discussion about the substance and the logic inherent in an existing political system inevitably involves simplifications; in real life, some features and manifestations of such a system will never fit into any analytical model. Such a model, while helpful in understanding the essential features of a system and the directions of potential changes within it, can never grasp it in its totality.

Thus, for example, any textbook on the theory of state governance will contain references to a range of theoretical models—from the natural or social contract to Mancur Olson’s model of government as either a “stationary” or a “roving” bandit.[1] But no academic in their right mind would think of using these models as exhaustive explanations of real-life political developments. Life is always more complicated than any model or theory; people involved in politics are rather diverse and are motivated by a wide variety of factors. Political decisions are overwhelmingly a product of compromise, both overt and implicit, and their implementation in practice is always very different from the decision-makers’ intent. Thus, my discussion of Russia’s political system is merely an attempt to grasp and to explain its overall logic, to stubbornly run through myriad deviations from it and through a large number of disconnected events and phenomena.

Our second but no less important caveat is that the notions used to describe a system’s overall logic not only are subject to individual interpretations affected by personal biases but also change over time. We should always keep this in mind. Any particular term may mean vastly different things in different historical periods. As a result, some seemingly fundamental disagreements over specific political events may be caused by merely a difference in the understanding of certain emotionally charged terms, while being completely insubstantial in practice. This applies first and foremost to such notions as democracy, equality, public good, and the like. Some of the seemingly scientific terms with a broad consensus about their usage are routinely subjected to wide-ranging interpretations that disrupt all prior consensus around them.

With these caveats in mind, let me also note the following about the terminology used. First of all, the term “democratic,” widely used by intellectuals to characterize political systems and developments, should actually be applied with a great degree of caution. It is too abstract when used generically and too subjectively biased and vague when used in specific contexts. It is used more to differentiate oneself from the “other” than to denote a sum total of specific characteristics or political tools.

As we know from history, neither universal voting nor the existence of political parties nor the absence of criminal prosecution for political speech or for a criticism of the authorities—in sum, no single mechanism among those currently identified by mainstream Western intellectuals as being “democratic”—can be assumed to be a universally applicable, characteristic feature of democracy or its defining element. Moreover, even when taken together, these elements can produce political systems that are fundamentally dissimilar in spirit and in the direction of their development. Thus, the division of countries into “democratic” and “undemocratic” still ends up being colored by one’s personal bias toward identifying with the “good guys,” as opposed to the “bad” and the “other.”

It is more meaningful to characterize political systems on the basis of a different pair of notions: that of a competition-based system, in which political groups openly vie for power against each other within a set of mutual restraints, versus an authoritarian system, in which power is not acquired within the legal framework of an open political competition. In a competition-based system, power is distributed, one way or another, among different centers of authority that most often serve as alternatives to each other; in the authoritarian case, one leader or a group organized along corporate lines single-handedly has a grip upon the exercise of power.

Accordingly, the mechanisms of transferring power from one group to another are different in each case. In a competition-oriented system, power is transferred through an electoral process whose legitimacy is recognized by all participant groups but is not single-handedly controlled by any one of them. Meanwhile, in an authoritarian system, power is transferred by an arbitrary decision of the ruling group or its leader on the basis of specific power relationships. Under this scenario, the particular manner in which the power gets transferred is not all that important. Under an authoritarian system, power can be transferred either by a simple appointment, by a top-down restructuring or reforming of the machinery of governance, or through general elections, provided that the outcome can be engineered in advance. Under a competitive system, there can be a wide variety of specific electoral systems, with dozens or even hundreds of different arrangements, whereby officials may be elected directly, indirectly, or in a multiple-stage process, and with different sets of both voters and candidates. In a competitive system, even the number and the character of restrictions on the electoral process is not critically important.

What is most important is that the system must provide an opportunity to remove a ruling team or group from power, in a transparent and institutionally determined manner, so that the rulers cannot establish the length of their own terms in power and cannot predetermine their successors. In other words, the system must guarantee that any group of rulers will have no choice but to step down, without an opportunity to name a successor whose ascent to power it would be able to secure.

Naturally, the prerequisite for such a system is that no single group has an effective grip on power and that power is spread out among at least two or three or more groups, each wielding the requisite legal tools of organized coercion. Accordingly, the primary characteristic of a competition-based political system is that no single individual or group of people has full power and no one can issue decisions without considering how other groups and political forces will respond to them. Most importantly, such a system has embedded safeguards against any attempt to usurp power in the country. In other words, any individual or group of people having access to the levers of power are fully aware that their attempt to cross the boundaries of their authority will immediately trigger the mechanisms whose end result will be the use of legally organized coercion to push them back to where they belong.

We can agree to call a competitive political system “democratic,” as many often do. Yet, at the same time, we must keep in mind that, in this context, the term “democracy” is related to its original Greek meaning—“people’s power”—in approximately the same manner as economic agents in real life relate to the ideal homo economicus from classical economic theory—an imaginary human being from a textbook, which has no personification in reality. In other words, we can use the term “democratic” as long as we realize that its factual meaning in this case has little in common with its formal definition.

In any case, “democracy” here does not mean “people’s power” or “power for the people” or even “power in the interests of the people.” Rather, it is simply a characterization of a political arrangement under which power is not concentrated in the hands of any one elite group but instead is distributed among several groups in accordance with specific rules that secure an alternation of different groups in government. It is also a system that relies upon compromise among these groups, rather than everybody’s subordination to the will and the interests of a single dominant group. Either way, at present, competitive and authoritarian systems of governance exist in about equal numbers in the world around us. It seems that no one has yet been able to come up with a formula explaining the emergence of a particular system and its occasional transformation into its opposite—at least not in a clear and compelling way.

This is not to say that there are no theories about it; there are plenty. Moreover, the spontaneously developed and informal community of professional economists and political scientists has formulated (and named after themselves) a variety of hypotheses on this subject, by going through virtually every conceivable relationship between types of political systems and such factors as the level of income and wealth, the rates and quality of economic growth, the stages of an economic cycle, and so on.[2] However, every such hypothesis is met with a counterhypothesis. Meanwhile, the general issue of what comes first—democracy or economic growth—has long since been elevated to such theoretical heights that any attempts to apply it to derive real-life conclusions are hardly ever taken seriously by anyone any longer.

Moreover, in some instances, boundaries between competition-based and authoritarian systems of governance are getting blurred. At least one reason for this is the existence of a considerable number of borderline cases, in which no particular group has a clear-cut, single-handed grip on all resources of power across the board and yet the ruling group enjoys such a significant advantage in the distribution of these resources that, in reality, competing groups are not able to apply effective checks and balances on its power. In such instances, the classification of a given system as either competition-based or authoritarian may depend upon the judgment and the personal bias of an individual observer. In addition, because the situation within a given system may fluctuate rapidly, the exact moment of its transition from a competitive to an authoritarian state or vice versa, from one logic of its functioning to another, may be hard to identify and to capture.

Finally, anyone who seeks to get an unbiased grasp of a given situation and to think seriously should, at the very least, be put on guard by peremptory judgments and emotionally colored labels (such as “dictatorship” or “tyranny”) as well as by sweeping historical comparisons. Attempts to hide oneself behind sweeping characterizations are most often used to conceal the lack of information and knowledge about the circumstances. As noted in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Needless to say, this does not mean that people should not take their stands as citizens or pass value judgments; yet every development and every phenomenon need to be viewed holistically, with all their nuances, contradictions, and complexities.

