The Putin System: An Opposing View

3 AUTHORITARIANISM ON THE PERIPHERY ^{Understanding Russia’s Political System and How It Works}

The events of the twenty years following the collapse of the Soviet system have brought Russia to a political system that is based upon a monopolistic grip on power by one dominant group of the ruling bureaucracy. This group appoints whomever they want as chief executives of every uniformed agency (the military, police, security services, and so forth), every administrative unit, and every major economic institution.

This system precludes the replacement of the ruling circle without the simultaneous breakup of the entire system and a deep political crisis. This is a system geared toward its own self-perpetuation. It excludes the possibility of either spontaneously evolving or reforming itself in accordance with a changing environment. Finally, this is a system based upon the redistribution of rents derived from administrative power; therefore, it is interested in the preservation of those economic and societal conditions that enable it to extract and to keep these rents. I will discuss all the features and characteristics of this system in more detail in the rest of this chapter.

As I have noted, the primary feature that characterizes the formation and succession of the present-day power system in Russia is its authoritarianism. In its essence, if not in appearance, the current political system in Russia is an undiluted authoritarian regime. In this instance, I use this term without a negative emotional connotation. This is just an unbiased assessment of a system of power in which a narrow ruling circle (either with or without a single leader among them) has secured a monopolistic control over the pyramid of administrative power while preventing any significant concentration of political resources in the hands of any other group.

Under our present conditions, such control is secured through more or less effective management of those media that shape public opinion (or, more precisely, the component of public opinion that is relevant for the authorities) as well as meticulous surveillance of all large-scale capital flows inside and into the country. The objective is to prevent any political groups or opposition structures that might be potentially dangerous for the ruling circle from accumulating any significant resources under their control. The tools that ensure achievement of this objective were identified and tested back in the 1990s. But it was over the following decade that this objective was placed at the center of government policies. Over time, it became not just increasingly more prominent but also, to a large extent, a goal in and of itself.

The quasi-corporate ruling circle put the political content of media resources, primarily public television and mass-circulation tabloids, under its control as early as the second half of the 1990s, essentially using these outlets as propaganda tools. One should not be misled by the fact that, in legal terms, some of these media were privately owned at the time. Already, the presidential staff and the narrow circle of the most influential members of the ruling group were playing key roles in deciding upon the political content transmitted by these media.

In the first years after the turn of the century, the ruling group decided to formalize and solidify this control through government ownership of most media resources. It started with the de facto nationalization of Vladimir Gusinsky’s media empire and with the government asserting its full management authority over ORT, Russia’s flagship TV channel. Following that, the government used proxy firms to secure ownership of virtually all mass media capable of shaping public perceptions of the substance and content of Russia’s political life.

So far, over the period of Putin’s rule since the turn of the century, this policy has allowed for the existence of individual opposition-minded media outlets, primarily online. However, these are viewed by the ruling circle as reflecting the feelings and opinions of a negligible fringe that is unable to impact the country’s situation in any fundamental way. Thus, the opportunity to express pro-opposition sentiments and views has been restricted to those niche media channels that the authorities see as having only marginal influence. These media do not undermine or weaken the authorities’ ability to control the minds of the larger strata of society, which could have been used by competing political groups as a weapon in their struggle.

The other pathway to ensuring the Kremlin’s hold over political resources in the country has been the strengthening of its ability to control the flows of money that might be used for political aims, mainly for the formation of alternative centers of gravity in Russian politics. The prosecution in 2003 of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Yeltsin-era “shares for loans” privatization, was the first show of the government’s resolve not to allow any large-scale financial—and therefore organizational—resources outside of its purview to get involved in political struggle. It showed that all financial flows of any significance were going to be as tightly supervised as possible. There obviously were additional motivations involved in arresting and prosecuting Khodorkovsky, such as the fear of letting certain economic assets of strategic importance to slip away from government control, the personal economic interests of individual members of the ruling circle, and the poor personal relationship between Khodorkovsky and Putin. Yet the principal rationale was to show that, from now on, big money was not going to provide access to high-level politics, and, moreover, it was not going to serve its owners as a guarantee of immunity from prosecution and arrest.

From then on, the authorities became more and more determined to curb rich Russians’ opportunities to use their personal fortunes toward political activities outside of government control. In practice, this was pursued primarily through the “ruling party,” United Russia. The party assumed the functions of a vertical supervisory authority, extending from Moscow into the country’s periphery. It has been charged with tracking the political activities of regional business owners and integrating them into the unified system of the authoritarian state while resolutely blocking any attempts to organize or to fund social and political projects that have not gained the consent of vertical hierarchy of power. The changes the Kremlin has made in the electoral system—namely, the abolition of gubernatorial elections in the regions and the election of regional legislatures by party slates only—were also intended to help achieve the task of full control over all political resources. At least in theory, this made it more difficult to use funds outside of government control to increase one’s political influence.

Naturally, as in any such matter, the goal was never completely achieved; after all, the interests and tenets of the centralized vertical hierarchy seen in Russian politics often yield to the private interests, ambitions, and personal preferences of regional hacks and bureaucrats. Yet, overall, the authorities were quite consistent in stifling all unsanctioned political activities through administrative decisions about the use of financial resources (and at times through criminal prosecution). By now, these policies have become one of the linchpins of the power system in the country.

All the government rhetoric about the need to privatize large government holdings in the banking and resource industries, however practical this rhetoric might have seemed at times, have remained empty talk. This shows the steadiness of the authorities’ policy of control over all those resources that could be put to political use by others. Moreover, during the first decade of the century, the state’s directly or indirectly controlled share of cash flows tied to the banking sector and resource industries (virtually the only two truly significant streams of money in the Russian economy) has ostensibly grown in size.

The reason for the continuous postponement of the privatization of these two sectors is exclusively political, as there is no practical economic or even ideological rationale for delaying it. Preventing politically ambitious groups other than themselves from using the resources of banks or big resource companies to fuel their own growth has been the primary concern of the upper crust of government bureaucracy. And maintaining a direct government grip on the largest corporations in these two sectors reduces the likelihood that some part of the cash flows they control might be used for political activities that have not been approved by the federal government, or for activities that directly confront the government’s interests and goals.

Herein, too, lies the most likely explanation for the failures to launch political campaigns using private financial fortunes, even when the initiators of those projects were extremely cautious and deferential to the system. Even though, as a rule, such endeavors were initiated by and undertaken with the consent of members of the ruling circle, sooner or later (and usually fairly soon) these budding politicians tended to fall prey to palace intrigues and ended up being shut down by external pressure before gaining any traction. And the real reason for this is not the lack of funds or organizational talent but rather that the logic of an authoritarian power does not leave any room, in principle, for even concealed, undercover competition for the place that is held by the ruling group.

Having placed domestic sources of political funding under its control, the Kremlin became more active in its efforts to block attempts to use foreign funds for this purpose. These foreign sources had in fact been placed under government watch and partial control previously, but it was finally done openly and in public in 2012. New laws created the official status of “foreign agent” as well as special reporting and accountability procedures for nongovernmental nonprofit organizations that were funded from abroad and whose activities had a political dimension. At the same time, a government-issued regulation blocked any research institutions and teams from obtaining foreign grants without government sanction.

Finally, this array of measures was complemented by the law that prohibited legislators and high-ranking officials (that is, all those members of Russia’s elite who were potentially capable of initiating political or related activities without government consent, or of becoming deeply involved in such activities) from having bank accounts or other financial assets outside of the country. Even though, formally speaking, the law is intended to shield influential government officials from potential vulnerability to foreign influence, in reality this so-called nationalization of the elites is an effective means of control over the possibility that some government officials might fund political activities out of the government’s view—regardless of any foreign interests whatsoever. The fact that the passing of this law coincided with other actions intended to block autonomous sources of funding for political activities suggests that the Kremlin’s primary concern in passing this law was not the risk of manipulations on the part of foreign intelligence agencies but rather the threat presented by autonomous political activities within the elite but outside of the control of the ruling circle.

As a result of these government-initiated moves, any individuals or groups with political ambitions who aren’t sanctioned and controlled by the authorities cannot count on any significant financial support, at least within the current legal framework. This certainly makes it much easier for the ruling circle to achieve its goal of maintaining its monopolistic grip on power. It also makes it unnecessary to resort to outright criminal prosecution of oppositionists—except for those inclined to take part in boisterous street actions with sometimes unpredictable consequences.

Naturally, in real life things get more complicated. Government control is not always absolute, while human imperfections drive the system or its individual representatives toward excessive cruelty, toward carrying the persecution of its opponents beyond what would be rational from its own point of view. Yet, overall, the ruling circle’s control over key assets and cash flows in the economy is quite effective in performing its function of maintaining the “political stability” as they envision it.

As mentioned, the other instrument used to ensure the ruling circle’s monopolistic grip on power is its tight hold upon the tools of influence over the mass consciousness. At present, the most important among these tools are nationwide TV channels and regional mass media. Taken together, these outlets, to a great extent, shape the perceptions of a very large number of Russian adults about the world around them, and they play a decisive role in programming citizens’ social and political behavior.

This certainly does not mean that people accept as an article of faith everything that is foisted upon them by these media. Much of it, and first and foremost the propagated image of the government as the defender of the people’s interests, is viewed by a great many people with much skepticism and even scorn. Mass opinion of officialdom and of the moral character of the ruling bureaucracy, including its top brass, is widely known. It is not an appreciative view, to put it mildly, whatever the official media might say. However, the single most important goal of the authorities turns out to be fully achievable—imposing their information agenda upon the country and thus identifying linchpins in the mass consciousness upon which the relative political security of the ruling circle can be anchored.[1]

Nonetheless, the ruling circle do not necessarily need to have total, comprehensive, and all-encompassing control over these media outlets. Unlike totalitarian systems, which seek to assert complete dominance over the minds of the people, authoritarian systems do not set such grandiose goals for themselves. In their set of priorities, the principal task of their policies with regard to the channels of mass communication is to preclude the possibility that other groups—their potential rivals in the struggle for power and influence—might use these channels in the pursuit of their own goals, which may be incompatible with those of the ruling circle.

Preventing this does not require that the rulers try to reeducate society in line with some coherent value-based ideology. It is enough to infuse society with the sense that there is no alternative to the status quo and that this status quo is not, so to speak, jeopardizing their future. In other words, it is enough to persuade the bulk of the population that the present order is natural and acceptable, while the opposition’s promises of something better, more just, or more efficient is empty talk that comes from an evil source.

To ascertain this, one may just look at the content of the government-controlled media production and compare it with, for example, that of Soviet times. In contrast to Soviet-era media, today’s main government-controlled TV channels do not attempt to lecture the people about what to believe and how to behave. The national TV shows with the largest audience share today would not have passed the filter of Soviet-era censorship, not only on political and ideological but also on ethical and aesthetic grounds. Even the so-called political broadcasting mostly contains almost no positive messaging at all. Its only function is to discredit any alternative whatsoever to the powers that be. This is achieved by portraying other contenders for power as at least as selfish as its present holders but also socially (or ethnically) alien to most of the population.

