The Putin System: An Opposing View

1

This data is taken from Capgemini, The Wealth Reports, http://www.worldwealthreport.com. Accessed August 13, 2018.

2

Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

1

G. A. Yavlinsky, Rossiiskaia ekonomicheskaia sistema: Nastoiashchee i budushchee [The Russian Economic System: Today and Tomorrow] (Moscow: Medium, 2007). See also Grigory Yavlinsky, “Russia’s Phony Capitalism,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1998; Sergei Braguinsky and Grigory Yavlinsky, Incentives and Institutions: The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Grigory Yavlinsky, Realeconomik: The Hidden Cause of the Great Recession (and How to Avert the Next One) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011).

2

See, for example, Grigory Yavlinsky, Periferiinyi kapitalizm [Peripheral Capitalism] (Moscow: EPIcenter, 2003); or Perspektivy Rossii: Ekonomicheskii i politicheskii vzgliad [Russia’s Prospects: An Economic and Political View] (Moscow: Galleia-print, 2006).

3

See, for example, my article in Voprosy ekonomiki [Economic Affairs] 9 (2007): 19–26.

1

Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

2

For an extensive if not an exhaustive list of such hypotheses, see, for example, Sergey Guriyev and Oleg Tsyvinsky, “Ratio economica: Demokratichnyi krizis,” Vedomosti 161 (3175), August 28, 2012.

3

In the course of the twentieth century such authoritarian regimes, sometimes dubbed “developmental dictatorships” in Western literature, viewed themselves through the prism of their attempts to pull their countries out of economic backwardness and to try to catch up with the developed core of the world economy, or even to join it. The Soviet Union can apparently be considered one of those “developmental dictatorships,” at least at some stages of its historical trajectory.

4

Interview with Robert Aumann, Vedomosti 121 (3135), July 3, 2012; Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (London: Profile, 2012).

5

In the fall of 1991, I drafted an agreement on the economic union of the newly independent states—the former Soviet republics. That treaty envisioned the preservation of a joint currency, the establishment of a free trade zone, a joint customs control, continued cooperation among factories and firms of the former Soviet Union, harmonization of economic legislation across these countries, and other measures. The treaty was signed at the highest level of the Kremlin, with the participation of Mikhail Gorbachev and representatives of the leadership of thirteen out of fifteen former Soviet republics, including Ukraine and Kazakhstan (and with the exception of Azerbaijan and Georgia). The Baltic states also signed that treaty as observers. More than sixty rule-making acts needed for the implementation of this treaty were prepared and approved by the governments of the signatory states. However, the Belaya Vezha agreements on disbanding the union made it impossible to continue this work.

6

On a more general level, it is worth noting in this regard that the meaning of elections as a political institution greatly depends not only upon the integrity of electoral procedure, however important it is, but also upon the outcome of the elections—the character of the resulting change in the shape of power relationships. One possibility is that elections result in a limited but not a radical shift in these power relationships. That is, the side that wins the elections gets the opportunity to fill some government offices but does not obtain all power in its entirety; the losing party retains its power in other branches and at other levels of government, as well as their access to the media and the opportunity to successfully use the courts to challenge the decisions made by the winning party, among other things. But if the winner takes all without leaving anything to the defeated party, it is a different situation altogether. In other words, behind the seemingly uniform institution of elections, one can find fundamentally different principles of organization of power.

7

See Grigory Yavlinsky, Realeconomik: The Hidden Cause of the Great Recession (and How to Avert the Next One) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011).

8

Yavlinsky, Realeconomik.