Another characteristic of political systems that I want to emphasize here is their relationship to such concepts as the public good and societal goals. This is by no means of secondary importance. There is a prevailing view, both among the general public and among authoritative analysts of sociopolitical systems, that the classification of a political system as either competition-based (“democratic”) or authoritarian has no strict relationship to any societal goals that may be pursued by such a system and that may be connected, one way or another, to the notion of public good (such as, for example, acceleration of economic growth, technological and social modernization of the country, and the like).

On the one hand, history provides us with a plenty of examples of political systems under which the freedom of political activities—roughly, competitive elections and alternation of political leaders and parties in power (at times, very frequent alternation), to say nothing of freedom of speech and of the media—coexisted with pervasive corruption, total indifference of the authorities to societal needs, and the decline of order, morale, and public safety. The United States at the start of the twentieth century is perhaps the best example of this. In the post–World War II period, competitive political systems proved to be no panacea against corruption and inefficiency, either in developed countries such as Italy or in the developing world, as, for example, in India and Brazil.

The opposite is also true: there are examples of successful authoritarian modernizations, such as in Singapore, Turkey, South Korea, and, to a certain extent, Japan, where power continuously resided in the hands of a de facto single political force throughout the periods of their high-speed economic growth, while other, less influential political groups were denigrated and denounced. Mainland China and, possibly, Vietnam are the latest examples of countries that are widely viewed as having, at least to some extent, successfully modernized while being under an unquestionably authoritarian political system.

The mainstream of political thinking in Western societies generally views the possibility of accelerated economic growth and modernization under an authoritarian regime as an option applicable only to those countries that have fallen behind in their economic, technological, and social development, and only within a brief historical period of their “catching up” with the West, when their medium-term goals are rather obvious and can be relatively easily articulated in formal terms, becoming the political goals of an authoritarian state.[3] This may very well be true; yet, even with these caveats, we still have to face the actual discrepancy, present over fairly long historical periods, between, on the one hand, the characteristics of a political regime in terms of its internal competitiveness and, on the other, the extent to which it can effectively accomplish large-scale national objectives.

Furthermore, some eminent thinkers, such as, for example, economist Robert Aumann, who won the Nobel Prize in 2005, believe that the longer time horizons enjoyed by authoritarian regimes enable them to achieve the goals of modernization more easily—provided, of course, that they are not corrupted by their lack of accountability and control over their power. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose works are frequently referred to, claim that the threat of a revolution may compel elites under authoritarian systems to restrain their appetites, to be more rational in their expenses, and to provide larger amounts of public goods.[4]

But, of course, all the ruminations of this kind merely reflect one’s theoretical assumptions; if they can be put to any practical use, it is only to a very limited extent. It is certainly clear that there is no uniform linkage of any kind between the form of government and the motivations of the rulers and that if the ruling group has any motivation whatsoever to modernize the country, such motivation is typically mostly related to the overall attitudes of the political and economic elites and to the personal characteristics of their most active members. It is equally clear that these elites’ intent to modernize is conditioned, to a large extent, by the country’s prior history in its entirety as well as by the characteristics of the structure of its economy, the extent of its participation in the world economic system and international political institutions, and so forth.

All this will be applied in more detail to the case of Russia in other parts of this book. In the meantime, let me note as a matter of fact that a goal-oriented design of any political system, organized with a view toward the pursuit of the goals related to economic growth and modernization, is a feature that stands altogether apart and must be analyzed on its own.

A final issue worth mentioning here, in relation to the widespread classification of political systems and the terminology attached to it, is about the character of the equilibrium in a political system and the direction in which any such model or system may be developing. Setting aside for the time being the causes of and the driving forces that define the direction of development of a given political system, let us note that a political system may be either dynamic or static. If its specific elements are changing to adapt to life’s demands, if they help to remove the barriers that have emerged on the path of the development of society, if they form the requisite new institutions in response to societal demands, then it is a dynamic system. However, if within its framework there are forces and mechanisms that basically work to forestall changes within the system, to extinguish every external attempt to introduce change and instead to keep bringing the system back to an equilibrium of stagnation, then such a system tends to stagnate and to suppress change.

The systems of the first, dynamic type are, virtually by definition, capable of reforming themselves in an evolutionary manner. This enables them to prevent, for relatively long periods of time, major societal upheavals and associated shocks. Most often, these are the kinds of regimes that, even if perhaps authoritarian, do not neglect the need for a dialogue and pursuit of workable compromise solutions in order to reconcile divergent interests and approaches within the political class. While the separation of powers and the institutions of parliamentary democracy are the most efficient tools for achieving such a compromise, they are not the only such instrument, and they are not irreplaceable.

Political systems of the second type, which are stagnation-prone or demodernizing, inevitably result in explosive social and political disturbances of a revolutionary type. Such political systems may provide an appearance—or, rather, an illusion—of stability for a relatively short time, yet they are unable to provide resolution to emerging tensions. Instead, these tensions keep piling up until their scale is practically no longer compatible with the regular functioning of the system’s institutions. At that point, they lead to a serious political crisis. The system may be able to postpone a resolution for the time being by treating the symptoms of the problem, either by populist campaigns or by suppressing dissent. If, however, this is not feasible, then the resolution of this crisis leads, in the best case, to the collapse of the political system and its replacement with a new one that is more fitted to the requirements of the moment. Or, in the worst case, the entire statehood in its prior form may collapse, in which case the new institutions of governance will have to be built from scratch, or even from a lower starting point.

The characteristics used in this classification of political systems also do not have any strict and uniform relationship with the extent to which a given system is either competition-based or authoritarian. In a specific situation at a given point in time, “democratic” models of political governance may turn out to be unable to meet the current challenges. And by not providing society with the means to initiate a radical (or seemingly radical) transformation, a democratic system may end up contributing to the development of a deep political crisis with long-term repercussions. To name just a few historical examples, this is what happened in Weimar Germany, in Chile and Argentina in the mid-1970s, and to some extent in present-day Greece, which has bogged down in a quagmire of multiple internal divisions and economic challenges.

Granted, authoritarian regimes are more often prone to failures of governance, and one could cite plenty of examples in Africa and in Latin America. And as a rule, such failed regimes tend to be replaced with other regimes of the same authoritarian type. Some of these new regimes manage to achieve impressive gains in the quality of governance and to tackle, at least in part, the problems that led to the crisis, but others turn out to be just as powerless as their predecessors, and it is just a matter of time before they go down as well.

Nevertheless, there are also examples of a different kind—regimes built along an authoritarian model yet managing to go, without much pain, through necessary changes that provide them with more flexibility, adaptability, and sophistication in their means of control. Not always, but in some of these cases, such changes results in a gradual “democratization,” that is, the expansion of the role of representative institutions; the erosion of the ruling group’s monopolistic control over the resources of governance, including its control over the institutions of coercion; the increase of the autonomy and the power of the judiciary; and the end to the use of law enforcement agencies for partisan political purposes. Such developments could be observed, for example, in Spain at the end of Francisco Franco’s rule, as well as in South Korea and several other autocracies in Asia. But, of course, there have been also examples of an opposite development—the decay of representative institutions and the transformation of competition-based political systems into authoritarian regimes of varying degrees of severity.

Taking into account all that I have said thus far, let me start with an overview of Russia in the 1990s. It was then, in the wake of the abrupt collapse of Soviet statehood, and on the shaky ground of dysfunctional institutions and complete disorientation in the minds of Russia’s legislators and its law enforcement powers, that the political system of today’s Russia began taking shape.