One way or another, all the media governed by the ruling circle feed their consumers with two principal messages. The first is that nothing that is happening in the country is extraordinary or destabilizing; the status quo is here to stay, and everything that is going on is under control and will not end up in anything catastrophic. The second message is that there is no alternative whatsoever to the current state of affairs and that anybody who says the opposite is either a liar, a foreign mercenary—in either case, a disgusting and completely selfish creature—or, in rare cases, an absolutely naive daydreamer who has lost all touch with reality.

At the same time, outside of the framework of the political duties assigned to the relevant media, there is unrestricted space for a full diversity of opinion—all the way to its most preposterous forms and expressions, which undermine the very basics of human coexistence in society. And, of course, the existence of the media’s political requirement does not preclude the freedom of commercial activities, which in most instances is accepted as a given, implying that the managers of Kremlin-controlled mass media are expected to use their power for personal enrichment and prosperity. Moreover, the rapid enrichment of these media managers at the expense of the government as the owner of these major media channels is, for all intents and purposes, welcomed by the ruling circle, and at times even initiated by it, as a reward for the managers’ loyalty and readiness to serve the rulers without any compunction.

Granted, the stream of media messaging set in motion by these manipulative tools does not produce a large mass of authentic supporters of the ruling circle. Yet it performs another, much more important function. Namely, it inculcates the huge mass of Russians with the sense that there is no other kind of life beyond the media agenda that is being imposed on them, that any alternative whatsoever to the political realities of the present is just an inferior replica of the status quo, and that the lies and hypocrisy in the media’s portrayal of reality is not a deviation but rather a universal fixture of civic and political activities as such.

Let me reiterate: this way of managing mass media cannot secure society’s active support for the ruling circle. But, most importantly, it does ensure a societal attitude of scornful indifference toward any attempts to secure support for any group or team seeking to a become a political alternative to the ruling circle. And, in terms of safeguarding the existing system of rule in present-day Russia, general passivity, skepticism, and indifference toward politics guarantees stability better than explicit support by socially active groups of the population. This is so, in part, because enthusiastic public support must be constantly fueled by tangible successes and achievements, whereas maintaining an attitude of indifference and the sense that real changes in the country are impossible to achieve does not require excessive effort or expenditure.

Clearly, this way of governing the country yields satisfactory results only under relatively stable conditions, absent any external shocks or unmanageable domestic crises. These kinds of tools may be useful in averting small-scale trouble or tackling short-term challenges to authoritarian rule, but they are hardly helpful against major destructive, destabilizing forces. The tools make it more or less possible to cope with tactical problems in the short term, yet the state remains powerless in the face of strategic threats and powerful destructive trends, both internal and external. Society’s dismissive attitude toward all political rhetoric neutralizes and emasculates every criticism of the authorities, making it impossible to remove specific individuals from power against their will. But these public attitudes also make it impossible for the authorities to survive truly critical conditions by mobilizing public support and obtaining cooperation from society. To the contrary, under such conditions, the masses will tacitly enjoy seeing the authorities’ failure in a crisis situation, even if society as a whole suffers in the process. The instruments used to suppress societal threats to the authorities may work relatively well under a system that is sustained by the inertia of an orderly everyday life, yet they become powerless and unusable in the face of mass protracted challenges to the status quo. Nevertheless, at this time, the instruments used to sustain the Kremlin’s monopolistic grip on power has been fully formed and is relatively effective in serving its purposes, from the point of view of the members of the ruling circle.

Within any authoritarian system of governance, by definition, elections are not intended to be used as an instrument to determine which group of people will gain access to the levers of governance. In such a system, the ruling circle as the highest authority is permanently in power as a matter of principle. Though the composition of this circle may—and is even bound to—change over time, internal personnel modifications are made by their always stable core membership and are never submitted for approval by anybody outside of that group.

Within institutions and agencies that compose the government bureaucracy, both in its narrow and in its broad sense, senior executive staff is filled through appointments by the higher-ups. The only possible exception to this rule is at the lowest layer of the government apparatus. Heads of local self-government in the municipalities are still elected by the people, but they have no significant resources or power. That is, essentially all personnel changes, even those that are not planned in advance and that occur by necessity, are handled internally by the vertical hierarchy of power, without seeking any consent whatsoever from other groups that may aspire to positions of governmental power. In this system of governance, elections are either not held at all or are merely a facade, used to give an official status to the personnel decisions that have already been made, as if stamping them with “public approval.”

Naturally, in those instances when an authoritarian system uses the procedure of elections (whether because it has become an established tradition, to gain additional legitimacy, or for other reasons), the elections’ main feature, and at the same time the precondition for their continued use, is the predictability of the outcome. This is achieved through controlling the electoral process, the tallying of the votes, and the official determination of their results. Controlling these processes means having the power to interfere with the process, but such interference is not the only effective way to achieve the needed results and, under certain conditions, may not be used in its crude and explicit forms, such as outright election fraud. Given that genuine competition with an unpredictable outcome already indicates that the system itself is competition-based, which is antithetical to authoritarian rule, the ruling circle responds to every decrease in the predictability of an outcome either by perfecting its methods of control or by abandoning the use of elections altogether.

This principle common to authoritarian systems also operates within those frameworks that formally allow for the existence of multiple political parties. In reality, such regimes allocate a certain number of slots within the system (mainly in its representative bodies) to parties that are not formally included in the vertical hierarchy of power. In exchange for agreeing to play by the system’s rules, these parties obtain some rather meager share of political resources, such as occasional opportunities to influence some secondary aspects of government decisions, and some perks for the leadership of these parties, like those enjoyed by high-ranking officials (welfare packages, special pension arrangements, an indulgent attitude toward conflicts of interest, and the like). Also, as part of the establishment they can count on lifelong employment in a safe and privileged position.

Essentially, all these features have been replicated within the political system that has taken shape in recent decades in Russia. Although the means of filling vacancies in the power system, at every level and in every one of its facets, are typical of an authoritarian regime, Russia nonetheless continues to hold elections for the positions of the chief executive—at the national level, at the level of municipal and village administrations, and, if the recent trend continues, at the regional level. (Though the elections of regional governors were abolished in 2004, they were partially restored in 2012, even if in a truncated form.) Russia also continues to hold elections to the legislative assemblies at different levels of government. Even though the role of representative bodies in a mature authoritarian system is minuscule, their preservation is closely tied to the existence of political parties, for without elected representative institutions, the existence of parties becomes utterly pointless, not just in practice but also in a formal sense.

Over the past twenty years, political parties in modern Russia, along with the political system as a whole, have gone through a complex evolution—from associations established with the goal of acceding to power in the country, mainly through elections and associated procedures, to subordinate elements within the authoritarian power system. As such, they perform the functions that were assigned to them within the overall framework of such a system and in accordance with its rules.[2] I do not mean that the role played by these marginal parties (largely not by their own volition) is fixed once and for all. If the situation in Russia were to change for the worse, or even for the better, all those unspoken bargains would immediately become inoperative. Then the activities of these parties may very quickly acquire a fundamentally different character and their focus may shift to new priorities. At present, however, the party structure continues to operate within the framework imposed on it by the authoritarian system—as does the institution of elections to which the present and the future of political parties is inextricably bound.

It is hard to say to what extent the present ruling circle is guided by any specific set of considerations in its decision to keep holding elections in Russia. Acquiring popular legitimacy by presenting their rule as a reflection of the will of the people expressed through free elections is, undoubtedly, one important incentive to keep having them. It is just as evident that such legitimacy is important not only for domestic but also for international consumption. At least some in the ruling circle consider it important to maintain contacts with the outside world and, more precisely, with its most advanced countries, and a formal legitimation of one’s rule through elections is a substantial precondition for maintaining relationships with those governments.

The staying power of established procedures is apparently an additional factor. Once elections have become part of the existing political system, it is easier, psychologically and for other reasons, to adapt them to the system’s needs than to abolish them altogether. Yet the essential point is that, within the framework of such a system, the institution of elections will function only as long as the system is able to control their outcome. The failure to do so will mean either that the authoritarian system is collapsing or that the decision will be made to eliminate elections from the system’s institutional machinery.

Of course, members of the ruling circle view occasional, localized failures (from their point of view) of control over the outcomes of elections as possible and tolerable. Usually, these failures later get fixed. For instance, in Yaroslavl’s mayoral elections of 2012, Yevgeny Urlashov, a candidate who was inconvenient for the authorities, was elected, but he was arrested shortly afterwards on corruption charges and removed from office. One can also think of borderline situations, so to speak, in which the authorities allow fairly broad political competition so as to create an illusion of expanding it, with the possibility that this expansion will become irreversible.

Yet, overall, they want the mechanism to work well and to preclude any unplanned outcomes. If, in spite of all the efforts and measures taken to prevent them, the failures of the election machinery to produce expected outcomes exceed a certain threshold of what is tolerable for the authorities, then either the system itself will be transformed or, much more likely, the ruling circle will jettison the institution of elections in favor of more user-friendly tools of governance.

A system of governance like the one in Russia plainly does not contain within itself any goals, except for its inherent goal of perpetuating itself over time. Within this system of governance, the goals and meaningful content are set by the ruling circle, in accordance with the value orientations shared by the majority of its members. Thus, one cannot claim that an authoritarian system is invariably just a vehicle for personal enrichment of the people in power, or an instrument of suppressing individual freedoms, or, alternatively, a modernizing and developmental tool. As with most phenomena of practical social reality, authoritarianism cannot be universally defined by a single purpose. Everything depends on the context of a particular time and place, on the qualities of the elites, on the individual characteristics of the leaders at the top, and so on.

Yet any authoritarian system also has a feature that is absent from any system that is unequivocally competition-based: authoritarianism enables the ruling circle to extract administrative rent from their monopolistic grip on power. Due to their sole ownership of political resources in the country, the ruling circle has the opportunity to set up, at their complete discretion and without being held accountable for it, their own rewards and perks of all kinds, both formal and informal, individual and collective, for discharging their administrative functions. These rewards may be tied to performing specific governance-related activities or may be completely detached from them and thus simply serve as a bonus accruing to the powers that be, due to their position in society. The revenues extracted by members of the ruling circle may derive merely from its monopoly on violence and the resulting opportunities to practice outright extortion. This applies, for example, to uniformed agencies.

In an authoritarian system, there is no other power that is even able to fully determine the amounts, the forms, and the channels of these rent revenues accruing to the ruling circle, let alone to put a restraint on their indulgence and voracity. Essentially, this is the central weakness of authoritarian systems: with no built-in devices to limit the rulers’ wants, sooner or later these systems become powerless to contain the tidal wave of selfishness, avarice, and social irresponsibility of the ruling group members.

History tells us that the idea of a competition-based political system, with the spread of the sources of power among different elite groups, separate branches of power, and systems of checks and balances, was ultimately rooted in a fundamental philosophical assessment of human nature. This assessment, developed over many centuries of historical experience, presumes that no individual is solely and permanently guided by one’s ideals and the laws; that every human is fallible, prone to greed, vanity, and the pursuit of power; that one is uncritical of one’s own behavior and misperceives other people’s motivations and the outcomes of their activities. And being in power accentuates the failings and the vices even of people who have extensive experience and an excellent professional background. This is precisely why, over the long haul, only restrictions upon one’s personal power allow a government to maintain its effectiveness, to make sure it reflects broadly shared interests, and to prevent or limit the extent of power abuse. One of the famous slogans of the Soviet era claimed that one’s conscience is his best keeper. In contrast, the founding fathers of democracies in the world proceeded from the assumption that only external controls and a distribution of governmental functions across as many agencies as possible in a state can minimize the actual power abuse that is driven by the cravings and selfishness of individual power holders. This can be fully rendered by a Russian saying that has been very well understood in the United States: “Trust, but verify.”