9

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Russia’s economic system began absorbing very large windfall profits from the export of raw materials and hydrocarbons. These superprofits greatly reinforced and accelerated its political consolidation. The most significant stages of this process were as follows:

• the subordination of all politically influential media, with the destruction of the NTV media company (2000–2002);

• the deepening fusion of government power with the ownership of economic assets through an even greater subordination of businesses to the state, with President Putin’s tight personal control of all financial flows and the shrinking of the private sector of the economy (as exemplified by the prosecution of Yukos from 2003 on);

• the elimination of all autonomy whatsoever for regional elites, with the abolition of gubernatorial elections (2002);

• the unleashing of no-holds-barred propaganda in government-owned media; the reversal of the editorial policies of the previously influential democratic mass media through semi-involuntary transfers of their ownership rights to the largest government-owned public companies; the transformation of these media into tools of the ruling circle, serving their interests by manipulating public opinion (first and foremost the opinion of the educated class in Moscow and Saint Petersburg); and a drastic increase in the scale of election fraud (starting in 2003);

• the intimidation of society, beginning in 2012, including intimidation of young people (with the prosecution of the band Pussy Riot), of protest rally participants (with the prosecution of the Bolotnaya Square protesters), of human rights advocates and civic organizations (with the “foreign agent” labeling, in accordance with the newly passed law), and of the bureaucracy (with the prosecution of the former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov); loud campaigns targeting various minorities (such as the campaign against “homosexual propaganda”); the campaign for the “nationalization of the elite”; and other actions; and

• active efforts to create a pervasive sense of a lack of alternatives to the status quo, regardless of the quality and the mistakes of the power holders.

10

Let me quote here an editorial published on August 16, 2013, by Vedomosti, Russia’s leading business paper: “The situation that we have with the ownership of large economic assets stinks. The holdings acquired in the course of privatization were not earned by their present owners. The transfer of property rights to the new owners of factories and coal mines looked like the return to a state of injustice and had a tinge of a royal grant in exchange for loyalty…. The government retains an implicit ‘golden share’ in large property holdings, especially in those that the Kremlin views as having a strategic value.”

11

Many observers have noted that, during the entire period of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment (and he explicitly confirmed it after his release), his confrontation with the government, in political terms, did not suggest—either then or today—an opposite or a fundamentally different direction for Russia’s development than the one that has been pursued by the Kremlin.

12

In actuality, private and government funds allocated by Western countries for “global democracy support” were rather limited, and even these funds were typically spent on personally enriching “professional democratizers,” with payments having rather tenuous connection to the actual outcomes of their work. The practical result of this “struggle for democracy,” in the West, was sustained public attention to a few dozen media stories and personalities whose high profiles were out of sync with their actual significance and impact in terms of power relationships in Russia, which was minimal at best.

1

This aspect of the situation is rarely mentioned, and yet it is critically important. The authorities cannot completely protect themselves against scathing critiques and outright invective. Mass access to the internet makes this physically and technically impossible—as developments in China have demonstrated, controlling discussions on the internet is not feasible even with much more rigid and effective surveillance of the population. Therefore, manipulating public opinion becomes the most potent means of counteracting criticism. Major mass media as well as the “niche” opposition outlets largely neutralize critics of the system by pushing to the fore issues and stories that appear inconsequential or preposterous to most of the country’s population. This may be done either intentionally or because of the outlets’ extremely low professional standards. The achievement of this goal is further simplified by the attitudes of a large part of the opposition-minded intelligentsia: viewing themselves as part and parcel of the global (Western) elite, they feel that they don’t have to take into consideration the needs, beliefs, tastes, and prejudices of the bulk of the population (which they brand “bumpkins,” “rednecks,” and holdovers from the Soviet era). As a result, instead of presenting issues that might animate the masses (such as the condition of the social safety net, the performance of the judiciary and law enforcement agencies, health care, and education), the agenda of the system’s critics gets filled with discussions of the personal ups and downs of individual oppositionists, infringements upon individual artists’ freedom of creativity, and other stories that cause a mixed and skeptical response among the depoliticized majority of Russians. The role of the politicized intelligentsia of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the emergence, development, and consolidation of the system of peripheral authoritarianism in Russia deserves a separate and fairly blunt appraisal.

2

It is telling that, in their pronouncements, genuine supporters of the authoritarian system do not count the political parties represented in the Duma as opposition but, by default, as part and parcel of the national elite, consolidated around its official leader. See, for example, Grigory Dobromelov, “Two Years of Castling,” Expert [in Russian], September 24, 2013, http://expert.ru/2013/09/24/dva-goda-rokirovki.