Those who have forgotten those first post-Soviet years, or who were too young at the time to remember them, should be aware that the political system of the new Russia, as it was emerging on paper in 1991–1992, had no future from the outset. This was so even if we set aside the issue of how much of the actual control over the situation in the country was in the hands of Russia’s new authorities and even if we assume that the formally existing institutions were actually functioning and shaping the real situation in the country.

What looked, in the late 1980s, like the awakening of democracy (i.e., the establishment, one after another, of new institutions that appeared to be taking over the functions of deliberation and decision-making) did have its positive impact as a peaceful revolution of sorts. And yet, in the long term, it was not at all universally positive. The situation was rapidly becoming fraught with many legal and institutional conflicts, while a few of its important procedural aspects, related to the mechanisms of making and implementing decisions and of controlling their implementation, were rather vague.

It would take several pages to draw a list of all these conflicts and uncertainties. Let me mention just a few of them here. The Congress of People’s Deputies, Russia’s legislature at the time, had an ambiguous status as the highest authority in the country, with no institutional tools to exercise this authority. President Boris Yeltsin, on the other hand, was in control of virtually every practical policy tool, though he was legally constrained by the legislature, which could formally impose on him particular policies while bearing no responsibility for their feasibility. It was largely this ambiguity that, in 1993, resulted in the situation in which the legislature’s showdown with Yeltsin and his government over the president’s right to dissolve the legislature and hold fresh elections went beyond the framework of legally established procedures and put the country on the brink of a large-scale armed internal conflict. Moreover, within the government, the boundaries between the process of legislating and that of governing were extremely blurred, which led, at times, to complete uncertainty for the lower layers of the executive administration, for the judiciary, and for the armed agencies of the government.

In addition, the conspicuous weakness of the judiciary system and the lack of effective instruments for the implementation of its decisions resulted in virtually limitless opportunities for all kinds of power abuse, while making it impossible to use the courts as the adjudicator of disputes or as a disciplining power. It was already then, in 1992–1993, that the ruling circle began cultivating and encouraging an attitude of disregard for the law while replacing universally applicable, long-term, and legally binding norms with personalized, ad hoc, and temporary arrangements between government authorities and economic agents. The withdrawal of law enforcement agencies from the activities necessary to ensure compliance with business deals and contracts, along with the uncertainty about the rules of behavior that would ensure normal economic activities, complicated matters even more.

Finally, enormous uncertainty was caused by the de jure dissolution of the Soviet Union while retaining de facto, for a certain period of time and without any special agreements about it, a shared currency, a shared customs control, and a jointly managed transportation and energy infrastructure.[5] In turn, the lack of clarity about the legal basis for managing these shared systems led to the same preponderance of individual, personalized deal-making over legal norms and to a misperception of democracy as the freedom of will exercised in the absence of appropriately established, stable, and universally applicable rules and procedures.

Even this incomplete list of issues shows that the political formation spontaneously emerging out of the breakdown of the Soviet system of governance had no central organizing principle and would not be able to stabilize itself either in the short term or in the long term. To gain at least some relative stability, it had to evolve, one way or another. Only through change could it transcend its most acute contradictions and acquire some routines that would help to prevent wild, unpredictable swings from one side to another. And, essentially, this evolution constitutes the gist of the first stage of Russia’s post-Soviet political history, comprising most of the 1990s.

The first and arguably the most important choice that had to be made during this historically important period was the choice between a competition-based and an authoritarian political system. I believe that this choice was more or less completed with the adoption of Russia’s new constitution, between October and December 1993, and then finalized on the eve of and during the presidential election of 1996, when Yeltsin was reelected, and in its aftermath. Those years made it clear that, even though political pluralism was being preserved and there were at least a few groups within the elite, each represented by a team of political players, the instruments of political power actually were not divided and distributed among these groups to even a minimally necessary extent. Without such a distribution of power resources, mutual checks and balances cannot function.

The degree of concentration of resources in the hands of the dominant elite group that coalesced around the presidential staff of Boris Yeltsin was sufficient to enable it to manipulate all other groups and to prevent them from getting an opportunity to assert any practical influence upon government, let alone to be able to replace it in the Kremlin. After some serious hesitation, this ruling group finally decided to hold the presidential elections in 1996, and, formally speaking, this implied the possibility of a nonviolent but still involuntary replacement of this group of people in power. Yet, in spite of this decision, there was only one election outcome that the ruling group deemed acceptable: the victory of Boris Yeltsin. And they secured this outcome with the highest degree of certainty, by using every kind of power resources that they had at their disposal.

Needless to say, those who now, for whatever reason, present the 1990s as a period of unprecedented blooming of democracy in Russia (in a positive value–laden sense of this term) tend to omit the fact that no one within Russia’s ruling circle at the time accepted the possibility of voluntarily relinquishing power to another group of people on the basis of its winning more votes than were going to be won by Boris Yeltsin.

When running for Russia’s presidency in the 1996 election, I saw this attitude of the ruling circle and took it into account. My goal was to bring substantial modifications to Russia’s policies. I saw the purpose of my campaign as stopping the formation of an oligarchical system based upon the fusion of private business, property control, and political power, as well as standing up against corruption and the war in the North Caucasus. I was going to do it by offering an alternative to Boris Yeltsin’s semicriminal economic policies, including his fraudulent loans-for-shares auctions, which handed large numbers of shares in Russia’s major companies to a few well-connected banks in exchange for their loans to the government.

On this basis, I intended to come in third in the race (after Yeltsin and the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov). Then I was going to put forward the condition for my support for Yeltsin in the runoff, namely, my appointment as prime minister, with the goal of introducing significant changes in economic and personnel policies. This was the only realistic chance to modify Yeltsin’s course of action in politics and in the economy. But this opportunity was blocked by the oligarchical group of Anatoly Chubais and Boris Berezovsky. They did this by pumping up the media and pouring financial resources into the presidential campaign of General Alexander Lebed, making sure that he ended up with the third-highest number of votes and then, almost immediately after the election, destroying him as a politically significant player.

Of course, it is hard to tell which methods would have been used by Russia’s ruling circle had it not been able to secure the outcome that was acceptable to it by employing the resources they had used already. In fact, neither is it fully clear which resources they did in fact use, and to what extent, to ensure the predictability of the outcome. This is not quite clear even today, nearly twenty years after those elections—the first-ever Russian elections that, in theory, could have sealed the fate of the ruling circle. From time to time, key protagonists of that period have hinted at the existence of some mysteries or, at the very least, something that has not been fully spelled out with regard to the run-up to the election and the contingency plans that were made for the eventuality that the election did not go their way. Regardless, I am sure that the ruling circle did not view the possibility of transferring power to another group, based on the outcome of those elections, as something realistic. Thus, already at this point, the first and foremost feature of an authoritarian political system took shape: the impossibility that the efforts of those outside of the dominant group could replace one group in power with a different group “from below,” in a peaceful and legitimate fashion.

Let me reiterate: this does not mean that such a power transition is precluded on paper. A great many authoritarian regimes hold periodic elections for various levels of government so that, in theory, the possibility of an opposition victory in those elections cannot be ruled out. Yet, as long as a group of people ensconced at the height of power (most often united around an actual or an ex officio leader) has monopolized control over administrative power and over armed agencies, such a group has the real power to eliminate the probability of being ousted. Under such circumstances, even if an opposition gains the support of the majority of voters, this never leads to an official admission of defeat by the incumbent rulers nor to any practical implications in terms of a transfer of power.

But even such a scenario—an authoritarian incumbent losing the formal support of the majority of the country’s population—is possible only as a result of very powerful pressures by forces and circumstances both internal and external to the system. Under regular conditions, most of society, especially its politically inactive segments, tend to provide the requisite support for the powers that be and their mode of governing, even if their exposure to the propagandistic and administrative machinery is minimal.