If, at some time in the past, authoritarianism in Russia experienced periods of voluntary moderation and self-restraint without a commensurate pressure from below, it has by now ostensibly outgrown these internally imposed limitations. As, also is noted by the scholar Daron Acemoglu, at this stage of a nation’s maturity, the threat of social upheaval, of a revolution, becomes the only reason for the elite to restrain themselves.[3] If such a threat is not acute or immediate, or at least is not perceived as such by the authorities, it cannot act as a brake on their behavior; hence, they keep extracting administrative rents from the rest of the population on an ever larger scale. Strictly speaking, there is no way to measure the amount of this rent with precision; all those prominent economists who lay claims to discoveries in this regard are just trying to mislead the public, to put it mildly. If there is any proof of the increase in the scale of this transfer of wealth, it is localized and anecdotal. Nevertheless, all direct and indirect evidence indicates that, in Russia in the second decade of the twenty-first century, this rent extraction is ongoing and even blooming.

Thus, all the major costs of economic activities in Russia (the cost of labor, the cost of energy, transportation costs, administrative burdens, real estate rents, security costs, and so on) have been rapidly increasing since the turn of the century, with the exception of a brief period during the 2008–2009 global financial crisis. The capacity of the federal budget to provide investments in public infrastructure are diminishing and their efficiency is conspicuously declining. The quality of infrastructure work is going down, even on projects that have been a high priority for the Kremlin because of their public nature and geopolitical significance, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok or the Olympic Games in Sochi.

Government economic initiatives, such as the project to establish financial “development agencies,” government-owned corporations in innovation-oriented industries, special economic zones, and many other ideas that were presented as emblematic of government intentions, have either been quietly shelved or, worse, have become the source of recurrent bad news. The undertakings and the projects that had been portrayed by Russian authorities as seminal have now become the target of their most stringent public critique. And, increasingly, economic decisions made by the government get suspended after an extended period of time since their adoption and after large expenditures toward their implementation have already been incurred.

All of this, taken together, strongly indicates that members of the ruling circle are becoming increasingly open about their focus upon vigorous appropriation of administrative rent, and this makes it less and less likely that they will accomplish any long-term tasks that require an expanded time horizon for planning and organizing implementation and oversight. And this is so even though, unlike in a competition-based system, the authoritarian system is not burdened by the electoral cycles that, objectively speaking, impede long-term planning because of the inherently short-term interests and motivations associated with them.

At the same time, however counterintuitive it may sound, such a decline in the efficiency of governance and abandonment of long-term visions indirectly indicate that post-Soviet authoritarianism in Russia has entered a mature neo-totalitarian stage. At this stage, all the essential features of an authoritarian system have already shown up and are now taking their more or less final shape. This suggests that the authoritarian regime has already subdued all those internal strivings and intents that were not coming from its core and that were associated with the personal aspirations and illusions of post-Soviet leaders. At this point, the objectively existing patterns and characteristics of this form of political organization of society are coming to the fore. And these characteristics are such that any active developmental ambition of an authoritarian system entirely depends on the individual motivations and energy of its leaders; the system contains within it no built-in automatic mechanisms that would propel it toward modernization.

With regard to the individual motivations of political leaders and the energy required to make these motivations work, the biological aspect of human nature leaves only a short time span in history during which leaders can play any role. Given the lack of turnover in government, which is one of the essential features of authoritarianism, the unavoidable result is the rotting of authoritarian regimes. That is, Russia’s interest in reaching certain goals that are meaningful for the nation as a whole yields fairly quickly to the ruling circle’s one-sided focusupon the acquisition and the divvying up of “legitimate spoils”—administrative rents.

The typical authoritarian political model as we know it from history has several systemic features. One feature that plays a significant role is the fuzziness of its ideological underpinnings. This is mainly due to authoritarian systems’ interstitial positioning between, on the one hand, competition-based systems, in which ideology is actively employed to differentiate among political groups competing among themselves for the right of temporary access to the levers of governance, and, on the other hand, totalitarian systems, which use rigid dogmas of a particular totalitarian ideology as a tool for winning and maintaining power.

Totalitarian systems need an ideology in the form of a set of ideas and beliefs intended to be implanted into the consciousness of every individual and into society as a whole as the only valid set of views about the world. Such an ideology serves as a potent tool of political control over society, used to galvanize its members for action and to mobilize them in defense of the system when necessary. Totalitarianism always and everywhere relies first and foremost upon organized coercion applied to society by the powers that be. But such violence cannot be the sole basis of its power because it cannot provide strong enough cohesion to society without at the same time brainwashing people to instill in them the ideological motivations to act in the ways expected by the system and its leaders. Hence the need for “the only true teaching,” with its concomitant rituals, cults, and role models, as well as the tireless and perpetual fight against this teaching’s enemies, whether open, hidden, or even potential.

But competition-based political systems also call for ideological underpinnings. They are needed for the system as a whole, for its basic principles and general structure, and we can therefore think of democracy itself as an ideology. Ideology is also needed by the individual competing groups that are vying with each other, at least pro forma, not as clans built around the shared personal interests of their members but as like-minded people voicing shared beliefs about what makes a just and effective form of politics. In turn, these beliefs are most often at least superficially bound together by a certain system of views about the proper or fair organization of society—which is essentially what we call an ideology.[4] This is exactly why competition-based political systems tend to include a rather diverse spectrum of ideologies, even though the interests of the system’s survival compel it to keep this diversity within certain boundaries—which means, in particular, suppressing various totalitarian ideologies, including religious currents with a totalitarian bent.

Meanwhile, authoritarian systems, positioned in the middle between totalitarian and competition-based systems, tend to be rather colorless, in ideological terms. Within the framework of such a system, the authorities usually do not pursue total control over citizens’ minds and do not try to impose upon them uniform views about social and political developments. Sometimes such self-restraint is the conscious choice of the rulers and sometimes it is due to the lack of necessary resources. Either way, an authoritarian state does not pursue such goals and instead limits itself to controlling financial resources as well as administrative and coercive power.

Given that such control is quite sufficient for the authorities to safeguard themselves and to perpetuate their power, they pay scant attention to ideology and to what goes on in people’s hearts and minds. And since an authoritarian power does not seek to instill ideological uniformity, it tends to permit the existence of various currents of thought in society, public debates among them, and even “soft” forms of organizing among like-minded individuals. This organizing is allowed as long as it does not lead to the emergence of political organizations possessing large amounts of resources and capable of claiming power in society and government. Moreover, objectively speaking, ideological debates in society turn out to benefit the authoritarian government because such debates prevent those unhappy with the government from unifying within a single camp, due to the conspicuous ideological differences among the forces interested in bringing the current power system down. And the broader the ideological spectrum, the less likely it is that the opposition groups will coordinate their activities with one another.

Although the autocratic rulers themselves usually try to project some ideological power, they are not good at that; they are not making the effort, they are not enthusiastic, and they usually do not achieve any lasting results. In such a system, government agencies are staffed with individuals selected according to the convenience of working with them and the opportunities to extract revenues in the form of administrative rent. Although the system undoubtedly requires them to display outer loyalty, it usually does not impose any particular demands upon their mind-set or views. Thus, because the characteristics required for comfortably operating within the system are distributed among people according to the laws of nature and do not closely correlate with their ideological preferences, the resulting composition of government staff tends to be rather diverse, in ideological terms.

And even though the ruling corporate circle unquestionably projects certain ideological messaging for public consumption (typically emphasizing patriotism and deep-rooted values), it is devoid of internal cohesion. Unless an authoritarian system morphs into a totalitarian one, it remains an eclectic assortment of individuals who are ideologically and even culturally quite different from one another. Accordingly, every attempt to produce an ideology that would bring everyone together ends with a standard menu of trivial statements against the backdrop of everyone’s blatant hypocrisy.

This feature of authoritarianism fully manifested itself in Russia’s political system of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the 1990s, when authoritarian rule was beginning to take shape and when the abandonment of a competition-based political system as a lodestar for post-Soviet Russia was not yet so obvious, the ruling circle tried to differentiate itself ideologically from those groups that it was promoting into the role of the opposition; the authorities were actively trying to play the ideological role of the “reformers.” This was made simpler by the fuzziness of the goals that were officially proclaimed as the direction of government work and that were overwhelmingly shared by the ruling circle. These goals included transition to the market, development of private ownership, loosening of restrictions on contacts with the West, recognition of ideological pluralism, and so on. The obvious difference between these goals and the foundational principles of the Soviet era enabled individual authorities to distinguish themselves through rhetoric about things like the “policies of reform” or the “reformist spirit.”

In the first decade of the new century, however, the situation changed. On the one hand, the socioeconomic inequality that became rampant in the 1990s and, most of all, the illusory character of the notion of mass-scale private entrepreneurship as a means of raising Russians’ incomes drastically reduced the appeal of the ideology of “market reforms.”[5] On the other hand, societal fatigue from the uncertainties and inconveniences associated with the drastic changes in the social and professional organization of society in the 1990s generated popular demand for stability and predictability. This was further reinforced by the mass disenchantment with every kind of rhetoric; whereas in the 1980s many Russians had viewed freedom of speech as a key to progress, by now it turned out that free speech per se provided neither tangible goods nor genuine changes in the life of society. Thus, in the first few years of the twenty-first century, as the authoritarian rule was consolidating and becoming aware of its power and maturity, its ideological persona was becoming less and less distinctive.

For example, the rhetoric of market reforms and the anticommunist fervor of the mid-1990s have disappeared from government officials’ speeches and pronouncements. References to their commitments to democratic values and to upholding political rights and freedoms also gradually receded into the background. At the same time, while official rhetoric now includes a tinge of nostalgia for Soviet times, it has led to neither a restoration of Marxism as the state ideology nor a clear shift toward a Western European–style leftist socialist ideology. Instead, Russia’s newly minted authorities were more inclined to portray themselves as centrists, committed to practical constructive work and real-life concerns that reflected the interests of the people (in contrast to the “chatterboxes” of the opposition). Such an ideological posture enabled the ruling circle to recruit people of widely ranging ideological leanings and a variety of political backgrounds. It also provided the requisite flexibility to engage a broad spectrum of relevant groups and strata of society without completely alienating any large, influential circles of professional people.

The beginning of the rapid rise of Russians’ incomes and of the financial capacity of the state at the start of the twenty-first century was another contributing factor. It enabled the ruling circle to instill in society optimism about its future and to distribute various handouts in exchange for recipients’ reluctant acceptance of the government, without demanding of them a uniformity of ideological views. In a certain sense, the ideological passivity of the Kremlin in the mid-aughts indicated the strength of its position. As the volume of financial transactions in the country grew, and while the authorities had the power to control these flows, it was unnecessary to look for an additional ideological means to bind people to the authorities and ensure their self-perpetuation in power. The Kremlin was too confident and at ease with the situation to step upon the slippery slope of the quest for some official ideology; instead, it opted for the vague and eclectic rhetoric of just “working for the benefit of the people and the country.” Only by the end of the aughts did it become evident that the period of nearly automatic rapid growth of incomes was coming to an end (it was simply too good to be true for too long, for objective reasons) and that the opportunities for the appropriation and distribution of administrative rents had hit their limits. It was then that the ruling circle became conspicuously more active in its pursuit of additional ideology to prop itself up.

