The Putin System: An Opposing View

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

In this book, which builds upon more than a quarter century of my work as both a practicing politician and a scholarly analyst of Russia’s development, I trace the resurgence and consolidation of authoritarian rule in post-Soviet Russia, first under Boris Yeltsin and then under his appointed successor, Vladimir Putin. I make the case for characterizing this regime as a peripheral one, and I do so for two major reasons. First, Russia continues to demonstrate economic and psychological dependence upon leading industrial powers, primarily the United States and Germany, which form the developed core of the world economic system. Second, many of Russia’s policies stem from its leadership’s resentment over being treated as a peripheral player, progressively marginalized within most international institutions and their decision-making on major global and regional issues.

I am fully aware that this argument appears to defy some of the basic elements of the narrative, put forth by mainstream Western media and by policy makers, about Russia as a powerful key player, not just in the world but also in American domestic affairs. In fact, I concur with the view that the Russian government’s involvement in the affairs of the Western world in recent years may have had an impact on these societies that has been far from peripheral, even if it is impossible to quantify with precision. There is mounting evidence of the Kremlin’s interference in the electoral process in the United States and Western Europe and in the inner workings of their democratic institutions, and that the Kremlin did so in support of radical right-wing forces and those seeking to undermine modern societies’ foundational values of socioeconomic progress, social and racial justice, and opportunities for all. Whatever role the Russian government and its proxies played in the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections in 2016—even though, in my analysis, any involvement was secondary to other, internal factors—the very fact of such interference was indeed central to US domestic political developments and foreign policy and hence to the evolution of the core of the world politico-economic system.

And yet, while the impact of Moscow’s actions has definitely put Russia on the front pages of Western newspapers and in prime-time news, where it is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, it does not change the peripheral characteristics and position of Putin’s Russia with regard to the developed industrial powers and the system of world governance that these sustain. In this regard, Russia is broadly comparable to North Korea: while Pyongyang’s existential nuclear threat to the United States and its allies in the region, and potentially to the rest of the world, is central to the present-day international agenda, this in no way qualifies North Korea to be a part of the political core of the world system.

Granted, unlike North Korea, Russia is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council and wields some influence in parts of the globe on the basis of its military power, and even more so for historical reasons. But, other than that, it is no longer a member of any club of developed industrial powers. And with a 2016 gross domestic product, according to its own official statistics, of less than $1.3 trillion—about 11 percent of the economy of mainland China and smaller than the gross domestic product of Italy or Brazil—Russia constitutes merely 1.8 percent of the world economy.

While Russia’s economically peripheral position and its authoritarianism are historically interrelated, these are two distinct phenomena. They have different implications for the international system and call for different responses from the outside world. This authoritarianism, what I call “peripheral authoritarianism,” is an issue on its own, but one that takes on a unique quality in light of Russia’s economically peripheral status. At present, the combination of these two trends has resulted in antagonistic relations with key Western powers, perhaps the worst in Russia’s modern history, but it doesn’t have to continue in this fashion. Russia may be peripheral or semiperipheral in the world’s economy, but it does not have to be ruled by an inward-looking, xenophobic government whose crony capitalists park their wealth overseas, in the banks and real estate of the developed core countries, while their government hypocritically demonizes and denounces Western ways of life from Russian television screens.

The positive aspects of international relations in the period of détente, during perestroika, and during the first post-Soviet years remind us that Russia is by no means inherently anti-Western and that a different type of relations is a realistic possibility. It is essential for American readers to keep this in mind and to not accept uncritically the media’s stereotypes of the Russian people as falling in line with authoritarian Russian propaganda. This stereotyping ultimately harms, first and foremost, those who are working toward better Russian–American relations and toward a Russia that, politically, would be an integral part of Europe.

It is equally important to realize that a Western response to the Kremlin’s actions that heavily relies on sanctions and other hard-line solutions intended to defang Russia’s authoritarian regime by driving it even further into the global economic periphery is ineffective at best. The latest World Wealth Report shows that, from 2015 to 2016, the number of millionaires in Russia and their total wealth grew by 20 percent—faster than the total for the world—and the growth continued in 2017, though at a lower rate.[1] And such a hard-line approach is highly likely to backfire, by strengthening the regime and hardening nationalistic support for its foreign ventures.

The paradox at play is that while Russia’s peripheral economic position vis-à-vis the developed world is unexceptional and is a matter of concern to Russia only, its political system of peripheral authoritarianism, which is built upon this economic base, has proven to be a significant, if not the driving force behind Russia’s major conflicts and crises in various parts of the world. Some of these situations have an overtly military component (as in Ukraine and Syria), while others, such as those caused by the explosive rise of the radical right in American and European politics, are of a different nature. But all of them are deeply affecting the political systems of the developed “core”—not only tangentially, through the flow of refugees and increased military engagements, but now also directly, by contributing to political upheavals in the United States and Western Europe.