This is how it works in similar cases around the world. Strictly speaking, the pivotal—even, one might say, totemic—status of the liberal competition-based model of political system, in the mind-set of global elites and in the relevant scholarly or quasi-scholarly writings, is more a consequence of the financial and technological might of the group of countries that use this model, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, than of its successful spread in the larger world. It is often lost on many that the majority of our planet’s population today lives in countries under authoritarian systems of rule, who differ among themselves in their ferocity in suppressing dissent, in their effectiveness, and in their political capabilities. Contrary to popular belief, such systems often do not assume the most extreme forms of bloody tyranny or practice total control over the life of their society. In more than a few cases, an authoritarian system does not preclude the population under its rule from enjoying a more or less unrestrained private life—as long as people are depoliticized. Even if this private life is quite removed from the ideals of efficiency and diversity, even if it is squeezed by an excess of arbitrary regulations and in some cases by ideological myths, nevertheless it is a relatively peaceful and stable life, with some space (however limited) for self-fulfillment in terms of personal aspirations and abilities.

It was precisely this kind of authoritarian system that took shape, in its basics, in the 1990s in Russia. The presidential election of 1996 still contained within it some chance, though not a very plausible chance, for the country to swerve onto a different trajectory, with the prospect of transitioning to a liberal, competition-based political system. In comparison, during the 1996–1999 period, the probability of moving to a different path at this particular turn of the spiral of Russia’s history decreased to a statistically negligible level. At the present stage, for such a change of direction to happen, Russia would need to go through a period of a very serious reconceptualization that could lay the groundwork for another U-turn in its history.

Meanwhile, we should also revisit certain key events of Russia’s development in the 1990s, which people tend to remember rarely and with which some are unfamiliar. First, the hyperinflation of 1992, which resulted from the liberalization of prices under total government ownership of economic property, created a supermonopolistic economic structure in Russia. This hyperinflation led to the expropriation of nearly 100 percent of individual savings, rapidly bringing the country’s population to total misery.

Second, in 1993, President Yeltsin used force to resolve the confrontation between himself and the legislature (the Supreme Soviet). Subsequently, this resulted in the basically forcible integration into the new political system of a significant number of nationalists and so-called leftists. This was followed by the adoption, without debate and by dubious means, of a constitution that was authoritarian in its essence and in its logic.

Next, the war of 1994 in Chechnya led to many thousands of deaths and destroyed whatever modicum of positive legacy still remained from the Soviet era on the level of social psychology—that is, the remaining widespread norms of interethnic acceptance, at least in terms of outward behavior. That war consolidated the militaristic element in the ruling nomenklatura. It also damaged Russia’s international reputation, while forcing many people in the outside world to ponder yet again the possibility of a military threat emanating from Moscow and to draw up plans for new dividing lines on the map of Europe.

The following year saw the launch of the fraudulent “privatization,” which essentially amounted to the transfer of the economically most important government properties to a tiny circle of individuals with access to the authorities, virtually free of charge, via the so-called loans-for-shares auctions. This process laid the basis for the lack of legitimacy of private property ownership in Russia, contributed to the fusion between government officeholders and private property owners, and annihilated all autonomous sources for the funding of civil society initiatives.

The 1996 election, as I have stated, was another crucial turning point. Boris Yeltsin, the candidate of the ruling circle in the 1996 presidential election, was aggressively promoted to everybody else in Russia as “our” candidate, along the lines of the dictum “Everyone who is not with us is against us.” After the election, through the distribution of plum portions of national economic wealth, free of charge, authorities continued to issue rewards to big business for their political service. This distribution of assets created an unbreakable bond between the country’s political leadership and its new bourgeoisie. This was also the beginning of the doling out of government positions in exchange for one’s personal services and as an expected source of the prospective officeholder’s personal enrichment. Further, authorities persistently made an effort to tie one’s patriotic feelings to the notion of being in the personal service of the chief of state (something that was noted by a classic Russian author of the nineteenth century, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, as the habit of confusing two notions: “Fatherland” and “Your Excellency”).

It is also very important to note the emergence of a panic in the Kremlin about the possible fracturing of the elites into two competing groups within the dominant circle; this fear prompted the authorities to put a stranglehold on the political alternative that was coalescing at the time around Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. The final stage in this process was the establishment of an institutionalized “successor to the president,” when outgoing president Boris Yeltsin publicly announced Vladimir Putin as the sole candidate put forward by the ruling group to succeed him and provided him with all the resources and opportunities of incumbency that were controlled by that group.

As a matter of fact, this final move signaled the definitive installation in Russia of the second of the key features of an authoritarian system: the transfer of power by means of personalized succession, without a public competition for that role in any shape or form. In other words, this feature eliminates the ruling group’s uncertainty about not only the electoral process but also the process of succession caused by individual biological reasons, such as the death or infirmity of the ruler. Let us note that even though this succession was initiated by the ruling circle and driven by the personal considerations of its members (some of whom later found that they had miscalculated), it happened with at least a tacit approval of society at large. The presence of electoral institutions, the freedom of political organizing and speech, did not preclude society as a whole, and especially its political class, from taking it as a given that, starting from the late 1990s, the ruling circle did not consider it necessary and would not allow its power and the personal fate of its members to depend upon the actual results of an uncontrolled popular vote at the general elections.

Of course, the attitude of the general public was not the only or even the most important factor. It became evident around the same time that the process of post-Soviet transformation did not produce the institutions capable of acting as independent branches of power and of ensuring the implementation of their decisions if those decisions were at odds with the interests or the wishes of the ruling circle. The representative bodies of government and the judiciary failed to gain the support necessary to become real counterweights to the executive agencies or to the informal, semicriminal, and even fully criminal quasi corporations that were spontaneously growing up around the executive and relying upon the machinery of violence. Even then, the much-touted “formation of the state of law and order” turned out to be, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, a hypocritical cover-up of a de facto recognition of “might is right” as a formative instrument of governance.

Therefore, no candidate vying for power independently of the ruling circle had even minimally functional institutions to rely upon. For such candidates, the only means to gain a solid footing would be to construct their own organized entities endowed with administrative and coercive power resources, but this course of action presented risks for Russia’s ruling party, and it was rejected by every responsible politician and public figure. Under those conditions, the country essentially faced a choice between the bad and the ugly, because a choice in favor of a political competition that would rely upon extralegal use of force would be essentially tantamount to choosing a state of civil war, even if it was not a full-blown civil war. And this, in turn, would have led to even more detrimental consequences than what we have before us today.

Admittedly, there are those who believe that, since the political system of the 1990s did not have such a high concentration of coercive, uniformed power as its fulcrum, it was therefore less centrally controlled and thus more democratic than its later variety was going to look, in 2005 or in 2010. Given that this opinion is rather popular among the liberal intelligentsia in Russia, let me comment upon this view.

It is an accurate observation inasmuch as it refers to the overall lack of governability as a feature of the socioeconomic situation at the time. However, as a matter of principle, no effective competition-based system can be built upon the loss of governability. The power wielded by warlords in confrontation with one another is a poor substitute for a competition among political teams that include more or less competent managers qualified to operate complicated government machinery. The diversity of political forces, also known as pluralism, implies a prevalence of democratic values in politics only in the presence of certain additional requirements.