3

In theory, an external threat can also play the role of such a constraint, but it has to be grave, tangible, and immediate. In present-day conditions, such situations occur infrequently, and it is even more rare for a ruling group to perceive them as such. Evidence shows that authoritarian regimes direct much more attention and resources toward preventing the emergence of potential domestic threats (such as riots, uncontrollable outbursts of violence and disobedience, or organized opposition) and toward fighting external opponents who are not among the most dangerous than toward protecting their countries against potential invasion by those who may actually pose such a risk.

4

I am talking here not about ideology in its broader sense, as an element of the social consciousness of a community of people, but rather about specific ideological systems that serve as political tools.

5

I will not discuss here the extent to which the principles on which Russia’s new economic system was being built were actually market-based. I addressed this subject in many of my prior works.

6

Some Russian commentators explain “strong power,” as understood by the present ruling circle, as being independent of the society it governs. This is also true. However, the main distinctive feature of a strong power, from the Kremlin’s point of view, is its ability to suppress any threats to its capacity to govern and any doubts regarding its right to do so.

7

We should keep in mind that the West is not merely a convenient propaganda target. It is in fact dangerous for Russia’s ruling circle, first and foremost because it symbolizes those principles that are most dangerous and destructive for Russia’s peripheral authoritarian regime—namely, the principle of equality before the law, the principle of an independent judiciary, the inviolability of private property, and the ideal of holding government accountable to society.

8

I am not the only one to observe these ideological trends. The list of interviews, blogs, and other publications by fairly prominent members of Russia’s political establishment, and by its dispassionate analysts, that make note of the ideological bent of the authorities, beginning around 2012–2013, would be pretty long.

9

The same principle was used in Soviet central planning under Joseph Stalin: the targets set in the plans were known to be impossible to meet, yet the punishments for failing to meet them were applied selectively, depending on one’s political preferences and the currently ongoing propagandistic campaigns.

10

Prominent sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (at Yale University), writing with Georgi Derluguian, describes the present-day division between the core zone of global capitalism and its periphery as akin to a solar system, in which every country is a planet orbiting around the sun—the “core” of the system—each at its own distance from it. Under certain circumstances, some of these country-planets may either move up to an orbit closer to the sun or slip into a more distant orbit. Georgi Derluguian and Immanuel Wallerstein, A Story of a Downfall: The Soviet Civilization Project in the Context of Global History, Expert 1, no. 784 (December 26, 2011) [in Russian].

11

See, for example, Francis Fukuyama, “The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?,” Foreign Affairs 9, no. 1 (January/February 2012), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2012-01-01/future-history.

12

While these raises have been very modest in absolute terms, they give the impression that the Kremlin views raising public sector wages as its priority.

13

Among the former Soviet countries, there have already been several examples of a situation in which a functioning parliament turned out to be the last resort in preventing the country from slipping into actual chaos and anarchy when it was faced with an acute crisis of governability and the executive hierarchy’s loss of control over the state of affairs.

1

The lively academic debate spurred by the works of Samuel Huntington and the concepts that he put forward is an example of such a legitimation of this theory. See, for example, Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

2

Grigory Yavlinsky, Realeconomik: The Hidden Cause of the Great Recession (and How to Avert the Next One) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011).

3

I intentionally use the word “Ukraine” without the article “the” for political reasons.

4

As Putin expressed it, in his remarks in the Kremlin about the Crimean situation, “Russia felt that it had not been just robbed but that it had been plundered.” Vladimir Putin, “Address of the President of the Russian Federation” [in Russian], Kremlin.ru, March 18, 2014, http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603.

5

These elements include a nostalgic, idealized notion of the Soviet system; of the autocratic police state that existed under Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855); of the counterreforms of the 1880s; of the notorious “freezing” of Russia in the 1890s, associated with the name of the influential courtier Konstantin Pobedonostsev; and even of the “lessons” of Russia’s abrupt territorial expansion under Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, which coincided with brutal transformations of the country against its will. And to make all this look smart, government propaganda generously peppers this eclectic mix with quotations from various Russian philosophers of the early twentieth century (known as the “Silver Age” of Russia’s culture), from Ivan Ilyin to Nikolai Berdyaev. These quotations tend to be taken completely out of any context to which they originally belonged.