An additional impetus for this pursuit was that the decrease in economic opportunities caused by the petering out of income growth coincided with the election cycle of 2011–2012. In a system in which elections are essentially an extraneous element, an implant from another political model, the mere holding of elections, with the inevitable campaign agitation by every political force, generates additional tension within the system, regardless of the authorities’ confidence about their position and their control over the outcome of the elections. In addition, the rising pitch of political debates, which previously had been rather listless, now had the potential to influence the minds of the masses in ways that were undesirable for the authorities. The intensity of these debates could possibly awaken faint rumblings under the surface of society, and soon, in an unexpected situation, people might be ready to support so-called extremists capable of undermining government control over the situation in the country.

Given all this, in the early 2010s, Russia’s authorities became noticeably more interested in developing a more distinctive ideological stance. The direction of this quest emerged spontaneously and pointed toward a conservative, status quo ideology of defending the authorities as the only personification of Russia’s national interest and of resisting all political change. This is the direct reason for all those ideological trends that were plain to see after 2010 and that we continue to observe today. Let me enumerate the most prominent among them.

First, the Russian government engaged in relentless propagandizing of the need for “strong power.” In this framework, “strong” means not so much effective or capable of maintaining law and order; rather, it means a power that is not to be questioned, that is untouchable and has some mystical underpinning equating it with statehood and nationhood as a whole.[6] In this new framework, the state is not just equal to the powers that be; it is a function of their activities. So an assault upon the ruling circle is viewed as an attempt to destroy the state itself. Essentially, the Kremlin has taken up the idea of autocracy—not as it was known in the Romanovs’ imperial Russia but in the meaning that it takes in political Eurasianism. This involves a deification of power as sacred in itself and not accountable to any institutions. It is presented as allegedly the natural and sole form of existence of Russia’s statehood and the only one that safeguards Russia against extreme polarization and the fragmentation of society.

Officially, the system holds on to elections as a form of legitimation of the country’s supreme authorities. Yet, ideologically, elections are presented not as an opportunity to select one of several candidates competing with one another on an equal basis but as a selfless, heroic struggle of Vladimir Putin, the sole and unrivalled tsar and leader of the nation, against presumptuous attempts by outsiders, impostors, to take the throne away from its legitimate holder. Hence the conspicuous absence of the “Chief Candidate” from presidential debates (since the autocrat cannot bring himself down to the level of personal debate with impostors); hence the aura of majestic grandeur in government media’s presentation of this candidate; hence the emphatic support from senior clergy of Russia’s top religion, the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. In this framework, elections of the chief of state turn into an expression of the people’s support for the authorities—which meets everyone’s expectations and is encouraged through a variety of means. This demonstration of support is based not on a hardheaded assessment of the quality of governance and the resulting quality of life but rather on the notion of defending the powers that be, as the personification of the state, against their weakening, whether willful or accidental, by various “schismatics.”

The second ideological trend, resulting naturally from the first, is that supporting the authorities is portrayed as the civic duty of the people in its entirety, regardless of the extent of disagreements among them. Accordingly, if someone refuses to support the authorities, let alone rebels against them, this indicates, whether directly or indirectly, that its opponents are not a part of the Russian people. The media and the government present such behavior, at best, as an honest blunder under the influence of various harmful ideas and, at worst, as a consequence of not loving one’s people, not understanding their interest, or deliberately betraying them.

In the past few years, this theme has become particularly pronounced. The presentation of all opponents of the ruling circle as antisocial, hostile to the Russian people, belonging to some other, non-Russian society has become one of the key messages of the political and ideological broadcasting by the main government-owned media. Moreover, the point that is hammered over and over again is that all opponents and adversaries of the present authorities represent a fifth column directed from abroad with the aim of dismantling Russia’s statehood, causing the breakup and partition of the country, enslaving its people, and so on. This ideological trick solves two primary tasks: on the one hand, it deprives those in the opposition who advocate for a European path for Russia of a mass following; on the other, it constrains those who call themselves a patriotic opposition by undermining their political base and pushing them to the fringe, as they face the choice between endorsing the powers that be or being labeled extremists who must be kept away from the levers of government power.

Finally, the third ideological tenet posits a hostile international environment. As a matter of fact, this logically complements the first and second propositions. Indeed, a ruling circle that is the sole embodiment of the notion of Russia’s statehood and peoplehood must resist those hostile forces that seek to ruin and destroy this statehood. Accordingly, if all the parts and strata of the people are rallying around this ruling circle, it means that the state’s enemies are somewhere outside of the country, an external enemy and a threat to the nation. This naturally leads to an increasingly emphatic anti-American and, more broadly, anti-Western outlook, transmitted by the ruling circle to the public, with finger-pointing at the West and especially at the United States as the eternal and irreconcilable foe of Russian statehood.

The propagandistic portrayal of the West as the main and virtually the only foreign enemy of the nation logically flows from the Russian establishment’s favorite message, wherein those who criticize the Russian government are against the Russian people and are influenced from abroad. There is virtually no other candidate for this role of chief villain—although, were the Kremlin propaganda in a certain sense more forthright and less cowardly, it might discern a primordial challenge to itself in the unsettlingly rapid rise of China or in the methodical spread of a radical, militant strand of political Islam.

Nonetheless, for various reasons, the West has turned out to be the most convenient for Russia to portray as the primary threat and adversary. On the one hand, the West is more laid back than China or the aggressive wing of political Islam in responding to confrontational rhetoric; as a rule, its response is also merely rhetorical. Essentially, the West has accepted the rules of Russia’s political postmodernism, which leaves enough room for publicly calling the Western establishment the enemy of Russian statehood while, at the same time, demanding from this establishment visa-free travel and promotion of trade and investment in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia’s ruling circle is well aware that an attempt to play such a game with China (let alone trying, for example, to establish Russian control over China’s internal distribution networks) would be immediately and abruptly blocked by the Chinese.

On the other hand, the aggregate image of the West is a natural common enemy for a panoply of different currents and forces inside Russia that espouse an idealistic view of “traditional” society and set it up against the present-day postindustrial society, which they see as “corrupted” by “virulent” forces of liberalism.[7] The power of the negative image of the West to mobilize public outrage in Russia is notably higher than the potential power of the negative image of any alternative candidates for the role of Russia’s chief external foe.

Finally, as the most powerful force in today’s world, the West as adversary suits the aspirations of the Russian elite, who, since the Soviet era, have become accustomed to viewing themselves as central on the global stage. In spite of the increase in the relative importance of former Third World countries in global politics, Russians and their elite do not view any one of them, including China, or even all of them taken together, as a worthy adversary for the former superpower. In addition, the present authoritarian regime views the United States and Western Europe as the only political players in the world with reason and means, however limited, to bolster the forces inside Russia that could fully or partially escape from this regime’s control. From the point of view of the ruling circle, no other global players have either the requisite means or a sufficiently strong desire to do so.

Granted, direct Western support for civic organizations in Russia oriented toward European political culture has been relatively insignificant, and Western rhetorical assessments of Russia’s political system have been rather bland. Even so, given the many historical commonalities between the peoples of Russia and of the European Union, if Western rhetorical challenges psychologically resonate with Russia’s mass consciousness at some point in the future, then Russia’s post-Soviet system may experience a major ideological crisis, if not an outright collapse. The many examples of peaceful “color revolutions” since the turn of the century, as well as similar confrontations that ended up in government use of force, do not look like something that could be easily transplanted onto Russian soil. But that is today, and what may happen tomorrow causes considerable, even if somewhat irrational, fear among Russia’s present-day rulers.

Thus, the view of the United States and NATO as enemies and chief potential adversaries is convenient for the authorities from the standpoint of ideological struggle against the opposition, while at the same time it reflects real concerns of the ruling circle with regard to the West’s interference in matters that the Kremlin views as nobody else’s business. Either way, anti-Western rhetoric has become an important component of the ideological identity of Russia’s authoritarian regime. It would be erroneous to dismiss it as a short-term response or as merely a convenient tool for accomplishing immediate tasks.

The fourth ideological trend is that the government and its media are increasingly pumping up Russians’ sense of pride and self-esteem. In principle, this is nothing unusual and is entirely normal. The civil society of any country has a natural need for a collective sense of self-esteem, which is built up using historical events (such as military victories and conquests), economic successes, achievements in sports, and many other elements. Invoking past and present national success stories does not constitute any kind of ideology per se. However, an ideological twist appears whenever these achievements start to be used as justification for the lack of normal living standards, the lack of functioning public institutions or their failure to perform, or the lack of clarity about the vision of the future development of the country and its people (as in, “We don’t have any of that, but we are making missiles instead”).

Of course, the boundary between the typical self-confidence of a nation and a propagandistic twist to such confidence is not set in stone, but it is easy to discern when government and the media overstep that boundary. This happens, for example, when they start exploiting history as a source of newly created myths extended into the present and the future and allegedly demonstrating the country’s “special role” or its mystical “manifest destiny” as the guide for other nations. This happens when government enacts laws that penalize skepticism about the country’s historic achievements or the special historic mission of its people. It also happens when the authorities give sports tournaments a political, government-level status, linking athletes’ victories to the political course of the government and the ruling party and exploiting them to promote the ruling circle. (Those who grew up in Soviet times should be very familiar with all this.)

Has this boundary between Russia’s national self-confidence and its propagandistic distortion already been crossed? As of this writing, my sense is that we are there. And it is being done in an ever outrageous manner.

Finally, a fairly important ingredient of the regime’s new ideology has been its reliance upon propaganda about the so-called traditional, premodern beliefs of such institutions as the family, the church, and the nation-state. All this is done in a very Eurasianist style; that is, Marxist–Leninist ideas about society, seen as having lost their efficacy, are replaced with “tradition”—family tradition, religious tradition, or government tradition. Of course, this is done through an entirely superficial and historically flawed interpretation. In its intensity as well as its ignorance and unscrupulousness, this ideological work is on a par with the worst examples of totalitarian propaganda.

This trend is exemplified by the authorities’ and the media’s confrontational stance toward minorities of all kinds—by granting government functions to religion and the church and by the tendency to impart an ethnic-based identity to the state, solidifying, ideologically and politically, the status of ethnic Russians as the core “indigenous” ethnicity (so far, however, without formalizing this in legal terms). In this regard, the new ideology of authoritarianism in Russia is clearly an about-face on Soviet-era ideology. The new ideology fits in with its Soviet predecessor with regard to the four aspects that I mentioned earlier: viewing the powers that be as a given that is not subject to questioning, labeling dissenters as enemies of the people and outcasts, positing a powerful and hostile encirclement by foreign enemies, and inflating the sense of national pride as a substitute for the normal functioning of public institutions, though this final aspect is largely negated by reverting to the legacy of pre-Soviet Russia.