The first of these requirements is the existence of relatively functional institutions in the country, which can transform such political diversity or pluralism from an end in itself into a force that makes institutions work in a more orderly fashion and increases officeholders’ accountability for developments in the country. If such institutions do not exist, as they didn’t exist in Russia in the late 1990s and don’t exist today, then it makes no sense to lament the “abduction” of democracy after the year 2000. What then remains of that claim about a“democratic government of Yeltsin’s liberal reformers” is merely the fact that, in the 1990s, the individuals in and around the Kremlin were closer to the Soviet-era liberal intelligentsia in terms of its political culture, ideology, and myths than were the group of people that took their place in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, if we pursue unbiased, dispassionate analysis of those two periods, it is obvious to me that the 1990s were merely an earlier, embryonic stage of the very same peripheral authoritarianism, a system that matured over the subsequent decade and a half. (Further justification for the use of the term “peripheral” in this context will be provided later in the book.)

Going back to the question of why Russia’s political system developed along the path that it did in the 1990s, let me mention several explanatory factors. These factors made the potential formation of a competition-based model of the “Western” type an extremely complicated and therefore unlikely possibility. First and foremost, in Russia in the 1990s—and most consequentially in the early 1990s—there was no consensus among the elites about the most general, most fundamental rules and propositions around which the prospective political and economic system of the “new” Russia was going to be formed. And the presence of such a consensus is the key prerequisite in the formation of a functioning political system based upon competition among political forces. The fundamental issues on the public agenda at the time included the following:

• What was the future of public property going to be in the postsocialist era?

• Which means of acquiring extensive private property were legitimate? What was the extent of its inviolability?

• In which areas of life were market relations and private ownership, including ownership by foreign governments and individuals, going to be acceptable?

On these foundational matters, the country was polarized—not at all on the fringes but, rather, among the members of the most influential groups of Russian society, who had great economic, administrative, and media resources at their disposal. This polarization also affected the understanding of national sovereignty and its potential limits in relation to both the outside world and Russia’s own citizens. Among other things, this included the fundamental concept of the boundaries between civil rights and national interests, as well as the limits of acceptable restrictions that could be imposed by government upon individual freedoms. In other words, society was polarized over issues that typically are not subject to political debates in competition-based systems because they reflect a consensus among the elites that has emerged over the course of history and that cannot and should not depend upon the outcomes of a popular vote.

This is the issue of the “limits of democracy”—the determination of what can and what cannot be subject to debate or used as a tool of adversarial competition among rival groups within a competition-based system. In principle, the existence and normal functioning of a competition-based political system requires and depends upon this issue having been resolved, and it requires having mechanisms in place that ensure adherence to a consensus about it. If there is no such consensus within the ruling class or among the sum total of a country’s elites, then a competition-based political system becomes impossible—at least beyond the time frame of a single electoral cycle.

An unbiased and dispassionate analysis of all available experience in this area indicates that competition-based political systems function in a sustainable and relatively efficient manner if the issues put on the agenda and raised in election campaigns by competing political groups do not affect the foundations of a given society and do not destabilize its core. The opposite is also true: the wider and the deeper the disagreements among the various parts of the politically influential part of society (the stratum that, in the West, is usually called the “political class”), the greater the motivation of the currently ruling group to deny its competitors the opportunity to overturn the choice that was made by the voters in the previous election cycle. And if these disagreements affect the most essential, most fundamental, and most vital relations in society, then the willingness of the elites to accept free and universal voting as the supreme authority in political disputes may become infinitesimally low.[6]

This one reason is already enough to explain why it was highly unlikely that Russia in the early 1990s would develop a classical competition-based political system with all its democratic attributes, such as law-abiding political parties, relatively neat forms of political rivalry, and a fair tallying of election results with unpredictable outcomes. The gulf separating various groups within Russia’s political class from each other, in terms of their views on how Russian society should be organized in the future and what its intermediate and long-range interests should be, was just too wide for this to happen. Incidentally, this is precisely why the competition-based system took hold and got off the ground in the Baltic states formerly under Soviet rule—in spite of all the difficulties and failures and even though, truthfully, the capitalism that they gained back is of a peripheral type—while in Russia and in most other former Soviet countries it did not happen.

This was arguably the central factor in the logic of the formation of an authoritarian instead of a competition-based political system in the 1990s in Russia. But it was undoubtedly reinforced by other factors as well. In particular, even since the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of government institutions in Russia increasingly lagged behind the developmental needs of society and behind the understanding on the part the educated portion of society that articulated those needs. Despite the fact that Russian society was prepared for a leap toward modernization and had realistic chances to accomplish it, at a certain point, the institutions of governance froze, proving to be too rigid, and thus did not let those chances materialize. By the start of the twentieth century, the outdated character of those institutions was acting as a brake upon the country’s economic and political development. To an extent, this backwardness of political forms was the root and cause of the acute crisis of 1917–1918, which turned out to be too much for Russian statehood at the time to handle. The outcome of it was a tragic period, when Russia was subjected to a brutal and unsuccessful experiment in constructing a nonmarket economy with a totalitarian political superstructure.

In the late 1980s, that experiment came to an end, yet the backwardness of Russia’s political forms, which had been the major contributing factor behind that experiment, was still there. Moreover, the political system of post-Soviet Russia reproduced not just the many flaws of the Soviet system but also those of the pre-Soviet, pre-Bolshevik institutions of imperial Russia. These flaws included excessive centralization of power, inadequate feedback loops, a lack of balance among various institutions, insensitivity of the authorities to the changing needs and demands of society, and the lack of effective mechanisms of parliamentary control over the executive (in post-1993 Russia, the president’s powers, whether informal or officially established, have been nearly monarchical, unrestrained by either law or political practice). Furthermore, the powers that be are not in the habit of looking for reasonable compromises that would open up space for social and political transformations without antagonizing significant strata and forces in society. There also is no habit of replacing individuals in power on a regular basis and on the grounds of an unbiased assessment of the outcomes of their work.

All these congenital flaws in Russia’s political development, dating back as far as the beginning of the twentieth century, were reenacted in the course of its post-Soviet reconstruction. This was exacerbated by the drastic decline in the educational and cultural standards of Russia’s political class, compared to pre-Soviet times. The seventy-year-long Soviet era largely undermined what could have become the economic foundations of a competition-based political system: the presence of various groups of large property owners who would be willing and able to support rival political teams capable of acting as the key protagonists in legal political competition.

Moreover, for a long period of time, Russians had no idea about any forms of property ownership other than personal or state ownership. Thus, the emergence of a stratum of individuals who might view themselves as full-fledged, legitimate owners of private property, having not only the right but also the responsibility to take active part in civic and political life in terms of having a seat at the table rather than being “on the menu,” would require time, robust public debate, and even educational efforts.

At the outset of the Soviet era, the propertied classes of private owners, such as landed gentry, merchants, industrialists, and even affluent peasants (who had just barely gained the feeling of being the actual owners of the land that they tilled) were destroyed, not just as “economic classes” but also literally, by physical extermination. From the standpoint of what I have said about the need for a propertied class to sustain political competition, this disaster had immense negative implications, including implications for the political consciousness of the country’s population. There were no economic groups that could become an adequate substitute to those classes in every sense of it—not small semiprivate cooperative traders of the late Soviet period; not the so-called red directors, the government-appointed managers of large production units on the eve of privatization (who all of a sudden gained power over vast industrial and agricultural assets while having only tangential relationship to the prior development of these public assets); not the beneficiaries of the “small-business privatization” of the early 1990s, that is, former managers of small Soviet-era trading firms, construction business, and services; and certainly not the former criminal and semicriminal elements (including petty black market peddlers and managers of large clandestine networks) that rose up from the de facto underground and attempted to seize control of the most lucrative opportunities in commercial distribution and finance.

