excerpted from
Russia's Managed Democracy
by Perry Anderson, London Review
of Books
www.zmag.org, January 23, 2007
On the evidence of comparative opinion
polls, [Putin] is the most popular national leader alive today.
Since he came to power six years ago, he has enjoyed the continuous
support of over 70 per cent of his people, a record no other contemporary
politician begins to approach. For comparison, Chirac now has
an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair
of 30 per cent.
Such eminence may seem perverse, but it
is not unintelligible. Putin's authority derives, in the first
place, from the contrast with the ruler who made him. From a Western
standpoint, Yeltsin's regime was by no means a failure. By ramming
through a more sweeping privatisation of industry than any carried
out in Eastern Europe, and maintaining a façade of competitive
elections, it laid the foundations of a Russian capitalism for
the new century. However sodden or buffoonish Yeltsin's personal
conduct, these were solid achievements that secured him unstinting
support from the United States, where Clinton, stewing in indignities
of his own, was the appropriate leader for mentoring him. As Strobe
Talbott characteristically put it, 'Clinton and Yeltsin bonded.
Big time.' In the eyes of most Russians, on the other hand, Yeltsin's
administration set loose a wave of corruption and criminality;
stumbled chaotically from one political crisis to another; presided
over an unprecedented decline in living standards and collapse
of life expectancy; humiliated the country by obeisance to foreign
powers; destroyed the currency and ended in bankruptcy. By 1998,
according to official statistics, GDP had fallen over a decade
by some 45 per cent; the mortality rate had increased by 50 per
cent; government revenues had nearly halved; the crime rate had
doubled. It is no surprise that as this misrule drew to a close,
Yeltsin's support among the population was in single figures.
Against this background, any new administration
would have been hard put not to do better. Putin, however, had
the good luck to arrive in power just as oil prices took off.
With export earnings from the energy sector suddenly soaring,
economic recovery was rapid and continuous. Since 1999, GDP has
grown by 6-7 per cent a year. The budget is now in surplus, with
a stabilisation fund of some $80 billion set aside for any downturn
in oil prices, and the rouble is convertible. Capitalisation of
the stock market stands at 80 per cent of GDP. Foreign debt has
been paid down. Reserves top $250 billion. In short, the country
has been the largest single beneficiary of the world commodities
boom of the early 21st century. For ordinary Russians, this has
brought a tangible improvement in living standards. Though average
real wages remain very low, less than $400 dollars a month, they
have doubled under Putin (personal incomes are nearly two times
higher because remuneration is often paid in non-wage form, to
avoid some taxes). That increase is the most important basis of
his support. To relative prosperity, Putin has added stability.
Cabinet convulsions, confrontations with the legislature, lapses
into presidential stupor, are things of the past. Administration
may not be that much more efficient, but order - at least north
of the Caucasus - has been restored. Last but not least, the country
is no longer 'under external management', as the pointed local
phrase puts it. The days when the IMF dictated budgets, and the
Foreign Ministry acted as little more than an American consulate,
are over. Gone are the campaign managers for re-election of the
president, jetting in from California. Freed from foreign debt
and diplomatic supervision, Russia is an independent state once
again.
Prosperity, stability, sovereignty: the
national consensus around Putin rests on his satisfaction of these
primordial concerns. That there may be less in each than meets
the eye matters little, politically speaking, so long as their
measure is memories of the abyss under Yeltsin. By that standard
the material progress, however relative, is real. But the stratospheric
polls reflect something else as well - an image of the ruler.
Putin cuts a somewhat colourless, frigid figure in the West. In
cultures accustomed to more effusive styles of leadership, the
sleek, stoat-shaped head and stone-cold eyes offer little purchase
for affective projection. In Russia, however, charisma wears another
face. When he came to power, Putin lacked any trace of it. But
possession of the presidency has altered him. For Weber, who had
the Hebrew prophets in mind, charisma was by definition extra-institutional
- it was a kind of magic that could only be personal. He could
not foresee postmodern conditions, in which the spectacle is a
higher power, capable of dissolving the boundaries between the
two.