With regard to ethnicity, however, the rhetorical difference between Putin’s Russia and the late Soviet period is rather stark. Even though, in practice, Soviet authorities assumed the primacy of Russian language and culture and the need for tight political control over ethnic minorities, it nevertheless formally based itself upon the tenet of equality among cultures (an analog to the European notion of multiculturalism) and the need to integrate the country’s ethnicities into some sort of a cohesive community of Soviet people. Consequently, Soviet authorities were resolute in cracking down on public displays of hate speech against any ethnicity—even though there were in fact implicit quotas on the representation of various ethnic groups in government, in uniformed agencies, and in the “politically sensitive” fields of culture, education, and applied science. In the late Soviet period, it would be unthinkable to have government-owned television giving a platform to someone who calls for “kicking migrants out of Moscow,” meaning in fact all those who do not look like ethnic Russians, or for knocking some ethnic minorities “under the pavement”—the kinds of statements that can be found in the official media today. In the Soviet period, coercive government agencies used all of their power to suppress any attempts by anyone to launch pogroms out of the blue—the kind of violence that today gets public approval and encouragement from establishment figures and even government officials.

The issue of policies toward minorities that are not connected to a specific territory is rather tricky. Like any other totalitarian ideology, the Soviet belief system assumed the need to impose on all its subjects a uniform set of views about the world; in this sense, the notion of protecting minority rights was completely alien to it. Nevertheless, it implicitly acknowledged the differences among people, whether given or historically conditioned, with regard to their ethnic and class origins, cultural affinities, and so on. Soviet authorities did not recognize the right of minorities to emphasize their identity in public. Back then, a Jewish congress or a Cossack legion or a gay pride organization would have been unthinkable. And, in practice, some of these minorities were being suppressed or restricted. However, after Joseph Stalin’s death, in 1953, the Soviet regime did not tolerate any attempts to publicly denounce and victimize ethnic and cultural minorities, at least as long as such groups stayed within the limits of behavior that were imposed on them.

In contrast, in the new realities of post-Soviet Russia, minorities face a terrible choice: either fit into the system within the confines of the roles assigned to them and according to their willingness to perform these roles, or be a target of government-sanctioned attacks. It is worth noting that the purpose of such public attacks is not to physically evict minorities from Russia’s public space (or at least this is not yet the purpose) but rather to give nonminority Russians a sense of their superiority over at least some of their compatriots while, at the same time, letting the steam of their pent-up anger out of the kettle.

Clearly, this facet of the regime’s authoritarian ideology will become increasingly pronounced and rigid with the rise of the levels of anger in society—and these levels may keep rising, due to economic difficulties, changes in ethnic demography in specific territories and in the “politically sensitive” fields of economic activity, and the disorganization of everyday life caused by the growth of corruption and the overall weakness of governance. The resulting increase in hostility toward minorities will affect the content of mass media broadcasting, which will assume an increasingly imperial tenor in terms of enforcing a rigid hierarchy of values and the groups that embody them. This also will influence actual policies, which will be increasingly geared toward inciting hatred for ideological as well as various ethnic and cultural minorities.

And yet, going back to the beginning of this section, it must be noted that the ever more pronounced ideological twist of the Putin regime in recent years, and its attempts to secure a wider base through more intensive brainwashing of the public, suggest that the system has already passed the peak of its resilience.[8] The growing rebelliousness in society, engulfing primarily its most active parts, has increased to the point where the ruling circle feels its presence, and feels it so sharply, that its prior confidence about controlling the situation without ideological props, in a relatively comfortable and secure manner, is rapidly beginning to evaporate.

As a matter of fact, the Kremlin’s new strategy, based on emphasizing the regime’s ideological persona, is much riskier than its prior approach, as it awakens and mobilizes the potentially destructive elements in society. The ruling circle clearly expects to be able to keep these elements under control and to use them exclusively against its opponents. However, controlling destructive forces of nature is a very complicated task. To assume that these blind forces will not erupt and destroy society itself, with its tricky and fragile system of balances, means accepting huge risks at best. At worst, the rulers risk being liable for the disastrous consequences of a false confidence in the government’s powers of control.

The system of governance that has taken shape in Russia is not just an authoritarian regime. It is a system functioning within the distinctive conditions of the transformation of the Soviet system (which degenerated and thus failed to meet the challenges of its time) into capitalism of a peripheral type. This is a capitalism that has no internal sources for its growth and is functioning on the fringe of the global market economy.

These conditions have inevitably imparted some peculiar features to Russia’s authoritarianism. The first among these characteristics is certainly the exorbitant level of corruption that is endemic to the system. In principle, corruption exists everywhere. To some extent, it affects every highly organized society. Moreover, the higher the level of a society’s organization, the larger is the element of corruption—if understood not in the narrow sense, as primitive bribe-taking, but more broadly, as including conflicts of interests among government officials, the practice of taking advantage of insider information, deliberate promotion and servicing of private interests in government, and so on. Likewise, a number of borderline phenomena characteristic of a developed society also can be viewed as a form of corruption in this broad sense of the term. These include the practice of legislators’ advocacy of the interests of their campaign donors, or elected officials’ sharing of information with “their” media and consultants. Thus, when we say that Russia’s political system and its analogs in other countries are characterized by systemic corruption, what is distinctive here is not the presence of corruption per se but rather its large scale and its many forms, or, more precisely, the special role played by corruption in the functioning of the system in its entirety.

Of course, the forms of corruption that are observed in present-day Russia are not unique to it and are fully in line with those that are known from elsewhere; they are described a thousand times in academic and general-audience writings and even in fiction. Naturally, at the lowest layers of governance, where agencies handle relatively small amounts of resources, the more primitive forms of corruption are more prevalent. These include trivial theft and bribery, kickbacks to officials for contracting with public procurement funds, and procuring from firms that belong—directly or indirectly, fully or in part—to those who allocate and manage these public contracts. These forms of corruption certainly do exist at the higher levels of bureaucracy. However, at that level they also are supplemented with more intricate forms, such as administrative protection for one’s own family business and securing preferential conditions for it; building sophisticated networks of family relationships and friendships aimed at taking personal advantage of one’s high-level government status; tricky, multilayered mechanisms of extortion from private businesses; and so on.

At the same time, in the case of Russia, the underdevelopment and extreme vulnerability of social and economic institutions under the peripheral type of capitalism have shaped two distinctive features that set its corruption apart from the type that exists in the countries belonging to the core of the world capitalist system:

1. the relative underdevelopment of sophisticated and veiled forms of corruption that require a higher-level institutional structure for their implementation; and

2. a more explicit relationship between corruption-driven enrichment and the outflows of capital from Russia.

The country’s comparatively unsophisticated corruption is a predictable consequence of the underdevelopment of large private businesses and the institutions servicing their needs. Indeed, the stock market, which serves as a major tool of corrupt enrichment, using confidential insider information available to high-ranking government officials, plays a very limited role in Russia’s economy. Its trading volume, as well as the range and complexity of its financial instruments, are meager compared to those in global financial centers. Accordingly, there are rather limited gains to be made from using insider information to enrich oneself through stock market operations or other transactions involving financial assets whose value might be predicted based on classified information.

Likewise, the opportunities for private business interests in Russia to lobby for legislation are rather insignificant. One reason for this is that legislative bodies cannot introduce any significant legislation on their own, without the executive authorities. The second reason is that, in general, in a peripheral type of capitalism, the law plays a very limited role in determining the actual parameters of business operations and the distribution of their gains. Under these circumstances, expenditures toward legislative lobbying are unlikely to pay off either in the medium term or in the long term. In addition, using private business resources to secure elected positions in present-day Russia is rather difficult, both because elections are controlled by the authoritarian “power vertical” and because very few elected positions confer any real power and freedom of action in the first place.

On top of this, the distribution of financial flows in this economic reality is so tightly intertwined with government power that it simply does not leave any room for truly complex and multistage forms of influence. That is, those who do not have access to the vertical hierarchy of power have no real means to influence the direction of financial flows in any substantial way. Meanwhile, those who are included in this vertical have no need to complicate the process of taking advantage of their access to financial flows; their appointment in and of itself is viewed by all as an invitation to the party, which includes an implicit mandate for personal enrichment by quite overt, simple, and unsophisticated means.

The second distinctive feature of corruption in Russia, its close connection with the export of capital, is also conditioned by a number of interrelated factors. First, the opportunities for investing corruption-generated revenue inside Russia are limited by high risks. As the volume of such domestic investment grows, these risks increase as well. Under the present system, if the owner of these investments cannot personally manage this capital as a business enterprise, the chances of losing the monies earned by one’s “hard work” and transferred to someone else’s care are unacceptably high.

In addition to the risks involved, the peripheral character of Russia’s capitalism objectively limits productive utilization of new capital. Russia’s main industry—the production and export of oil, gas, and other natural resources—is dominated by a group of big firms, with virtually no entry point for newcomers, especially those with private funds. Manufacturing is viable in only a limited number of areas. And almost all successful high-tech ventures eventually force their owners—in most cases, due to objective factors—to move the business away from Russia and into the intellectual, technological, and organizational space of modern economies of the global core elsewhere in the world. Thus, those who are engaged in corruption-driven primitive accumulation of capital and plan to benefit from it in the future typically invest in foreign assets (primarily real estate or the launch and development of some kind of family business abroad). This represents a significant share of capital outflows from Russia.

Another factor that links corruption to the export of capital is that, as the stratum of rich or just very affluent Russians emerges and expands, their yearning for full integration into the global elite, focused around the so-called West, is growing and will continue to grow. This is yet another consequence of Russian capitalism’s peripheral position. This trend is a given and it is irreversible. Under globalization, children of successful elites from every region of the developing world—from India to Africa to Latin America—acquire property in the United States and Western Europe and park there a large part of their family assets. This goes on in spite of the psychological resistance and even active rejection of the West in the minds of the first generation of wealthy elites; many of their members would rather maintain their cultural and physical independence from the Western world that is foreign and alien to them. But, with generational change, and in many cases even without it, the realities of managing massive amounts of wealth take over, and even powerful ideological barriers (such as political Islam in Arab countries) are powerless to contain these large assets and their owners in their places of origin.

It is therefore unsurprising that the Kremlin’s widely advertised campaign to promote the “nationalization” of Russia’s elites was limited from the outset and is lacking in drive and persistence. Unlike many other government initiatives (some even more inappropriate and senseless than this one), this campaign was the only one to face outright objections and effective opposition from among the elites from the outset. This reaction significantly tempered the initial enthusiasm of some pro-government public figures who had eagerly sought to be at the forefront of this campaign. Moreover, data on capital outflow for the year 2013 indicated that the measures taken to compel high-ranking officials to close their bank accounts abroad went hand in hand with an apparent increase in the rate of capital export from Russia. (Unfortunately, in the statistical data it is practically impossible to separate export of capital by Russian citizens from repatriation of assets from Russia by citizens of other countries; therefore, we can only operate with hypotheses that have a high probability of being true.)

