Volume 9 Numbers 1/2

Winter/Spring 2000

Feature

Putin's Russia
     Putin's Third Way
     Russia and The "Strong State" Ideal
     Thomas F. Remington

Calls to strengthen the state have become widespread in Russia. Liberals and conserva-tives alike take it for granted that Russia's statehood was weakened by the unsuccessful reforms of the 1990s and that the restoration of state strength must now take high priority. Certainly this was a theme of Vladimir Putin's public statements in the run-up to the March presidential election. As we read in Putin's address, "Russia on the Threshold of the Millennium," posted to the government's web site in December, "Russia needs strong state power and must have it." (Available in English at www.pravitelstvo. gov.ru/english/statVP_engl_1.html.) Few Russians would disagree. It is scarcely surprising when a Russian leader calls for a "strong state," any more than when a conser-vative candidate for office in the United States calls for restoring traditional "family values." In an earlier era, unsentimental journalists in America referred to such campaign boilerplate as "bomfoggery," because of the frequency with which candidates (notably Nelson Rockefeller) liked to expatiate on the theme of the "brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God [BOMFOG]." In Russia, the phrase "strong state" represents an analogously clichéd appeal to conserva-tive values. Noteworthy, nevertheless, is Putin's treatment of the idea. The position he takes gives a new twist to the rhetoric of state strength in Russia. Whether Putin himself actually believes these ideas is another matter (after all, an article posted to a web site is probably targeted to a particular segment of the society). But his article, like other recent statements by Russian leaders and thinkers, does reveal a new way of conceiving state strength. In the article, Putin immediately qualifies his call for a strong state by adding that "this is not a call for a totalitarian system. History convincingly testifies that all dictatorships and authoritarian systems of govern-ment are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. For all their defects, humanity has not thought up anything better. A strong state power in Russia means a democratic, law-governed, effective federal state." Putin argues that Russians have come to appreciate the blessings of democracy, of a state bound by law, and of personal and political freedom. Yet people are "troubled by the obvious weakening of state power. The society wants to see the restoration of a directing and regulating role for the state to the degree necessary, proceeding from the traditions and current situation of the country" (italics added). Putin, at least in his public pronouncements, is refusing to treat state strength as a sacred value. Rather, he calls for a state that is only as strong as is necessary and consistent with democratic freedoms. This moderately liberal position may not sound radical or original to Western ears, but it is a significant shift in emphasis for Russian discourse. Moreover, it is a conception that has become widely shared among the political elite. Putin's treatment of the strong-state theme differs from earlier models of state strength in Russian thought by virtue of its insistence on law, democracy, and freedom. In Russia's political tradition, the cultural stereotypes of the strong state have often been apologias for absolutism. But the Russian tradition contains both dominant and counterpoint motifs, often comprising antipodal pairs of values, such as centralized power and fraternal equality, or the hierar-chical and martial ideals associated with the fatherland versus the nurturing, communal elements associated with the rodina (motherland). One of the longest-running themes in Russian political culture has been the model of "dual Russia." As Robert Tucker has shown, images of the relationship of state and society in Russian thought have often pictured rulers and ruled as divided by a deep chasm. Those holding state power regarded society with a mixture of fear and incomprehension, while society viewed those "up above" as alien, or as interested mainly in maximizing the extraction of labor, wealth, or military might from society. Of course, many bridges have been built over the state-society abyss. In times of great military danger or triumph, state and society have shared a national purpose. At times, great individuals have risen up from the depths of society to become great figures in the state. Or society has embraced a notable figure as "their own," someone close to the people who can mediate and intercede with the authorities, like a saint in popular religion. Periods of thaw, when political controls were loosened, have brought state and society closer together, but such loosenings have been tran-sient. Through much of Russia's history, the state's strength was often understood by both state and society to come at the expense of society's well-being. In the lapidary phrase of a great nineteenth-century Russian historian, quoted by Robert Tucker, "the state swelled up, the people grew lean." Recently, in this journal, Richard Rose offered a different