Once installed in the presidency, Putin
has cultivated two attributes that have given him an aura capable
of outlasting it. The first is the image of firm, where necessary
ruthless authority. Historically, the brutal imposition of order
has been more often admired than feared in Russia. Rather than
his portrait suffering from the shadow of the KGB, Putin has converted
it into a halo of austere discipline. In what remains in many
ways a macho society, toughness - prowess in judo and drops into
criminal slang are part of Putin's kit - continues to be valued,
and not only by men: polls report that Putin's most enthusiastic
fans are often women. But there is another, less obvious side
to his charisma. Part of his chilly magnetism is cultural. He
is widely admired for his command of the language. Here, too,
contrast is everything. Lenin was the last ruler of the country
who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin's Georgian accent
was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev's
vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could
scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial
southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin's slurred diction the
better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of
expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more
or less correct idiom, comes as music to many Russians.
In a strange way Putin's prestige is thus
also intellectual. For all his occasional crudities, at least
in his mouth the national tongue is no longer obviously humiliated.
This is not just a matter of cases and tenses, or pronunciation.
Putin has developed into what by today's undemanding standards
is an articulate politician, who can field questions from viewers
on television for hours as confidently and lucidly as he lectures
journalists in interviews, or addresses partners at summit meetings,
where he has excelled at sardonic repartee. The intelligence is
limited and cynical, above the level of his Anglo-American counterparts,
but without much greater ambition. It has been enough, however,
to give Putin half of his brittle lustre in Russia. There, an
apparent union of fist and mind has captured the popular imaginary.
The combination of an oil and gas bonanza
with a persona of clear-headed power has been enough to demarcate
Putin, in public opinion, decisively from what came before and
to assure him mastery of the political scene. The actual regime
over which he presides, however, although it has involved important
changes, shows less of a break with Yeltsin's time than might
appear. The economy that Yeltsin left behind was in the grip of
a tiny group of profiteers, who had seized the country's major
assets in a racket - so-called loans for shares - devised by one
of its beneficiaries, Vladimir Potanin, and imposed by Chubais,
operating as the neo-liberal Rasputin at Yeltsin's court. The
president and his extended 'Family' (relatives, aides, hangers-on)
naturally took their own share of the loot. It is doubtful whether
the upshot had any equivalent in the entire history of capitalism.
The leading seven oligarchs to emerge from these years - Berezovsky,
Gusinsky, Potanin, Abramovich, Fridman, Khodorkovsky, Aven - ended
up controlling a vast slice of national wealth, most of the media
and much of the Duma. Putin was picked by the Family to ensure
these arrangements did not come under scrutiny afterwards. His
first act in office was to grant Yeltsin immunity from prosecution,
and he has generally looked after his immediate entourage. (Chubais
got Russia's electricity grid as a parting gift.)
But if he wanted a stronger government
than Yeltsin's, he could not afford to leave the oligarchs in
undisturbed possession of their powers. After warning them that
they could keep their riches only if they stayed out of politics,
he moved to curb them. The three most ambitious magnates - Gusinsky,
Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky - were broken: two fleeing into exile,
the third dispatched to a labour camp. A fourth, Abramovich, though
still persona grata in the Kremlin, has opted for residence abroad.
Putin has taken back under state control parts of the oil industry,
and created out of the country's gas monopoly a giant conglomerate
with a current market capitalisation of $200 billion. The public
sector's share of GDP has risen only modestly, by about 5 per
cent. But for the time being, the booty capitalism of the 1990s
has come to a halt. In regaining control of some stretches of
the commanding heights of the economy, the state has strengthened
its leverage. The balance of power has shifted away from extraordinary
accumulations of private plunder towards more traditional forms
of bureaucratic management.
These changes are a focus of some anxiety
in the Western business press, where fears are often expressed
of an ominous statism that threatens the liberalisation of the
1990s. In reality, markets are in no danger. The Russian state
has been strengthened as an economic agent, but not with any socialising
intent, simply as a quarry of political power. In other respects,
Putin has taken the same underlying programme as his predecessor
several steps further. Land has finally been privatised, a threshold
Yeltsin's regime was unable to cross. Moscow boasts more billionaires
than New York, yet a flat income tax of 13 per cent has been introduced,
at Yegor Gaidar's urging. A highly regressive 'unified social
tax' falls on those who can least afford it. Welfare benefits
have been monetised and slashed. Key economic ministries remain
in the hands of committed marketeers. Neo-liberalism is safe enough
in Russia today. The president has made this clear to all who
are interested. On a visit to Germany in October, brushing aside
questions about the death of Politkovskaya, he told his hosts:
'We do not understand the nervousness of the press about Russia
investing abroad. Where does this hysteria come from? It's not
the Red Army that wants to come to Germany. It's just the same
capitalists as you.'