Yet the most important feature of a peripheral-type corruption is not the forms that it takes but rather its scale. In spite of all the publicity around corruption scandals that from time to time shake the global capitalist core—the United States and countries of Western Europe—this corruption is notably still so-called upper-level corruption; it mainly involves high-ranking government officials taking advantage of their position for personal benefit. However, the corruption that we see in the West almost never expands to the agencies that these higher-level corrupt officials supervise, and it does not transform these agencies into criminal enterprises as such—that is, the agencies do not function as a result of an existing opportunity for corruption-derived gain and essentially for the sake of this gain.

Moreover, the very publicity around these scandals in the West is evidence that those societies and governments have within them the means to crack down on corrupt activities of the highest-ranking officials before they manage to pervert the agencies that they manage to such an extent that they cease to perform the requisite functions of governance. These internal checks on the extent of corruption may be based on competition among agencies and on the unwillingness of the members of the political class to let their colleagues (competitors) enrich themselves by violating the rules of this competition, but this is beside the point.

There is one key distinction between corruption that is still bearable and corruption that is irreparably destructive. Contrary to the widespread assumption, so-called everyday corruption destroys governance much faster and to a greater extent than its upper-level variety. This is because everyday corruption demonstrates that the authorities have lost control of the operation of government machinery, or at least of its key parts. Therefore, this type of corruption annihilates citizens’ trust in government institutions in their entirety.

Indeed, normalcy in the everyday life of the people and in the operation of businesses depends upon the lower and the middle ranks of government agencies. And if these public servants perform their functions well, the fact that these agencies’ top brass may pocket more than they are entitled to does not excessively disorganize everyday life in the country. If police are fighting crime, if tax agencies provide revenues to the government, if those in charge of holding government agencies accountable ensure compliance with the laws and regulations, and if public health-care providers and public-school teachers are treating people and teaching kids rather than extorting bribes and donations, then even significant power abuse in the highest echelons of the government is not so much of a catastrophe for the nation.

However, if upper-level abuses are not cut short by periodic investigations and tough punishment for those found guilty, then the rot of corruption quickly spreads along the entire hierarchy of government. Its agencies can easily morph from public institutions into criminal corporations whose only goal and reason for existence is the extraction and maximization of personal gain through their monopolistic control over specific aspects of everyday life in the country. Under these circumstances, the agencies either do not perform their stated functions at all or they do it only pro forma and in their “spare time,” which is bound to impact the effectiveness of government in its entirety.

Under such circumstances, too, the character of the state itself is greatly altered. It changes from being an institution with a public purpose, irreducible to securing the well-being of the ruling circle or even of a wider circle of privileged groups and strata of society, into an institution that exclusively serves the goals and objectives of a specific group of people. In this case, no one any longer expects or demands in earnest that individual agencies perform any public service tasks. These agencies now have to do nothing but fulfill their obligations with regard to other, more powerful groups of individuals. Meanwhile, all of these agencies’ resources in excess of those needed to fulfill these obligations are viewed as individuals’ property, which they are free to use toward their private interests and at their discretion.

If, over the course of its historical development, a given society has produced a type of government that we can call modern—an institution serving the nation as a whole and undertaking tasks other than maintaining the dominance of one group of people, however numerous—then corruption, if allowed to overstep certain boundaries, throws the state back to a premodern version of itself. Such a premodern government is an aggregate sum of corporate units wielding administrative power and organized by territory, by industry, and sometimes by function. Each of these corporate units accomplishes the tasks related to its own survival and prosperity while also fulfilling certain obligations with regard to corporations possessing more resources and authority.

In today’s world, this type of state typically precludes the country from being a part of the advanced core of the world economy and of global capitalism. Nevertheless, this type of state may exist for a long time on the periphery of the world economy without coming into an acute conflict with the objective needs of its peripheral economy or with the needs of a society whose condition corresponds to this kind of an economy.

Turning from our general points to the case of the present-day authoritarianism in Russia, I believe we can confidently state that, regardless of its distinctive country-specific features, we are witnessing the country’s regression into precisely such a premodern state. And corruption plays a decisive role in this process. Tolerance for corruption on the part of the government and society has been a fixture across all stages of the building of post-Soviet capitalism. Yet this corruption also exhibits clear-cut dynamics in its development. These dynamics may not be very visible in the short term, but they are quite pronounced over the long haul, and it has already resulted in a long-term weakening in Russia’s government agencies’ performance of the basic functions of the modern-type state. These functions include, among other things, ensuring that organizations and individuals at least formally comply with the law, protecting citizens from abuse and violence, ensuring that parties to contracts and agreements fulfill their terms, and providing the necessary minimum of government services to the public free of charge. It is true that the continuing erosion of these governance functions has not yet resulted in actual and complete paralysis. Yet it is hard to ignore the overall trend, and its simple extrapolation into the not-so-distant future gives us a clear picture of what lies ahead.

Now let us digress for a moment. When discussing transition economies, proponents of the institutional approach often tend to justify corruption, at least in part, from a functional point of view—as an opportunity to reallocate resources from an old elite to the new while avoiding direct confrontation between the two. This approach portrays corruption not as a form of deviant behavior but as the divergence between earlier established norms and the current models of behavior shaped by the changes in the socioeconomic environment. According to the functionalists’ logic, corruption will die off on its own as the tension between the two normative systems becomes less acute, with the new rules supplanting the old ones and the new elite replacing their predecessors.

Whatever the case, this kind of transition did not materialize in Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century. The outcome was quite different: corruption techniques have become the foundation of economic activities. They have overpowered the functioning of both market competition and government regulation. Although some view corruption-based economic activity as a feature of the transition to a market economy, in practice it has become institutionalized for the long haul.

With private business and government having become inseparable from each other, and with conflicts of interest becoming institutionalized, pervasive, and ubiquitous, corruption has become qualitatively different from being merely a deviation from the law and the rules. It is becoming both the rule and the natural norm of behavior. Corruption has been transforming the entirety of public consciousness and has resulted in the following paradox: laws are being intentionally enacted so that they can be broken. An individual who does not partake in corruption-related activities as a matter of principle is largely and often irrevocably cut off from the means of upward mobility and is at risk of not surviving in this economy. In fact, the success of an individual member of society is evaluated by others in terms of one’s ability to break the law without getting caught, and, moreover, to maximize one’s financial gain in the process. And this is not some kind of an irrational, archaic, traditionalist rejection of formal laws. To the contrary, it is the most rational behavior in this particular context. Such a corrupt mentality cannot be rectified through education or through expanding business and human contacts with the developed world.

The supreme powers in the country are not bothered by this corruption-based system. In fact, it works to their advantage. Government compels society to be its accomplice in crime, as everyone gets involved in it, whether on a regular basis or from time to time, or abets this crime by being a passive observer. Moreover, corruption becomes the most important tool of governing this political system. Since the scale of tolerated corruption makes it virtually pervasive, the ruling circle can keep almost the entire elite in a state of uncertainty and fear—by making exceptions or qualifications, by suddenly paying attention to or, to the contrary, turning away from evidence, and by selectively turning the law enforcement machinery on or off, depending on the individuals or groups of people in question.[9] Essentially, Russia’s present-day political system is identical with corruption; its anticorruption campaigns are nothing but struggling with oneself—and the outcomes are rather predictably ineffective.

And yet, in concluding this section, let me reiterate an earlier point that some may find debatable: the scale and forms of corruption in the government and politics of today’s Russia are not an unavoidable, natural product of its authoritarian system of governance. As I mentioned at the beginning of the book, autocracies do not have to imply stagnation and the decay of their countries; both in theory and in practice, there can be authoritarian regimes geared toward modernizing their societies (even if this happens infrequently). Even though they are limited in time and have no long-term future, at a certain stage, and especially in the catching-up phase of modernization, they may be able to successfully achieve the goals of closing the gaps that separate their country from those with whom they are catching up in economic growth.

Alas, it is increasingly plain to see that today’s Russia is not an example of this. The growth of corruption is out of control. It is hard to prove with numbers but easy to experience in person, through active participation in Russia’s political and economic developments or even by carefully observing them. This is the strongest evidence that Russian authoritarianism is of a stagnation-prone, peripheral, demodernizing variety. It anchors Russia in a certain position within the world’s economic and political pecking order—a position that isn’t exactly honorable and, most importantly, holds no bright promise for Russia’s future.

Another important feature of a peripheral-type autocracy is the distinctive configuration of its social base of support. But before undertaking a description and analysis of this support, I have to make another digression. When speaking of “peripheral” authoritarianism, I am aware that, at this point in history, all countries ruled by authoritarian regimes are located, one way or another, on the periphery of global capitalism, whereas the political systems of the countries included in capitalism’s core are currently functioning on the basis of political competition. Granted, the framework of this competition may differ from one time and place to another, but in none of these countries is there a truly monopolistic grip on power by a fairly small group of people, as is typical in autocracies. Perhaps in this sense one can say that, at least at this time, there is no other type of authoritarianism than the one that exists on the periphery of the world system.

And yet I believe that identifying peripheral authoritarianism as an autonomous phenomenon is worthwhile, in terms of analyzing its characteristics in Russia. There are at least two rationales for this. First, the concept of world periphery is fairly elastic and covers economies and societies that differ widely from one another in terms of their complexity and degrees of modernization. Coincidentally, those authors who use the term “peripheral economy” in their works point to significant differences in the economies and the social structures of the countries included in this category, and they introduce the notion of “semiperipheral” countries and economies.[10]

Accordingly, individual countries with authoritarian or similar political systems, while being part of the overall world periphery, are positioned at considerably different places with regard to the core of the world economy. Thus, on the one hand, there are quite a few dictatorial regimes that are parasitizing on a primitive, often seminatural and monocultural economy in the countries that lag behind the leaders of modern capitalism at a distance of one or even two historical periods. On the other hand, many countries that have been in the process of making or have already completed their historic leap toward the core of industrial civilization and are positioned on its borderline continue to maintain political systems in which the principles of free political competition operate on a very limited basis, if at all. Specific examples may include Singapore, Indonesia, oil kingdoms in the Middle East, and, finally, mainland China, with its one-party system and tight control over political developments. In these countries, some form of political authoritarianism coexists with quite modern forms of entrepreneurship and with high levels of education among a significant part of society, which is also highly receptive to new technologically advanced business.

Another reason to analyze Russia in terms of peripheral authoritarianism is that the trajectory of the political systems of even the most developed countries of the world—from their emergence to their present-day, competition-based polities—passed through some form of autocratic rule. And the autocratic periods in their histories are not that far removed from our times. Thus, both Japan and South Korea made their leaps toward their present position as part of the “Western world” not so long ago by history’s standards. In South Korea, this was done under conditions of the ruling group’s quite severe crackdown on political opposition; in Japan, the authorities steadily marginalized the opposition by nonviolent means.

