Volume 9 Numbers 1/2

Winter/Spring 2000

Feature

Putin's Russia
     Introduction
     Stephen Holmes

As Thomas E. Graham, Jr. observes in his contribution to this symposium, state inca-pacity (for instance, the Russian military's inability to discriminate quickly between an incoming Iranian missile and a submarine-launched American one) poses as great a danger to the West as did Soviet state strength before 1991. That is one reason why Vladimir Putin's amazingly sudden rise to power, despite his brutal venture in Chechnya, has been more or less welcomed in the West. But if he succeeds in his announced aim of strengthening the Russian state, what are the chances that Putin will use his enhanced powers for the benefit of ordinary Russians? To float an answer to this question is to guess how Putin's Russia will differ from Yeltsin's. Putin says that he favors "a law-based state," as Thomas Remington points out below. But does the new president, elected on March 26 and inaugurated on May 7, actually want to impose a single set of rules on all Russians, without favoring Kremlin insiders over political rivals and their financial backers? And what well-organized social forces would support him if he undertook a serious effort to decriminalize the Russian economy and eliminate corruption from the public sector? Although Putin paints himself as an ardent advo-cate of equality before the law and publicly accountable government, his critics do not hesitate to denounce him as a closet autocrat. The two articles here by Nikolai Sokov and Oleg Panfilov, although written from distinct perspectives, both suggest that the new president, during his tenure as prime minister and acting head of state, has pursued state strength by sacrificing important elements of liberalism and democracy. So should we now expect Putin to wheel his country sharply backward into authoritarianism? That the Russian political system is only weakly democratic, even today, is the least that might be said. Voters have no influence over important political deci-sions, and they know it. Parliamentary elections in Russia, in particular, coexist with unaccountable government, because parliamentary committees offer no serious form of monitoring and control over the central ministries. Richard Rose, in his contribution here, explains why the link between voters and their representatives, too, remains so attenuated in Russia. Basically, voters in parliamentary elections cannot punish or reward incumbent parties, based on past performance, not only because the executive has kept its distance from all parties but also because the parties loosely associated with the Kremlin over the past decade have kaleidoscopically dissolved and re-coalesced from election to election. Thus, more than three-fifths of the PR seats in the new Duma were won by parties that had no seats in the last Duma and, indeed, did not exist in 1995.

In short, because of Russia's undeveloped party system, Putin can safely support "democracy" without worrying that periodic elections will compromise the dark secrecy or unchecked freedom of government action. On the other hand, because periodic elections have obviously done nothing to help Russian voters discipline elected officials into serving the public interest, infringements of demo-cratic liberties (such as harassment of investigative journalists) stir scant public outcry.

To get beyond these two opposed takes on Putin (the sincere democrat versus the crafty authoritarian), we need only ask the following questions: Was he elected to office by the Russian public or elevated to office by a clique? To whom is he indebted for his accession to power? And, more pertinently, whose cooperation does he now need in order to consolidate his authority and govern the country? Do the new president's potential allies want the Federal Securities Commission and the Central Bank to apply general rules impartially or to lavish favors on insiders? Will political connections count for nothing in the ongoing privatization of public assets? The all-too-obvious answers to these simple questions do not necessarily inspire optimism about short-term prospects in Russia for either the rule of law or governance in the public interest. But they also cast doubt on Putin's ability to rule with an iron hand.

Emphasis on Putin's personal intentions, in fact, may simply be misplaced. The problems he faces are daunting, and the resources at his disposal paltry. The current system's capacity for self-defense and survival could well be stronger than any individual's ability to attack it successfully. Putin may want to eliminate corrupt bureaucrats, as both Louise I. Shelley and Stephen Handelman explain, but where will he find the noncorrupt bureaucrats to help him orchestrate such a cleanup? He can selectively break the backs of some so-called oligarchs while promoting others; but which banker-industrialists will support him if he indiscriminately and simultaneously launches a confiscatory attack on them all?

A similar point can be made about the sheer disor-ganization of the contemporary Russian state. (Recent articles on the perils of "state capture" by financial-industrial groups in Russia routinely fail to mention that, in many cases, the Russian state is not coherent enough to be worth capturing.) The fragmentation of Russia's central government into rival agencies-sometimes only failing to communicate, at other times bitterly feuding- has inadvertently but inevitably promoted the dispersal of power from the center to the periphery of the country. If Putin wishes to strengthen the enfeebled Russian state bequeathed to him by Yeltsin, if he aspires to regather the central government's scattered powers, then he will have to induce the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank, for instance, or the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Ministry, to stop working at cross purposes, to put aside their turf wars, and to coop-erate on solving common problems. But can he do this? And, unable to rally followers beyond a strong and grip-ping ideology, where will he find support inside his maddeningly fragmented bureaucracy for overcoming its paralyzing incoherence?

The way Russia's new regime will behave in the next months and years is explored only tentatively by the contributors to this symposium. We still know too little to speak with even modest confidence about what is to come. But the shape of Putin's Russia will probably depend less on the new president's private intentions, be these liberal or illiberal, than on the bargains he will have to make to obtain the political support he so plainly requires.

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