The political system put together since
Yeltsin's departure is a similar mixture of novelty and continuity.
It is now de rigueur for Western journalists - even the most ardent
boosters of business opportunities in the New Russia, or the humblest
spaniels of New Labour, anxious not to smudge Blair's friendship
with Putin (two roles that are not always distinct) - to deplore
the muzzling of the media, the neutering of parliament and the
decline of political freedoms under Putin. These realities, however,
all have their origins under Yeltsin, whose illegalities were
much starker. No act of Putin's compares with the bombardment
of the parliament by tanks, or the fraudulent referendum that
ensued, imposing the autocratic constitution under which Russia
continues to be ruled. Yet because Yeltsin was considered a pliable,
even if somewhat disreputable utensil of Western policies, the
first action was applauded and the second ignored by virtually
every foreign correspondent of the time. Nor was there much criticism
of the brazen manipulation of press and television, controlled
by the oligarchs, to engineer Yeltsin's re-election. Still less
was any attention paid to what was happening within the machinery
of state itself. Far from the demise of the USSR reducing the
number of Russian functionaries, the bureaucracy had - few post-Communist
facts are more arresting - actually doubled in size by the end
of Yeltsin's stewardship, to some 1.3 million. Not only that.
At the topmost levels of the regime, the proportion of officials
drawn from the security services or armed forces soared above
their modest quotas under the late CPSU: composing a mere 5 per
cent under Gorbachev, it has been calculated that they occupied
no less than 47 per cent of the highest posts under Yeltsin.
Serviceable though much of this was for
any ruler, it remained a ramshackle inheritance. Putin has tightened
and centralised it into a more coherent structure of power. In
possession of voter confidence, he has not needed to shell deputies
or forge plebiscites. But to meet any eventuality, the instruments
of coercion and intimidation have been strengthened. The budget
of the FSB - the post-Communist successor to the KGB - has trebled,
and the number of positions in the federal administration held
by personnel brigaded from security backgrounds has continued
to rise. Over half of Russia's key power-holders now come from
its repressive apparatuses. In jovial spirit, Putin allowed himself
to quip to fellow veterans in the Lubyanka: 'Comrades, our strategic
mission is accomplished - we have seized power.'
Still, these developments are mainly accentuations
of what was already there. Institutionally, the more striking
innovation has been the integration of the economic and political
pillars of Putin's system of command. In the 1990s, people spoke
of the assorted crooks who grabbed control of the country's raw
materials as syroviki, and of officials recruited from
the military or secret police as siloviki.[1] Under Putin,
the two have fused. The new regime is dominated by a web of Kremlin
staffers and ministers with 'security profiles', who also head
the largest state companies quoted on the stock market. The oligarchs
had mixed business and politics flamboyantly enough. But these
were raids by freebooters from the first into the second domain.
Putin has turned the tables on them. Under his system, a more
organic symbiosis between the two has been achieved, this time
under the dominance of politics. Today, two deputy prime ministers
are chairmen, respectively, of Gazprom and Russian Railways; four
deputy chiefs of staff in the Kremlin occupy the same positions
in the second largest oil company, a nuclear fuel giant, an energy
transport enterprise and Aeroflot. The minister of industry is
chairman of the oil pipeline monopoly; the finance minister not
only of the diamond monopoly, but of the second largest state
bank in the country; the telecoms minister of the biggest mobile
phone operator. A uniquely Russian form of cumul des mandats
blankets the scene.
Corruption is built into any such connubium
between profits and power. By general consent, it is now even
more widespread than under Yeltsin, but its character has changed.
The comparison with China is revealing. In the PRC, corruption
is a scourge detested by the population; no other issue arouses
the anger of ordinary citizens to such a degree. The central leadership
of the CCP is nervously aware of the danger corruption poses to
its authority, and on occasion makes a spectacular example of
officials who have stolen too much, without being able to tackle
the roots of the problem. In Russia, on the other hand, there
appears to be little active indignation at the corruption rife
at all levels of society. A common attitude is that an official
who takes bribes is better than one who inflicts blows: a change
to which Brezhnev's 'era of stagnation', after the end of the
terror, habituated people. In this climate, Putin - so far, at
least, lacking the personal greed that distracted Yeltsin - can
coolly use corruption as an instrument of state policy, operating
it as both a system of rewards for those who comply with him,
and of blackmail for those who might resist.