metaphor for the same pattern, that of the "hourglass society." In this model, mediating institu-tions between state and society are weak. While most people have little sense of confidence or participation in the state, they do have dense networks of interper-sonal ties of family and friendship. Policymakers, in turn, feel little sense of obligation toward or account-ability to those they rule and, instead, tend to be mistrustful and fearful of the "dark masses." In effect, state and society each inhabit their own sphere, and the connection between them is tenuous, as narrow as the funnel through which the sand must pass. In the "dual Russia" model, so long as the state's stake in society was primarily extractive, the machinery of power, including law, existed to govern and control society. In some phases, the state strove to build up society's capacity to provide resources to the state. Peter and Stalin are paired in the minds of many ultranationalists today as heroic figures who expanded the industrial base of the state, increased the state's control over society, and made Russia a mighty and feared military power in the world. The ideal of the "strong state" in the sense of derzhava-a great world power-is inseparable, for such self-styled patriots, from the image of a commanding patriarchal leader who, through force of will, defeats all natural and social enemies to build up the state's formidable might. Still other idealized images of a strong state exist in Russia's political tradition. One is the twinned metaphors of "cudgel" and "machine." In 1919, the Bolshevik leader Alexander Shliapnikov attempted to explain why Bolshevik efforts to construct an effective centralized state were so unsuccessful. He counter-posed two contrasting principles of organization: the dubinushka, or cudgel, and the mashinushka, or little machine. The problem with the Bolshevik state was that Bolsheviks typically tried to smash their way through obstacles, using force and fear, wielding the cudgel of coercion. Better, he said, to construct effi-cient administrative structures, similar to the machinelike organization of the Ford Motor Company, where every worker performed a special-ized task in the production process. Shliapnikov's simile neatly identified two equally unattainable ideals in the Bolsheviks' outlook: the ideal of irresistible power and that of a state run like an ideal Weberian administrative hierarchy, free of the burden of political choice, and as smoothly efficient as the Ford produc-tion line of their imagination. The flaw in Bolshevik and later Soviet thought was to overlook the need to delegate and share power, to find institutional means to represent and aggregate interests, and-above all- to recognize that political choice requires trade-offs. Bolshevik leaders were still under the sway of the utopian impulse in Lenin's and Marx's thinking, which imagined that the kingdom of socialism could bring full centralization of power and a frictionless administrative hierarchy-without requiring politics. Had Shliapnikov followed the logic of his idea further-and perhaps come upon Charles Lindblom's imagery of the "thumb" of administrative pressure versus the "fingers" of self-coordinating, self-equili-brating autonomous agents-he might have considered the possibility that the market could be a useful instrument for bringing about social order without requiring the state to turn into a vast, intru-sive, oppressive bureaucratic monster. In any case, it took many decades before Russian thinkers began to recognize that the market might be complementary to the state, rather than a chaos-inducing, intrinsically unjust instrument of social exploitation. In the meantime, Brezhnev-era conceptions of state strength emphasized-in part, simply to avoid confronting the imperative of market-oriented reforms-the USSR's achievement of strategic parity with the United States. As Brezhnev's foreign minister once crowed, no major regional problems existed in the world that could be resolved without the partici-pation of the Soviet Union. At times, the treatment of détente in Soviet writings came close to suggesting that the Soviet Union and the United States, as the two superpowers, ruled the world as a condominium. While the United States never accepted this premise, the realpolitik of the Nixon years required a recogni-tion of a Soviet sphere of influence that reached into Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. But the hollowness of this derzhava model of state strength was exposed through the Soviet Union's imperial overreach in Afghanistan and its inability to compete with the United States in the rapid development of the new military technologies threatening to upset the balance of offensive nuclear might. Flat living standards, the burden of penurious third-world client states, and technological lag all convinced younger Soviet leaders and thinkers that the Soviet model of a strong state had led to a dead end. So in the Gorbachev period new models were sought; and Soviet thinking about the constituent elements of state strength shifted. One of the lasting conceptual innovations of the Gorbachev period was the new concept of the "law-governed