The last Soviet generation grew up and came of age at a time when the totalitarian state, personified by whichever individual was in charge at the top, was in total control of the country’s assets in their entirety, both by law and in practice. There was no way they could accept these newly emerging groups of propertied people as legitimate owners, empowered to handle the enormous assets at their discretion, let alone trust them to use those assets as an instrument for defending their political interests. Even wealthy people themselves could not feel at ease in this capacity—both because of their worldview, which was shaped by the total monopolism of the Soviet system, and because of the hostility they felt from the bulk of the population. The majority of Russians persisted in their belief that there were no “sacred rights of property” in the country prior to and independent of the country’s highest ruler and his benevolent attitude.

This view of the country’s top authority as the only legitimate source of property rights, especially for large-scale industrial and agricultural assets, survived even the tumultuous period of the early 1990s and has persisted into the subsequent stages of the post-Soviet era. In those stages, as Russia’s central government rediscovered its strength, it began to actively reinforce those stereotypes in society by transmitting, directly or indirectly, the message that all other sources of property ownership were a form of banditry and a theft of property from the people.

This, in turn, has made it psychologically impossible for most Russians to separate the functions and powers of government authority from the functions and powers of that sole individual who is ensconced at the top of the pyramid of power. This also leads to ascribing to this individual powers and capabilities that he does not possess in reality. Another consequence is that the authorities and their supporters effectively deny any opposition groups or individual politicians the right to use government resources in their struggle for power against the dominant group. Neither this ruling circle nor Russian society at large find the authorities’ monopolistic control of the distribution of all key resources in the country to be unnatural or unacceptable, let alone criminal. To the contrary, they sanctify this monopolistic power by the use of tradition, drawing upon a variety of “religious” and “historical” justifications. The implicit underlying message is that this single-handed control over all resources is the natural form of organization and functioning of the powers that be. This alone is sufficient to present a daunting challenge to anyone who would try to establish a workable system of governmental checks and balances built upon the suitable economic foundation of autonomous groups of large and small property owners.

It is also here that we can find the roots of the understanding of strong power as being completely unrestrained by anything or anybody. People have been viewing efforts to establish a genuine separation of powers as attempts to weaken government authority, to disable it, to impose an alien will upon it. In this regard, the demeaning powerlessness of Russia’s present-day parliament is largely a product of the campaign of vilification of legislative authority that was waged, spontaneously or not, by Russia’s leading mass media in the 1990s. Let us not forget that, back then, the journalists who viewed themselves as supporters of Russia’s “democratic choice” frantically portrayed Russia’s representative institutions, first the Supreme Soviet and then the State Duma, as useless and as burdensome chains shackling our “mighty” first president, Boris Yeltsin, and allegedly impeding his attempts to charge ahead with the socioeconomic reforms that they said the country needed. Even the courts (to the extent that they retained some degree of political significance) were now and then portrayed in the media as pesky obstacles on Russia’s road to “economic reforms.”

Unfortunately, in Russia’s history, the understanding of the supreme power as the function of an equilibrium among diverse societal forces, and of a compromise among them, was minimal. Most of Russia’s public opinion typically viewed any compromise as “rotten,” as something that could and should be discarded as soon as possible and without any compunction. Russian society today is arguably paying a high price for stereotypes and preconceptions that, by and large, were shaped by Russia’s history.

Finally, another factor that influenced the political situation in Russia in the 1990s was the international environment.[7] I believe that, in spite of all of the inertia and other idiosyncrasies of the mind-set of the Russian public, there was a relatively brief period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when popular disillusionment with the Soviet societal order and way of life was so deep and so widespread that there was an opportunity to drastically transform that mind-set. Russians’ views of different sets of power relationships than the ones that had been historically present and embedded in the Russian consciousness would have been different today, had the former Cold War enemies of the Soviet Union been ready to respond to the country’s abandonment of its ideological dogmas, and of the Cold War, by looking for ways to include the Soviet Union in the existing world order on terms that would be seen by Russia’s political class and most of its citizens as dignified. Of course, in and of itself, this would have provided no guarantees of the development of Russia’s political system along a nonauthoritarian path. Yet it would have been a weighty consideration in Russia’s process of selecting its subsequent path of development.

In reality, however, the prevailing response in the West to the tectonic political shifts that occurred in the Soviet Union was shortsighted and selfish. The political shift was viewed as merely an opportunity to get rid of an old irritant, the widely acknowledged need to pursue a complex and multifaceted policy of “containing” the Soviets. Western leaders immediately paid the highest symbolic honors to the leaders of Russia by recognizing Russia as a diplomatic successor to the USSR at every level. Yet, at the same time, having lost a practical interest in developing a rational framework of relationships, as it had done with the Soviet Union, the West began to marginalize Russia in various contexts, both as a country and as a people.

In its relationships with the West, Russia’s political class encountered nakedly egotistic disregard for lofty principles, in practice, which was unfortunately justified as “realpolitik.” This was an important factor (though not the only one) in strengthening Russian skepticism about the liberal, competition-based model of political order. It convinced Russia’s political class that feigning competitive politics and liberal institutions (such as the separation of powers, free elections, and the replacement of individuals in power on a regular basis) was just as “marketable” to its Western partners as the hard, conscientious work to actually establish them. The reason for the failure of the West to become a factor of genuine modernization in the Russian political and economic system after the collapse of the Soviet Union is a debatable issue. However, in my view, it relates both to the shortsightedness or incompetence of individual political leaders and to the overall crisis of political mentality and behavior in recent decades.[8]

Whatever the case, in the 1990s, a wide array of factors shaped the political system of the “new” post-Soviet Russia in such a way as to make it authoritarian, averse to innovation, limited in its efficacy, and devoid of incentives to move in the direction of an alternative liberal, competition-based order.

In concluding our review of the 1990s, let us briefly sum up the determinants and the factors that led to the formation of the present-day authoritarianism of a peripheral type, as they emerged from the reforms of those years. With some caveats in mind, we can identify three groups of factors. The first among them was the sequence of events that led to the emergence of a system based upon the fusion of governmental power with the ownership of economic assets. This sequence included the hyperinflation (the government’s expropriation of savings) of 1992, the crime-ridden privatization (the loans-for-shares auctions) of 1995–1997, and election fraud and the subjugation of the media in 1996–1998.

The second factor was the Bolshevik methods used by the reformers. Reforms and decision-making were done on the basis of such tenets as “The ends justify the means,” “The economic basis [the character of property relations] will nearly automatically determine the superstructure [the shape of legal and civic institutions],” “The primitive accumulation of capital is always crime-ridden,” and so on.

The third group of factors was related to the authorities’ refusal to reassess Soviet-era history, to pass judgment at the governmental level on the legacy of Stalinism and Bolshevism. This refusal gave rise to Russia’s crisis of self-identification, as people found themselves disoriented with regard to basic values; it resulted in a mishmash of ideologies, in the flourishing of defiant ignorance presented as the so-called Eurasianist ideology; and ultimately it made it impossible for Russia to define its place in the world in a historically grounded and logical manner. As a result, by the late 1990s, Russians were in the throes of pervasive disillusionment, confusion, and a sense of having been utterly deceived. They were increasingly searching for answers to their problems by looking to the past, to the Soviet era. This was the context in which Vladimir Putin entered the stage.

However, as I have noted, the 1990s was a time when the present system was barely emerging and was still taking shape. Some of its traits were still a work in progress, while others were not yet even perceptible. Therefore, the first decade of the twenty-first century was no less important to the formation of the present-day version of Russia’s authoritarianism. We shall now address the developments of this period in more detail.