The scale of the slush funds now available
to the Kremlin has made it easy, in turn, to convert television
stations and newspapers into mouthpieces of the regime. The fate
of NTV and Izvestiya, the one created by Gusinsky, the
other controlled by Potanin, is emblematic. Both are now dependencies
of Gazprom. ORT, once Berezovsky's TV channel, is currently run
by a factotum from the FSB. With such changes, Putin's control
of the media is becoming more and more comprehensive. What is
left over, that ownership does not ensure, self-censorship increasingly
neuters. The Gleichschaltung of parliament and political
parties is, if anything, even more impressive. The presidential
party, United Russia, and its assorted allies, with no more specific
programme than unconditional support for Putin, command some 70
per cent of the seats in the Duma, enough to rewrite the constitution
if that were required. But a one-party state is not in the offing.
On the contrary, mindful of the rules of any self-respecting democracy,
the Kremlin's political technicians are now putting together an
opposition party designed to clear the bedraggled remnants of
Communism - liberalism has already been expunged - from the political
scene, and provide a decorative pendant to the governing party
in the next parliament.
In sum, the methodical construction of
a personalised authoritarian regime with a strong domestic base
is well under way. Part of its appeal has come from its recovery
of external sovereignty. But here the gap between image and reality
is wider than it is on the domestic front. Putin came to power
on the crest of a colonial war. In March 1999, the West launched
its attack on Yugoslavia. Planning for the reconquest of Chechnya
began that same month, under Yeltsin. In early August, Putin -
then head of the FSB - was made prime minister. In the last week
of September, invoking hostile incursions into Dagestan, Russia
launched an aerial blitz on Chechnya explicitly modelled on Nato's
six-week bombardment of Yugoslavia. Up to a quarter of the population
was driven out of the country, before an invasion had even begun.
After enormous destruction from the air, the Russian army advanced
on Grozny, which was besieged in early December. For nearly two
months Chechen resistance held out against a hail of fuel-air
explosives and tactical missiles that left the city a more completely
burnt-out ruin than Stalingrad had ever been. At the height of
the fighting, on New Year's Eve, Yeltsin handed over his office
to Putin. New presidential elections were set for late March.
By the end of February, the Russian high command felt able to
announce that 'the counter-terrorism operation is over.' Putin
flew down to celebrate victory. Clinton hailed the 'liberation
of Grozny'. Blair sped to St Petersburg to embrace the liberator.
Two weeks later, Putin was elected by a landslide.
Such was the baptism of the present regime,
at which holy water was sprinkled by the West. Bush added his
unction the following year, after looking into the Russian president's
soul. In return for this goodwill Putin was under some obligation,
which persisted. The occupation of the country did not end national
resistance: Chechnya became the corner of hell it has remained
to this day. But no matter how atrocious the actions of Russian
troops and their local collaborators, Western chancelleries have
tactfully looked away. After 9/11, Chechnya was declared another
front in the war on terror, and in the common cause Putin opened
Russian airspace for B52s to bomb Afghanistan, accepted American
bases in Central Asia, and primed the Northern Alliance for Kabul.
So eager was Moscow to please Washington that in the emotion of
the moment, it even abandoned its listening post in Cuba, of scant
relevance to Enduring Freedom in West Asia. But it soon became
clear there would be little reward for such gestures. In December
2001, the Bush administration scrapped the ABM Treaty. Russian
friends were sidelined in the puppet government installed in Afghanistan.
Jackson-Vanik trade restrictions were not repealed.
In this climate, it was asking too much
for Russia to underwrite the war on Iraq. Still, the US was not
to be antagonised. Left to his own devices, Putin would have preferred
to say the bare minimum about it. But once France and Germany
came out against the impending invasion, it was not easy for him
to sidle quietly off-stage. On a visit to Paris, Chirac cornered
him into a joint communiqué opposing the war - though the
French alone threatened a veto in the Security Council. Once back
home, Putin took care to phone Bush with expressions of sympathy
for his difficult decision, and made no fuss about the occupation.