Let us also not forget that, just forty or fifty years ago, some of the countries in Southern Europe that have by now become full members of the European Union were ruled by authoritarian regimes. And even many of the countries that today represent the leadership of the Western world completely transitioned to competition-based systems of parliamentary governance not so long ago. Moreover, some scholars believe that the “irreversible” nature of this transition is merely a hypothesis rather than an unassailable fact and may yet be disproven by an unexpected turn of events.[11]

Clearly, the character of authoritarian regimes in such countries was or has been different—both in form and, much more importantly, in core features—from the character of regimes that we observe in the countries of the deep periphery. Therefore, I believe that, in this sense, identifying peripheral authoritarianism as a distinct category with its own peculiar set of features is meaningful in both political and academic terms.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the distinctive features of peripheral-type autocracies is a specific configuration of their social base. In societies that have a fairly sophisticated economic organization and have already made considerable strides in the direction of joining the core of the global capitalist system, political regimes have tended to rely upon the bureaucracy of uniformed agencies as well as upon large-scale private owners of capital. The latter group plays a subordinate yet also a privileged, in many ways autonomous, and, most importantly, highly active role in such a system. At the same time, these “advanced” authoritarian regimes tend to combine their favorite populist and pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric, their propaganda of social harmony and the shared responsibility of all strata and classes for their country’s development, with barely any policy to address the socioeconomic needs of their people, very modest social safety net guarantees, and harsh labor laws.

In contrast, autocracies in the countries located far on the outskirts of global capitalism do not much trust their uniformed agencies; are more hostile toward the entrepreneurial stratum, seeking to subordinate it entirely to their administrative bureaucracy (which is likely to serve as their primary support group); and tend to rely upon a relatively broad layer of lower classes, presenting themselves as the defenders of their interests.

There is a certain kind of logic behind these differences. If an authoritarian regime is seriously pursuing rapid, high-quality economic growth (the kind of growth that brings the structure of society closer to its role models in the developed world), then it has no choice but to harness the energy of private initiative, in its most sophisticated and productive manifestations. Hence the need for closely cooperating with big business, for defending its interests vis-à-vis labor, while also curbing the pretensions and cravings of the government bureaucracy, which is capable of putting up huge barriers to the free development of private initiative. And the only potential mighty ally of the ruling group in achieving the task of restraining civilian bureaucracy is the bureaucracy of the uniformed agencies, which are capable of serving as a real counterweight to civilian bureaucrats.

The opposite is also true: a passive approach to the notion of a genuinely modernizing development, an acceptance of the dominance of the simplest, even primitive forms of economic and social relations, and massive use of straightforward, undisguised corruption as tool of societal and state governance compels the upper crust of peripheral autocracies to rely upon the natural carriers of these social phenomena—civilian bureaucracy and its clients as well as the lower classes of society.

In light of this, let us now turn to the analysis of these characteristics as they manifest themselves in the realities of today’s Russia. Predictably, since about 2005 we have seen the indicators of Russia’s post-Soviet peripheral and autocratic character becoming gradually yet conspicuously more pronounced. This is especially visible when comparing the period of its emergence in the 1990s with the present stage of its maturity.

During the initial period (stubbornly yet erroneously associated by many observers with political liberalism), Russia’s authorities harbored some illusions about the possibility of ensuring rapid growth, founded on Russia’s newfound capitalist base, to catch up with the developed powers. Accordingly, members of the ruling group at the time sought to establish their base of support among representatives of the relatively younger generation—energetic people who were looking to succeed quickly and who gave credence to the idea that the new social order offered them a unique chance to drastically change their lives for the better. These people hoped to become the core of Russia’s future entrepreneurial estate; they were not looking for the ruling group to provide them with material support, a social safety net, or high-quality public goods. They did not care about the ongoing, large-scale disappearance of jobs in traditional Soviet-era industries, or about massive delays in paying wages to Russian employees, or about miserly pensions, or about the looming threat to social service agencies. They got the opportunity to consume various goods, in quantities only dreamed of in Soviet times, and thus they were willing to absolve the ruling group of its responsibility even for the drastic worsening of the quality of law enforcement and the resulting threats to individual safety, as well as for the lack of high-quality civic and economic institutions and of a functioning competition-based political system. They were ready to disregard all of this in exchange for the opportunity to raise their consumption and social status through their own efforts and some good luck (such as the fact that they happened to be in the right place at the right time).

It was natural for the political elite at the time to seek—and, by and large, to find—the coveted social base of support among these people. It was precisely this stratum, whose members identified themselves as entrepreneurs and as the new economic elite, that helped the ruling group, in the mid-1990s, to secure at least a degree of legitimation of its power through the elections of 1996. This same stratum also helped the ruling group to overcome the shocks of hyperinflation and of the taming of it through ruthless slashing of social expenditures and public investment. It helped the ruling group survive Russia’s debt default and the banking crisis of 1998, the psychological shock of Russia’s de facto defeat in the war against secessionists in the Caucasus, and the loss of Russia’s superpower status in international relations.

It was also natural that neither public employees and other strata that were economically dependent on the government nor those many Soviet industrial and agricultural workers who had turned into a newly marginalized class could provide an alternative social base of government support at the time. As for the top brass of uniformed agencies, the ruling group could win their deference by giving them an opportunity to experience all the benefits of wielding the real power of coercion on their own, free from intrusive monitoring by the Communist Party bosses and security services, which had constrained their freedom of action in Soviet times.

Thus, during that relatively brief period of a transitional—or, so to speak, an immature—authoritarianism, the characteristics of the ruling group’s social base of support were largely skewed toward the model of authoritarian modernization. Under this model, as we know, the leading role is played by capital owners and the “aristocracy” of uniformed services, while the working masses are reduced to beasts of burden, toiling under Spartan conditions compared to those of a modern welfare state, with a minimal government-sponsored safety net. The civilian bureaucracy, overall, was already in an undoubtedly privileged position. Yet, at the time, only the tiny upper crust of this stratum, virtually an exclusive club among them, could claim to be the dominant, ruling force in the country. The bulk of this bureaucracy did not feel that they were the core, the social base, or even the beneficiaries of the political system that was taking shape at the time and has reached its maturity today.

Nonetheless, as the system was ripening, these social strata began to perceive themselves differently, and the ruling circle changed its approach toward them. The elites increasingly came to realize that, in spite of Russia’s rising incomes, the country was not getting any closer to the West, the most developed core of world capitalism, and was, at best, sliding along in a circular orbit, making rounds without any visible hope of joining the global club of the mighty and the powerful. With this understanding, members of the ruling circle also experienced a change in their thinking about the kind of society in which they were going to live in the coming decades. And it became obvious to them that only natural resources—mainly oil and gas, and more precisely their export abroad—generate the large financial flows that the ruling group is capable of detecting, tracking, and utilizing; therefore, there was less and less need to seek the support of the entrepreneurial class.

Russia’s elite believe that such natural resources belong to the state and not to the companies that extract or export them, even if these companies are privately owned. And because the ruling group genuinely views itself as equivalent to the state itself, it does not see any need to seek the goodwill or assistance of private business owners in order to control the revenues generated by the exploitation of these resources. Rather, the opposite is true: the government decides who among the entrepreneurs will get a chance to have a piece of the pie or get a contract to service this national feeding trough of natural resource utilization, and how much each one will get. Moreover, from the point of view of the authorities, giving private businesses a formal role in making money off natural resources achieves nothing except to nurture their illusions about actually owning those resources; it also feeds their aspirations to control related resources and financial flows on their own, which means claiming a significant role in the governance of state and society.

The ruling group could not conceivably let this happen. It was only logical for them to take over—not just in de facto but also in legal terms—the key sources of oil and gas revenues and to place them under the control of the government as their “natural” owner. Hence the setting up of new, giant, government-owned companies—Rosneft and Gazprom Neft—to work in oil extraction; hence the de facto nationalization of oil and gas companies Sibneft and Yukos; and hence Gazprom’s official monopolistic hold on the export of natural gas. Most important of all, the authorities must show private “capitalists” that all resources in the country, and all large-scale financial assets based on these resources, are—by default and because this is “the way it is”—the property of the highest government authority, to be used by others only for a period of time and only with the permission of the Kremlin. The property rights on these assets belong to the state (that is, to the ruling circle), are inalienable in principle, and cannot be entrusted to the “elemental” forces of the market.

For private business outside of the resources industry (which, of course, in today’s Russia means primarily trade, finance, and business services), in the context of the economic system that has taken shape in the country, the further a business is removed from government monitoring and control, the higher the profitability and the safety of the business will be. Therefore, it would be risky or even naive on the part of the authorities to look within this stratum for a subgroup that would constitute a potential social base for them or, in broader terms, for any institution whatsoever.

On the other hand, the increasing ability of the government to amass control over financial resources, primarily those generated by rent extraction in the oil and gas industry, has enabled the authorities to develop a different social base for themselves, consisting of groups that are dependent upon government payments. In the first decade of the century, such groups’ level of consumption grew rapidly, due to the steady growth of these government expenditures. This large stratum includes employees of government agencies and their families; those whose well-being depends upon government contracts, not just on the federal but also on the regional and municipal levels; and recipients of pensions, social assistance, and other public payments.

It was from among these groups that the Kremlin drew support for itself in the elections, and partly in the process of governing during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These groups were the prime targets of propaganda efforts that were plain to see in the broadcasting policies of the national TV channels. During this period, these TV companies significantly shifted their emphases and preferences with regard to the political tenor of their broadcasting. Previously, in the 1990s, their primary message had consisted of urging energetic and ambitious individuals to get away from dependence upon the government and to transform themselves into independent players in the capitalist game, even if that meant failing to scrupulously abide by the laws. Now, in the aughts, these very same media increasingly exhibited the tendency to engage with the aforementioned groups that were dependent on government payments, to cater to their priorities and their distinctive ways of thinking. Among the propaganda spins that fit into this trend were the glorification of stability and the ominous daily reminders about the “wild 1990s” as Russia’s dark age; the relatively frequent pay raises for government employees and contractors;[12] and, finally, an almost officially nurtured nostalgia for Soviet times, which celebrated the era’s “heroes of labor” and “intelligentsia of simple backgrounds” and cultivated the notion of a modest but growing well-being.

After the turn of the century, the social status of the government bureaucracy undoubtedly started to increase, and its actual material and intangible resources were growing conspicuously. Never mind that the portrayal of this class in the mass-oriented propaganda was still primarily negative or that the ruling circle was putting upon these bureaucrats the onus of responsibility for the many outrageous things in everyday life and beyond that caused irritation among the masses of Russians. Initially, the bureaucracy’s rising fortunes were mostly caused by the authorities’ informal permission for it to get more assertive in its behavior.

By the end of that decade, however, the official compensation for members of the government bureaucracy, starting with its upper crust, also began to grow exponentially, while the gap between them and the majority of employees in Russia became unprecedentedly large. This in itself was an indicator of the changing role of this class within the framework of Russia’s authoritarianism. Unsurprisingly, virtually every survey of professional and career preferences among young Russians, beginning from 2005–2010, showed that government service was becoming an increasingly popular choice, while young people’s interest in entrepreneurial career opportunities was declining.

On top of that, the aughts were also characterized by the development and strengthening of pervasive corporatism in Russia’s political system, which makes authoritarian rule significantly more potent, more rigid, and irreversible in terms of demodernizing the country. This corporatism is represented by the Eurasianist-style vertical hierarchy of power, ideologically inherited from the Stalinist model. Within this framework, the supreme government authority is perceived as the “director” of the entire country, in charge of everything, with all others being his employees “in the line of duty,” and every entity, all the way to one’s home or office desk, is a department or a subdivision of his megacorporation.