I shall begin my analysis of what happened to Russia’s political system in the first decade of this century by reiterating the central point of the previous section: in the 1990s, Russia was not developing along a democratic path. In this context, democracy is understood as a type of political organization that includes:

1. a distribution of power resources among several centers and groups within the system;

2. an effective separation of powers into different branches that function to preclude a concentration of power in the hands of a single person; and

3. the use of elections as a means to resolve political disputes and tensions and to select the next governing team from among several contenders.

In the 1990s, Russia did not progress in any noticeable way along any of these three dimensions; every attempt to prove the opposite has been unconvincing. During that particular period, in my opinion, the formal indicators of political democracy in the aforementioned sense of this term were in their sorriest state. They were virtually entirely emptied of their substantive content, and the institutions of democracy were being discredited, while the thick layer of demagogic rhetoric generated spontaneous protest among broad swaths of Russian society.

In addition, by the late 1990s the mechanisms of governance as such, and especially its administrative hierarchy, were in a truly sorry state as well. There was a broad consensus that the authorities of the Russian state were failing to perform the basic functions of governance that are essential under any type of a political system, such as maintaining public order, keeping track of its assets and protecting its citizens, preserving the integrity of the legal regulation of social and economic relations across Russia’s territory, making the court system work properly, producing and executing the country’s budget, and so on. Instead, government was being supplanted in these key functions by spontaneous, elemental forces, with plain violence used as a tool of competition, semicriminal unwritten arrangements taking the place of laws, and the like.

Therefore, after the transfer of power from Yeltsin to Putin, when the Kremlin suddenly launched a virtual campaign of denunciation of the “unruly 1990s,” it looked from the outside as if it was actually going to target the very failures of that decade that I have outlined. Although this quasi campaign was to a large extent demagogic, it also undoubtedly built upon a genuine sense that the Russian state had been unacceptably weakened in both external and, most importantly, domestic matters. It cannot be denied that, by the year 2000, Russian society and its bureaucratic elite were in a sense demanding a consolidation of governance. This was supposed to bring more order into everyday life by strengthening the state—not by making the state bigger or more ferocious in its use of force but rather by making it effective in performing those functions that make a society modern, sophisticated, and open to development.

How the system responded to this demand is a different story. Instead of consolidating the essential formative functions of the state, the system consolidated the authoritarian power at the top. As a result, Russia’s authoritarianism morphed into its present-day shape, projecting demodernization, conservative chauvinism, and isolationism.

To put it differently, if, during the early and mid-1990s, Russia’s post-Soviet political system passed the first of its developmental crossroads by opting for an authoritarian model of development over a competition-based one, during the next decade it passed a second major road fork as well. This time, it was a choice between a modernizing type of authoritarianism, a kind of “authoritarianism for the sake of progress,” and a conservative, stagnation-prone type of authoritarianism. The conservative type begins by erecting barriers on the path of any change that might weaken the ruling circle’s control over society—though eventually, at the final stage of its existence, this control is lost because of the degeneration of the institutions that enable governance in the first place.[9]

Strictly speaking, this is about a paradox that is well-known from history. It is expressed by the ages-old dictum “Everything must change so that everything stays the same.” The sustainability of any political system, including an authoritarian one, ultimately depends upon its dynamism and its ability to adapt, to open space for the growth of new forces and relationships, to detect shifts in a situation and to come up with responses to the new threats and challenges resulting from these changes. In theory, a competition-based system has significant advantages in this regard, because it assumes (again in theory) that the political team that fails to recognize an objective need for change will inevitably be defeated in the elections.

Of course, in reality nothing is so unequivocal. The need for changes is not always self-evident, the mechanisms do not operate automatically, and election outcomes may be very different from the system’s objective needs in terms of survival and development. For its part, under certain conditions, an authoritarian system also may display flexibility, ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and commitment to genuine rather than phony achievements. Thus, an authoritarian government does not invariably have to result in its own fossilization, becoming a shackle on society and an obstacle to progress. Such outcomes are more likely to be a product of a combination of situational variables and the political inadequacy of the ruling circle.

It is difficult to determine the extent to which these two factors shape the outcome of the process. But this typically results in a regime that is on the defensive against multiple real and fictitious enemies, including those from abroad. Such a regime tries to impede the activities of any forces that it views as unfamiliar and puzzling. By doing this, it precludes the possibility of an evolutionary development of those institutions that are currently in place.

What happens next is more or less clear: the institutions that are incapable of changing, including changes to close the gap between themselves and the changing sociopolitical environment, will sooner or later be unable to perform the functions that have been assigned to them. Thus, police are no longer fighting crime in earnest, intelligence agencies are no longer combating threats to national sovereignty with the same resolve as before, tax collectors are no longer as determined to pursue actual tax evaders. The courts in such a system acquire some traits of “independence”—not from the control of the supreme authorities but rather from any public control whatsoever—and by and large become commercialized. Legislative bodies pass their bills chaotically, without giving any thought to the laws’ implications or to the difficulties involved in making them work in practice. The agencies responsible for investing public funds under this system may follow any kind of logic whatsoever, except for the logic of stimulating economic growth, and most often they do whatever is convenient and serve someone’s private interest in spending public funds.

As a result of all this, the government at its highest level essentially loses the most effective tools for influence upon the situation in the country, and then its future gets determined by the forces of inertia and by various contingencies, including (and perhaps primarily) contingencies of external origin. Therefore, at a certain stage, an authoritarian government with a conservatively chauvinistic ideology and without the goal of modernization and reform is bound to become hostage to its changing environment, and this environment may either keep the government afloat for quite an extensive period or make an acute political crisis inevitable, with the regime in question being incapable of overcoming or surviving such a crisis.

During the first decade of our century, Russia passed the turning point that was mentioned earlier, the moment of choice between putting effort into modernization or building new fences and barriers on the path of political changes that might potentially threaten the stability of the authorities—and thus blocking any meaningful political development whatsoever. Today, the implications of having passed that turning point are evident to almost everyone. But, fifteen years ago, in the course of the presidential campaign of 2000, I was hardly able to persuade anyone that this kind of future was on the horizon, in spite of the very high likelihood of this course of events, given the characteristics of the oligarchical system that had been established in Russia, the personality of Boris Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, and the means by which he was brought to power.

Certainly, all the determinants of the outcome that is with us today were also present at the time. First of all, there was the absence of a powerful class of legitimate owners of large-scale productive economic assets like those that qualify as “big business” in any Western country, a class that would be willing and able to play a significant role in defining the political future of the country. As some will object by mentioning the “oligarchs” of the 1990s and their active politicking at the time, let me say the following.

The oligarchs were not an economic class. It is true that a few dozen Russians became real owners of exorbitant personal wealth, and that they also became formal owners of one or two hundred of the most desirable economic assets of 1990s Russia, such as oil companies Yukos, Sibneft, Lukoil, and Surgutneftegas; steel mills like Mechel or NLMK; nickel and copper giant Norilsk Nickel; and so on. Yet they were unable to coalesce into an enduring class of people who would be aware of their shared interests—essentially national interests—and who would be bound together by both shared and personal interests in the development of Russia’s economy and society along the path of what is often called market democracy. They could not become such a class because they ended up in their “oligarchic” roles by accident, because they had neither a shared history nor a significant track record in business, and, finally, because there were so few of them. Members of the group were not allies sharing the same interests but rather strangers laying claims to a portion of a limited number of desirable assets— assets that the new authorities had ended up with and were now doling out to others as they saw fit.