Thus, the apparent attempts by the Putin government or its proxies to intervene in the electoral politics of the developed core of the world system—through hacking computer systems of Western political institutions, leaking their internal information to cause damage to specific candidates (first and foremost to Hillary Clinton) and providing various forms of support for the radical or even not-so-radical right—represents a rather brazen effort to take revenge for the peripheral position and status that Putin’s Russia holds within the political system of global governance. This is the purpose of the Kremlin’s “active measures” to discredit basic European values and to strengthen isolationist and destructive forces in Western societies.

Whether this attempted revenge will be successful—that is, whether it will lead to a long-term core-periphery realignment favorable to Putin’s Russia—is primarily an issue of internal vulnerabilities of the core, of the US and Western European democracies, which are exposed through the weakening of their democratic institutions and value systems. This weakening has been a matter of concern for quite a while, as it increasingly fuels global uncertainty and chaos, a crisis of confidence in the future of our world, and even apocalyptic expectations in place of a compelling vision of sustainable development.

There is plenty of evidence that this weakening is rooted primarily in the decay of civil society institutions, as seen in the declining influence and shrinking material resources of labor unions, nonprofits, local self-government, political parties, and so on. In recent decades, this retrenchment of civil society has been described and analyzed from different perspectives by leading political thinkers, starting with Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, in his now classic work Bowling Alone.[2] There are many reasons to agree with those who see the retrenchment as caused by dramatically rising economic inequality and the decline of the middle class, unleashed by the neoliberal economic agenda that spread like fire from the United Kingdom and the United States to what was then still the Soviet bloc and that has dominated since then. This, in turn, resulted from the triumph of the ideology of self-regulating markets and the allegedly spontaneous social order generated by them, which is devoid of any value judgment about their social impact.

To summarize, the weakening of Western democratic institutions is a long-term trend that emerged well before Moscow’s interference in Western countries’ internal politics. Actually, the weakening made the interference possible, even though, in a vicious circle of sorts, Moscow’s interference may have exacerbated the damage to democratic institutions and values.

Thus, without a major awakening of Western societies and their power holders, the impact of such interference may go far deeper than we can imagine today. Not only do Western countries need to be cognizant of the dangers posed by even the possibility of a peripheral authoritarian regime interfering with their electoral processes, but also, no less importantly, they must be aware of their own internal vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the resurgence of authoritarian tribalism fueled by glaring economic inequality. In this case, the corrosion of the institutions of national and global governance can become potentially irreversible, undermining our ability to generate rational solutions to life-and-death issues of the day, from military defense to the planetary threat of human-generated climate change. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the US-led unipolar world order and the failure of multipolarity increase the likelihood of a major war with catastrophic consequences for our civilization.

I am deeply convinced that the single most powerful weapon of Western self-defense against this scenario is the resilience of the West’s democratic institutions and their ability to prevail over their own internal threats of authoritarian degeneration. One of the remaining key differences between the core and the periphery, in this instance, is that the core has internal resources for such a transformation and revival, while any similar developments in a peripheral or semiperipheral country like Russia depend upon the impulses from the core. Today, therefore, the possibility of a less authoritarian, less xenophobic, and overall less dangerous Russia primarily hinges upon the resurgence of democratic political and civic institutions in the West and their ability to resist and to prevail in the ongoing struggle against their own domestic authoritarianism, neo-Nazism, racism, and other forms of bigotry and hate, and to subsequently transform the international agenda.

While democrats and progressives in Western societies are fighting this out, I urge them to not underestimate the additional strength that they will gain through substantive and meaningful relationships with their counterparts in countries such as Russia. Even though, with regard to their ability to change government policies, civil societies and antiauthoritarian forces in these countries are many times weaker than those in the West, they are by no means insignificant in terms of being able to generate or speed up their own societies’ supportive responses to new signals coming from the core of the world system. Furthermore, some of these antiauthoritarian forces in peripheral and semiperipheral countries have developed unique practices of survival and nonviolent resistance. These practices may very well be both transferable and beneficial to American society, in response to the increasing attempts to transfer some of the features of Russia’s peripheral authoritarianism to America’s political landscape.

Russia’s United Democratic Party Yabloko, which my colleagues and I founded in the fall of 1993, has been dedicated to serving as an antiauthoritarian force in Russian society. In fact, it is Russia’s oldest currently functioning political entity to trace its origin and inspiration to the most recent round of Russia’s attempts to rebuild itself and its civilizational identity as part and parcel of the European community of democratic nations. Thus, we envision Yabloko as poised to be a carrier and transmitter of active institutional memory about the achievements of the late 1980s and the early 1990s to the present and the next generation of politicians. The end of the Cold War created opportunities for improvement not only in Russia’s domestic affairs but also in Russian–American relations—what was known back then, in American political parlance, as the “peace dividend.” We strive to advocate for such opportunities to be resurrected, once Putin’s rule ends, and to accomplish what must be done for both countries to take better advantage of these opportunities for mutual benefit.