In this setting, which is rather unusual even for authoritarian regimes, society as a factor in political life gets completely erased from the map. Quite frequently, sociologists are noticing seemingly paradoxical responses of the mass consciousness to certain stimuli, sometimes in trivial, everyday situations, and these responses suggest, first and foremost, that public consciousness has morphed into the mentality of corporate servants who are fearful of the possibility of getting “fired” by their boss and thus of losing everything that remains of their well-being. Thus, in this regard, too, we are witnessing the consolidation of a political system in Russia that is quite accurately described as peripheral authoritarianism.

Finally, analysts and observers have not paid due attention to the weakness of institutions, which is yet another feature of Russia’s peripheral authoritarianism. Strictly speaking, the issue of whether institutions are weak or strong does not have any fixed relationship to the choice of a political system, such as the choice between an authoritarian and a competition-based system, though it is quite possible that there is some correlation between the two. Overall, under any political system, whether an autocracy or genuine multiparty parliamentary rule, weakness in a society’s institutions diminishes the capacity of those institutions to manage societal developments. The opposite is also true: in instances where any of these political systems serve well, or relatively well, the interests of national development, they provide for the establishment of robust institutions that will ensure the continuity of the policies of the dominant class and their independence from the personal whims and prejudices of individual members of the ruling circle.

Certainly, authoritarian systems generally tend to produce regimes that are centered upon the personality of an unchallenged leader standing atop the ruling circle, embodying the regime, and playing the most important role in the process of making key decisions. Nevertheless, such a leader cannot and, in practice, never does substitute for the complex machinery of a modern state, let alone supplant the functioning of multiple institutions, without which it is impossible to conduct any sophisticated, productive economic activities, develop a modern social and business infrastructure, or even maintain basic order in any relatively advanced society. From this point of view, the task of constructing workable and efficient institutions is relevant for any government that has a sense of responsibility for its actions—and this includes leader-oriented dictatorships, as long as at least one of their goals is to secure steady development for their society and country.

Moreover, only the establishment of viable institutions can ensure an unperturbed succession, without catastrophes and upheavals, at the point when, for whatever reason, the individual resource of the man at the top has been used up. Leader-oriented regimes are bound to expire, at least for biological reasons, if nothing else, and in the absence of such institutions, it is highly likely that the end of these regimes will create a void at the top of the power hierarchy, followed by a no-holds-barred fight for control of the levers of power, a drastic increase in uncertainty, and deterioration of the business environment. Under the worst scenario, it may lead to chaos and a breakdown in state governance for a very extensive period of time.

It is plain to see that autocracies of a modernizing type, even markedly leader-oriented, personality-driven regimes (such as existed, for example, in South Korea), have managed to create and develop the social, political, and economic institutions that were generally capable of meeting the challenges of their time. These institutions were able to secure the basic continuity of policies during times of leadership succession at the top and to provide for the increasing complexity and modernization of their economy and society. Essentially, this and only this can serve as the precondition for a transition, over the long haul, from an authoritarian to a competition-based type of political system featuring alternation of ruling groups in power, elections as the tool to adjudicate the outcomes of competition among the teams contending for power, and, at the same time, strict, collectively set limitations on the range of potential activities in which the competing teams and the political forces behind these teams may engage.

Meanwhile, an authoritarian regime of a peripheral type—the kind that tends to produce stagnation and dependence upon the core of the world economy—is characterized by its typical inability to build viable, let alone successfully functioning, institutions. Not only is it bound to inevitably descend into one-man rule centered upon the cult of the leader, but also it has to switch the mode of governance to “manual,” practicing micromanagement from the top. That is, the institutional mechanisms and processes that automatically regulate economic, social, and political developments according to preestablished scripts either do not function without continuous intervention from the higher-ups or keep changing their modes of operation according to signals received from the supreme ruler, who has a virtually unlimited freedom of managerial decision-making.

Furthermore, such a regime of “manual” governance from the top traps the system in a situation where, once micromanagement is applied, it becomes impossible to go back to normal government functioning. From this point, continuous intervention is required just to keep government operating on a regular basis, since any deviations from standard operations are no longer automatically adjusted by the institutions operating on their own. Instead, fixing these deviations now requires special decisions to be made, as a rule, with the participation of the autocrat himself. As a result, the system becomes increasingly more dependent upon the accuracy and the effectiveness of decisions made at the top of the pyramid. At the same time, the likelihood of flawed or suboptimal decisions by the autocrat naturally increases, if only because of the inevitable exhaustion of his physical, psychological, and intellectual resources.

This is essentially what has been happening in Russia throughout the post-Soviet period. From the beginning, the process of developing legislative institutions took an extremely regrettable turn. The unsuccessful experience of the first post-Soviet legislative bodies—the Congress of People’s Deputies and its Supreme Council—could still be explained by the disconnect between the institutions formed during the Soviet period and their changed environment. However, the new legislative body that was established on the basis of the new constitution of 1993—Russia’s Federal Assembly—was subjected to constant negativity from the media and the government. The only plausible explanation for this negativity was the inability of the Kremlin—whose character and structure, already in the 1990s, was undoubtedly authoritarian—to develop working relations with this institution, which did not fit into the developing framework of authoritarian governance.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this issue was resolved in the manner that the ruling circle believed would be the simplest. They suppressed all kinds of dissent and took away opportunities for influencing legislation, ramming through the Duma all the decisions that were made by the actual powers that be ensconced in the Kremlin, without any debate or any compromises. To achieve this, the Kremlin formed a monolithic pro-government majority of legislators, controlled from the outside and based on rigid discipline and the unquestioning execution of the Kremlin’s decisions.

However, such a simple and seemingly efficient solution to the problem of having a parliamentary institution that was superfluous in an autocracy came with a certain price. By effectively stripping the legislature of any real influence in political decision-making, the ruling circle also deprived it of prestige and legitimacy among Russia’s political class and general population. In the short term, this would seem to be convenient for the Kremlin, since it accentuates the absence of alternatives to its rule, which is so important for any authoritarian power. In the long run, however, it makes both the political system and the state itself more vulnerable and fragile. Now every complication and every crisis carries the risk of a potential loss of control over the situation, and this may even be more likely, given the lack of institutions endowed with legitimacy and able to compensate for the breakdown of state governance resulting from erroneous actions or inaction of the authorities.[13]

Such a situation is especially risky for Russia, which has neither a functioning and legitimate representative body nor any alternative supreme authority that could hold power if its current organization breaks down. In addition, it is precisely the inability of Russia’s present-day parliament to exert any real influence that strips it of its legitimacy in the eyes of various societal groups and government agencies. As we know, today’s Russia has neither a hereditary monarch nor a religious body with any real authority sanctified by tradition, nor does the military serve as an autonomous political institution. Thus, there is a high risk of a major breakdown of state governance, with unpredictable consequences for the country.

But the weakness of the Federal Assembly as the representative body is certainly not the only issue. All the other institutions that are essential for a modern state exhibit extreme weakness and an incapacity to perform as they should. This is one of the manifestations of the peripheral character of Russia’s authoritarianism.

The challenges faced by the judiciary during the first decade of the century, for example, were discussed frequently and in much detail by many observers, and there were attempts to reform it, yet none of this has had any significant impact in terms of making the judiciary perform more effectively than before. Perhaps the best evidence of the failure of Russia’s judiciary is that those in control of Russian financial assets, including government assets, continue to incorporate their firms in foreign countries and offshore tax havens, on a mass scale. The owners of these entities justify their actions mainly by citing the “convenience” of the administrative and court procedures involved in managing these assets outside of the purview of Russia’s judiciary (in addition to the implicitly acknowledged political risks of operating in Russia). It is almost universally admitted that Russian courts are very hard to use in defending one’s title to a property.

In today’s Russia, it is just as questionable whether one can count upon the judiciary as an institution to protect individuals against wrongful persecution by law enforcement or other government agencies. At the very least, there has been too much evidence that the judiciary has become infected along with everyone else and that it displays a dismissive attitude toward the law that is typical of peripheral-type authoritarian regimes. In making their decisions, judges are practically able to ignore existing laws and regulations without risking any negative consequences for themselves.

Meanwhile, other significant institutions—those involved in law enforcement as well as those of a purely civilian nature—are relatively weak as well. And the main issue here is not merely the discrepancy between the scope of their mandated functions and the means and resources at these agencies’ disposal, or in their overlapping functions and areas of responsibility, or in the conflicts of interest, all of which are among the traditional challenges facing bureaucracy. There is a problem of a more fundamental nature, as I will discuss.

If we dispense with the facade and the superficial rhetoric, institutions are ultimately the norms and rules that are observed. They rely upon a tradition, or at least upon an acknowledgement of the need for it, and do not get altered on a whim to suit the needs of individual power holders at any particular moment. The distinctive feature of a peripheral authoritarianism is its denial of any steady long-term rules of operation that form the gist and the basis of public institutions in a developed society. Within the framework of such a system, institutions are no more than bureaucratic agencies set up to resolve specific tasks, the parameters of which are defined by the supreme authority. Hence, they play no autonomous role in shaping the direction of the subsequent development of the system.

Likewise, the guiding principles and considerations that these agencies use to accomplish the tasks assigned to them may easily and frequently change, depending on the needs of the moment and even the personal preferences of those who, at any given time, exert the most influence upon the views of the boss at the top of the one-man autocracy. As a result, the rules within the system end up being fluid, unsteady, and incapable of functioning as a glue to hold society together.

Essentially, this is precisely what we observed at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Russia. The hopes that economic stability would bring with it stable norms of everyday life embodied in robust institutions have not materialized. Today, just as at the turn of the century, Russia still has an unstable legal system, a system of law enforcement that acts selectively and is largely not functioning, and a continuously fluctuating set of rules on taxation, on retirement systems, on social, demographic, educational, and migration policies, and the like. This is precisely why the school system, local governments, territorial and cultural communities, political parties, and the entrenched mass media have failed to engage in the task of stabilizing relations in society. (The media must be the subject of a separate discussion, but it is important for our present purposes that their mainstream part has been unable to assume the role of a stabilizing, consolidating institution that would shape the boundaries of public consensus and tame the incursions of the political fringe across these boundaries.)

Finally, it must be noted that this institutional weakness has become a major constraint and a brake upon the development of the sophisticated financial and economic institutions characteristic of developed economies. Thus, over the past decade, the process of forming the institutional infrastructure of modern finance, which started in Russia in the 1990s, has ground to a halt. This is due to the deficiencies of all the institutions mentioned here, first and foremost the judiciary, as well as of the system of government–business relations in the areas of legislation and law enforcement that goes together with the development of finance.

Therefore, in the institutional sphere as well, Russia’s authoritarianism displays the characteristics of a peripheral type. Its stagnation-prone qualities and social and economic ineffectiveness in accomplishing the tasks of development are related not to authoritarianism as such but rather to its specific positioning within the system of global capitalism. This positioning makes it possible for Russia to exist as a second-tier, dependent element of this system and, hence, lowers the requirements that it has to meet in global economic development. That is, within this configuration, the weakness of institutions is both a cause and a consequence of Russian capitalism’s peripheral role, and this is at least one reason why all of the authorities’ rhetoric about modernization and about upgrading to the level of world economic leaders remains but empty talk, disjointed pieces of wishful thinking that, quite predictably, are never followed by any practical action.