state" (pravovoe gosudarstvo), conceptually a cousin to the Anglo-American notion of "rule of law" but closer in spirit and meaning to the German Rechtsstaat. What is striking about this idea is how universally popular it was and has remained. It is the only slogan from the glasnost era to remain fixed in Russian political discourse, when many of the other catchwords associ-ated with Gorbachev's reforms have long been forgotten. (Who now recalls "acceleration" or, for that matter, perestroika, except as a bitter memory?) But the idea that the state ought to be under the authority of law has been a widely popular view, perhaps since- with political opposition now legitimate-opposing camps can all agree that an effective, independent system of law protects each of them. I remember inter-viewing two members of the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1992 who were working together on issues of legal reform with a degree of harmony and professionalism that surprised them both. They explained this easy collaboration by referring to the joke, only half-facetious, to the effect that each was afraid that if the other's camp came to power he might well wind up in jail, in which case he would want as fair and impartial a trial as possible. Some institutions palpably work to benefit all rival parties. Public-opinion surveys confirm that the ideal of the strong state today has the greatest appeal among those segments of the populace who are least supportive of democratic values-the elderly, the less-educated, and those living outside the largest cities. Like "family values," such an ideal is linked to conser-vative and traditional outlooks. But in the course of the rethinking of political values that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, new ideas arose that challenged the older, simplistic version of the strong-state ideal. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s altered the structure of the Soviet regime by loosening the center's control over the regions, by legalizing party competition, and by introducing elements of a market economy. These reforms fundamentally challenged the traditional equation of social unity with state strength. In 1991, as Gorbachev and Yeltsin tussled over the balance of power between the union center and the constituent republics in the Soviet Union, a new formula came to be accepted, "strong center-strong regions." This maxim, which implied a complemen-tary and balanced relationship between two zones of power, was a small step toward rethinking older Russian models of state strength. At the same time, acceptance of political pluralism spread. In 1987, Gorbachev had cautiously opened the door to pluralism by welcoming "a socialist pluralism of opinions," meaning that the polit-ical debate was open to ideological competition, so long as a few socialist fundamentals remained untouched, and there was no party competition. In 1990, he embraced the institutional manifestation of pluralism by removing the constitutional ban on rival parties to the CPSU. Among the political elite, and to a lesser extent the general public, ideological pluralism came to be accepted as a normal feature of a developed society, and, by a wide margin, Russians considered multiparty competition a positive good. Public-opinion surveys in the early 1990s in Russia found that over three-quarters of the respondents considered party competition healthy for the political system. Support for multiple parties and other democratic institutions remains relatively high at the end of the decade, even though Russians are profoundly mistrustful of the existing political parties and other vehicles for representing and aggregating interests. As a description of contemporary Russian aspirations, therefore, Putin's assertion that Russians want a strong state but also value democratic liberties and the rule of law has considerable validity. The market structure also gained wide, popular acceptance, not as a replacement for state economic direction and redistribution but as a complement to it. One of the most powerful Gorbachev-era critiques of the Soviet economic model was that it was based on the principle of state compulsion of labor. In his famous 1988 essay, "Sources," in Novyi Mir, the late giant of Soviet journalism, Vasilii Seliunin, analyzed the history of the Soviet regime, showing that Soviet social organization had originated in such Bolshevik practices as rationing, requisitioning of products, and labor conscription during War Communism, all of which were revived under Stalin and only slightly modified by his successors. Now, however, it was occasionally recognized that the market could be an efficient allocative mechanism for at least some economic sectors. In time, the idea became widely accepted among Russians. Simultaneously, writers began to accept the imported concept of "civil society" as it referred to a sphere of independent civic activity and authority that is not in competition with the state but complements it. Gradually, a consensus is building around a Russian version of the "third way," which is neither the radical neoliberalism of the early 1990s nor the ultranationalist statism of the "red-brown" extremists, but a reinterpretation of the ideal of a strong state. This reinterpretation seems to be acceptable to most elements of the political class. In this emerging conception, the state would play a directive role in planning and directing investment resources, following a heavily redistributive social policy. The high courts (Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, and Arbitration [Commercial] Court) would have genuine political independence and would protect the integrity of the state against separatism in the regions and political extremism by the parties. The state would respect property rights and the sphere of civil society, although closely monitoring the limits of permissible behavior. The watchword would be "strong state-strong society." The existing Constitution would be the framework for the effective exercise of state power. The politically canny chairman of the Constitutional Court, Marat Baglai, recently offered a version of just such a "strong state and strong society" approach. (And it was surely no coincidence that his statement closely echoed Putin's web-site article.) At a recent Academy of Sciences conference on the topic of the Russian state and law on the eve of the new millennium, Baglai defended both the existing Constitution and the strong-state ideal. Declaring that "Russia does not need a replacement for the Constitution or radical changes in the mechanism provided in it of state power," he noted that there are nonetheless some "excesses" in the 1993 Constitution that weaken state foundations. So Russian state power must strengthen itself. But this does not mean moving to authoritarianism, even if there is a toughening of laws and strengthening of the power ministries. Moreover, he argued, the state cannot do without a "mighty upsurge of free public activity." In his internet article, Putin took a pragmatic view of Russia's situation. Russia, he wrote, is not about to become a second England or United States, with their deep liberal traditions. In Russia's tradition, as he pointed out, the "state's structures and institu-tions have always played an extremely important role. For a Russian, a strong state is not an anomaly and not something to fight but rather is the source and guar-antor of order, the initiator and chief moving force of any changes." Russia's traditions-statism, collec-tivism, paternalism-are facts, and it is pointless to judge them as good or bad in themselves. They are realities that all Russian leaders must accept. But in selectively combining these traditions with the indis-pensable universal values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, Russia should count upon a vigorous civil society to serve as monitor and counterweight to the strong state. As Putin put it: "Personally, I give primacy to the importance of establishing relations of partnership between executive power and civil society, the development of the latter's institutions and struc-tures, [and] conducting an active and tough struggle against corruption" (my translation). Let the state be . . . an effective coordinator of the economic and social forces of the country, elaborating the balance of their interests, determining the optimal goals and parameters of social develop-ment, and creating the conditions and mechanisms for their achievement. This of course goes beyond the customary formula, which reduces the state's role to working out the rules of the game and ensuring that they are observed. With time, in all likelihood, we will come to this formula. For now, the situation demands a greater degree of state influence on economic and social processes. In determining the scale and mechanisms of the system of state regulation, we should be guided by the prin-ciple, "the state as much as is essential, freedom as much as is necessary." Putin also deals with the linked concept of derzhavnost', the status of being a great world power. Noting, again, that Russians have believed for centuries that Russia should be such a power, he again reinterprets the tradition in a pragmatic and modernizing spirit: Today these inclinations must be filled with new content. In the contemporary world the great-power status of a country is manifested not so much in its military strength but in its ability to be a leader in the creation and application of advanced technologies, the provision of a high standard of living for its people, and in its skill in protecting its security reliably and defending its national interests in the international arena. Whether Putin's actions will match his state-ments remains an open question. But he has set forth a new and far more promising conceptual model of the "strong state" for future Russian leaders should they choose a democratic future after a troubled and often self-defeating past.

Thomas F. Remington is professor of political science at Emory University. His research concerns legislative politics and legislative-executive relations in Russia. He is author of Political Representation in a Transitional Regime: The Evolution of Parliamentary Institutions in Russia, 1989-1999 (Yale University Press, forthcoming).

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