Second, they were not viewed as legitimate property holders by the political establishment, by the population, or even by themselves. I may have written about it a thousand times, but I am prepared to reiterate the point once more: A property right is not a sealed piece of paper and is not a record made in some registry by the officials in charge. A property right is, first and foremost, the willingness of the society and its institutions to acknowledge the right of a given person to make decisions about a particular economic asset at one’s discretion, including decisions about selling it, passing it on as inheritance, or doing with it anything else that is not restricted or prohibited by law. But the oligarchs did not have this kind of broad recognition of their property rights (nor, fifteen years later, do the present-day holders of large economic assets have this).[10]

This is precisely why the oligarchs as a group could not become the driving force for modernizing reforms—or even provide reliable support for such reforms, should the government decide to initiate them. The example of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the businessman who supposedly advocated large-scale political and social reforms, is completely irrelevant here. His political ambitions at the beginning of the century were of a personal nature rather than reflecting the collective aspirations of an economic class. His pro-modernization rhetoric became so central to his pronouncements largely as a result of his showdown with the authorities; the cause-and-effect relationship between this rhetoric and his relations with the Kremlin is by no means as simple as some tend to believe.[11] Small and medium-size business owners had even less of a chance to become a political fulcrum of an authoritarian modernization during the late 1990s, given how socially and ideologically disparate and politically disorganized they were.

On the other hand, the central government bureaucracy was somewhat better prepared to assume that role. And, paradoxical as it may seem, it did for a quite a while sustain the possibility of a turn of the authoritarian system toward more recognition of society’s interests and needs. However, in the end, the “modernizer” faction turned out to be too politically weak to influence the policies of the Kremlin in a fundamental way. As a result, these policies ended up being nearly the opposite of those advocated by the modernizers in the bureaucracy, and representatives of this stripe who opted to stay aboard ended up being hostages of the course of action that was chosen by Vladimir Putin.

At about this same time, prices for oil and gas rose to unprecedented heights in the international markets, in both absolute and relative terms. I believe that, surprising as it may seem, this was yet another important reason why an authoritarian modernization did not take place in Russia. Some may view this explanation as too simplistic, and yet, at times, complex social phenomena may be based on really simple things. It is not at all surprising that the rapid growth of the financial reserves of both the government and of Russia’s population largely deprived them of the incentive to pursue modernizing policies that would be complex and risky (in terms of how different strata in Russian society might have responded to them). Instead, the accumulation of wealth favored a different priority: not to do anything that might disturb this transitory stability.

Meanwhile, the rise in prices for Russia’s export commodities was stopped by the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Russia’s authorities responded by instinctively retreating into a cocoon and setting up barriers to separate themselves from the ups and downs of Western economies and their complex mechanisms of growth. This was achieved through the rejection of “unnecessary” socioeconomic experimentation and by relying upon the tried-and-tested routines of the resource-based economy—namely, pumping hydrocarbons from newly found deposits and building mega pipelines for their delivery. This became the primary content of economic policies at home.

By now, even a serious prospect of unfavorable trends for Russia’s commodities on the world energy market cannot compel its political system to embark on a pursuit of ways to modernize the economy. Even though the situation was rather different during the first years of the new century, the protracted period of windfall revenues gained without much hard work most likely was a major factor that helped conservative, anti-reform policies to prevail, apparently for the long haul.

Likewise, the personal characteristics of the members of Russia’s ruling circle may have played a considerable role in tipping the scale in this particular direction. These personal characteristics include wariness about the outside world and a misunderstanding of the ways in which Western politics operate and how this shapes the West’s stance vis-à-vis the rest of the world, including Russia. These traits among the Russian leadership caused it to vastly overstate the risks of the wider opening of Russia to the outside world through modernizing reforms. The Russian ruling elite’s exaggeration of the importance of Russia to Western politicians led them to overstate the West’s willingness and readiness to expend huge amounts of resources to bring Russia to a “single common denominator” on every political issue. Of course, this exaggeration of the threat of outside interference in Russia’s politics was caused in part by domestic considerations, but it would be wrong to view it as merely a tool of manipulating public opinion. The authorities were quite genuinely alarmed by the specter of a powerful political force willing to stage a “regime change” operation in exchange for relatively modest financial reward, even if that fear was out of proportion with the actual extent of the threat.[12]

At the same time, one has to admit that Western leaders did not make any effort to assuage the Russian government’s fears and concerns. No one made it a point to really convince Russian authorities that the various grants for the “development of democracy,” which were being issued to opposition-minded individuals and organizations perceived as democrats by the American and European public, were not part of a full-scale plot to topple the Russian government. Even if Russian authorities firmly believed in Western conspiracies, they possibly could have been convinced by the (perhaps somewhat cynical) argument that various nongovernmental organization grants to Russian pro-Western opposition groups were just about as meager, formalistic, and unproductive as, for example, the aid that the Soviet Union, in its time, provided to Western communist parties. Anyone who thought that Soviet handouts to local communists and “leftists” would lead to a power shift in the United States would have been extremely naive; similarly, the whisperings about the billions of dollars that allegedly have been pumped into Russia through some (at times irrelevant and even fringe) nonprofit organizations, to be used to oust the ruling elite or to break up Russia, are just plain nonsense.

Of course, this is not to say that we must completely rule out any attempts by specific individuals and organizations outside Russia to influence the political situation within it in pursuit of their own commercial and other interests. But the risks associated with this cannot by any means be used to justify the rejection of reforms and an all-out confrontation with the outside world. Regrettably, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was no one willing or able to explain these truths to Russian authorities. To the contrary, some Western politicians thought it was quite innocuous to tease the Kremlin by making thunderous but empty speeches, semi-ritualistically invoking “support for democracy” in the post-Soviet space (but apparently not in such places as Turkmenistan or Tajikistan), as well as loudly talking about things like the upcoming new expansion of NATO to include former Soviet countries.

One way or another, between approximately 2000 and 2005, Russia’s ruling circle opted for a conservative, anti-reform type of authoritarianism over a modernization-oriented variety. The authoritarianism that prevailed in Russia was not open to dialogue with independent domestic political currents of any significance or to collaboration with the Western world. And, with all the fine-print qualifications and short-term fluctuations in overall policies, this type of authoritarianism became firmly entrenched in Russia in the second half of the decade.

It was certainly a gradual and not an abrupt shift. Changes in the composition and the character of activities of such government institutions as the presidential staff, the State Duma, the Federation Council, local legislatures, and so forth accumulated for years before revealing their qualitative differences from the past. To the extent that an official state ideology transpired from relevant documents and speeches, it maintained the inertia of the 1990s, with reformist and modernization-oriented rhetoric, for quite some time. This rhetoric spiked for the last time during the period when Dmitry Medvedev occupied the presidential office (2008–2012).

Likewise, there were some ups and downs in the government’s willingness to engage in dialogue with Russian civil society organizations from a broad ideological spectrum, as opposed to meeting with preselected and thoroughly vetted representatives. At times, it seemed as if the authorities were in the process of adjusting their prior policies or, at the very least, displaying some hesitation about the expediency of keeping those policies in place. Nevertheless, looking through the prism of medium-term trends, the choice made in the Kremlin was becoming more and more evident with every passing year.

The years that have passed since the so-called castling (popular Russian lingo for the set of decisions that moved Putin back into the presidency and Medvedev into the prime minister’s office in the spring of 2012) have not merely reaffirmed the steadiness of the policies pursued by the ruling circle. This period also introduced significant new elements into this picture, and they deserve a separate analysis. But before giving more attention to these details, I shall outline a comprehensive picture of the political system that took shape in Russia, as a result of the aforementioned developments, over the course of the two post-Soviet decades.