Yabloko has continuously campaigned against the Kremlin’s military interference in Ukraine and in Syria. We believe that, in both cases, the Kremlin has taken the wrong side of history and has been wasting Russia’s precious human and financial resources. Likewise, we are firmly opposed to the Russian authorities’ attempts to interfere with the domestic politics of the United States and Western European countries, whether through cyber warfare or by corrupting government officials and entire political parties, just as we objected to the instances of foreign interference in Russia’s domestic politics, including in the 1996 presidential elections, on the side of Boris Yeltsin and his neoliberal market reformers—interference that partly paved the way for Putin’s rise to power.

Yabloko’s stand on Russian–Ukrainian relations is that Russian authorities must acknowledge that their annexation of Crimea violated international law. This is the key step toward any subsequent international negotiations that would ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity while safeguarding the interests of the population of Crimea in accordance with international law. Moscow also must stop supplying arms and equipment to secessionists in Eastern Ukraine and reach an agreement on the deployment of UN peacekeepers in the region.

We also urge the end of Russia’s participation in Syria’s civil war. Russian involvement has caused the loss of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of peaceful Syrian lives, has fueled terrorism in the region, and has turned into a geopolitical trap for Russia itself. As part of our nationwide campaign to bring Russian servicemen home from the war zones, we held street actions in forty-seven cities and in thirty-eight out of Russia’s ninety regions. More than one hundred thousand Russians have signed our petition to bring Russian troops back from Syria, and polls show that, during the five months of our campaign, the share of those polled who are opposed to Russia’s participation in this war has grown from 34 percent to 49 percent—and we know that many more do not disclose their views to pollsters out of fear. Meanwhile, Yabloko’s representatives in regional legislative bodies have introduced a federal bill that would limit presidential war powers and have been urging these regional parliaments to use their right of federal legislative initiative to move this bill forward.

On March 18, 2018, presidential elections were held in Russia. With Vladimir Putin and his inner circle in nearly total control of the entirety of the country’s government apparatus—the infamous “power vertical”—and of every significant financial resource that could be used for political purposes, the outcome seemed to be predetermined. Yet it was not automatic, given that, even under these circumstances, open support for democratic opposition, not only in its traditional centers such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg but also in such places as Pskov and Sakhalin, was quite considerable. The extent of this support and the potential for its further rapid growth have been revealed by the results of the elections to local councils, held on September 10, 2017. In Moscow local councils, we were proud to see that Yabloko has become the second-largest political force after Putin’s United Russia, increasing its representation more than tenfold by gaining 176 seats, or nearly 12 percent of the total number. And, symbolically, we won all the seats in the district in which Vladimir Putin is registered to vote.

The goal of the authorities during the 2018 election was to secure for Putin the kind of landslide after which any democratic opposition can be totally obliterated and ignored, so that his successor can be picked and groomed without any undesirable influences from outside of the Kremlin. This required an array of means that, to the best of our knowledge, ranged from trivial fraud in places like Moscow to injecting fake candidacies of pop stars and other patently unqualified contenders, which made Putin look like the bedrock of sanity by comparison.

As Yabloko’s candidate in the 2018 presidential election, my primary goal for our democratic alternative in these elections was to wage the kind of substantive domestic as well as international campaign that could, in spite of the Kremlin’s control over Russia’s mass media, generate some constraints upon the possibility of a further transformation of Russia’s authoritarian regime in a decidedly totalitarian and militaristic direction over the next six years of Putin’s fourth presidential term. To achieve this, Yabloko openly spoke about this threat, openly campaigned for the end of Russia’s military interference and “hybrid warfare” in Ukraine and Syria, and openly denounced the Kremlin’s intrusion in the political processes in Western countries on the side of antidemocratic forces that are sowing division, violence, and hate.

To ensure the success of this strategy, which extends far beyond the election, it is essential for the Western public and its political class to pay attention to liberals in Russia and their struggle. Indeed, listening and engaging in a continuous dialogue is arguably the most effective, and perhaps even the only realistic way to support them, given the draconian legal restrictions on all other forms of foreign political involvement in Russia. Such a dialogue is presently impeded not only by the rising economic and political barriers on both sides but also by the drastic de-intellectualization of politics in both Russia and Western countries and the ensuing disintegration of the universal language of mutual understanding across cultures and political systems. Part and parcel of this decay is the decreasing amount of high-quality translations into English of conceptual political writings in the languages of non-English-speaking countries, such as Russia.

If we want the antiauthoritarian forces in Russia and in the West to strengthen each other and to amplify each other’s voices in our native languages, we must break through these barriers by encouraging more translations of original political works that effectively convey our respective messages to each other while preserving the authenticity and the context of the original. My main aim in bringing the present translation of this book to an English-speaking audience is to contribute to such a cross-cultural dialogue.