Yet by the end of his first term in office, the terms of Russia's
relationship with the West had changed. A fortnight after Putin
was re-elected in mid-March 2004, Nato expanded to Russia's doorstep,
with the accession of the Baltic states. But even if Washington
had given Moscow little or nothing, Russia was no longer a supplicant.
Oil prices, little more than $18 a barrel when Putin came to power,
were now over $40, and rising rapidly towards their current level
at $60 plus - netting Russia a windfall of $37 billion in extra
revenues in 2005 alone. More autonomy was now affordable. The
upshot so far has remained quite limited: clumsy attempts to check
further Western entrenchment along Russia's southern marches,
by browbeating Ukraine and Georgia; refusal to derogate control
of pipelines to Europe; revision of offshore concessions in Sakhalin.
But Russia's shadow as an energy giant is lengthening. It is now
the world's largest producer of gas and, after Saudi Arabia, the
second largest exporter of oil. As Europe becomes more dependent
on its energy, the country's leverage is bound to grow. No diplomatic
revolution is in prospect. But Russia has ceased to be a ward
of the West...
...The reality is that Russia's rank in
the world has been irreversibly transformed. It was a great power
continuously for three centuries: longer - this is often forgotten
- than any single country in the West. In square miles, it is
still the largest state on earth. But it no longer has a major
industrial base. Its economy has revived as an export platform
for raw materials, with all the risks of over-reliance on volatile
world prices familiar in First and Third World countries alike
- over-valuation, inflation, import addiction, sudden implosion.
Although it still possesses the only nuclear stockpile anywhere
near the American arsenal, its defence industry and armed services
are a shadow of the Soviet past. In territory, it has shrunk behind
its borders at the end of the 17th century. Its population is
smaller than that of Bangladesh. Its gross national income is
less than that of Mexico.
More fundamental in the long run for the
country's identity than any of these changes, some of them temporary,
may be the drastic alteration in its geopolitical setting. Russia
is now wedged between a still expanding European Union, with eight
times its GDP and three times its population, and a vastly empowered
China, with five times its GDP and ten times its population. Historically
speaking, this is a sudden and total change in the relative magnitudes
flanking it on either side. Few Russians have yet quite registered
the scale of the ridimensionamento of their country. To
the west, just when the Russian elites felt they could at last
rejoin Europe, where the country properly belonged, after the
long Soviet isolation, they suddenly find themselves confronted
with a scene in which they cannot be one European power among
others (and the largest), as in the 18th or 19th century, but
face a vast, quasi-unified EU continental bloc, from which they
are formally - and, to all appearances, permanently - excluded.
To the east, there is the rising giant of China, overshadowing
the recovery of Russia, but still utterly remote to the minds
of most Russians. Against all this, Moscow has only the energy
card - no small matter, but scarcely a commensurate counter-balance.
These new circumstances are liable to
deal a double blow to Russia's traditional sense of itself. On
the one hand, racist assumptions of the superiority of white to
yellow peoples remain deeply ingrained in popular attitudes. Long
accustomed to regarding themselves as - relatively speaking -
civilised and the Chinese as backward, if not barbaric, Russians
inevitably find it difficult to adjust to the spectacular reversal
of roles today, when China has become an industrial powerhouse
towering above its neighbour, and its great urban centres are
exemplars of a modernity that makes their Russian counterparts
look small and shabby by comparison. The social and economic dynamism
of the PRC, brimming with conflict and vitality of every kind,
offers a particularly painful contrast, for those willing to look,
with the numbed apathy of Russia - and this, liberals might gloomily
reflect, without even the deliverance of a true post-Communism.
The wound to national pride is potentially acute.
Worse lies to the west. The Asian expanse
of Russia, covering three-quarters of its territory, contains
only a fifth of its population, falling fast. Eighty out of a
hundred Russians live in the quarter of the land that forms part
of Europe. Catherine the Great's famous declaration that 'Russia
is a European country' was not so obvious at the time, and has
often been doubted since, by foreigners and natives alike. But
its spirit is deeply rooted in the Russian elites, who have always
- despite the urgings of Eurasian enthusiasts - mentally faced
west, not east. In many practical ways, post-Communism has restored
Russia to the 'common European home' that Gorbachev liked to invoke.
Travel, sport, crime, emigration, dual residence are letting better-off
Russians back into a world they once shared in the Belle Epoque.
But at state level, with all its consequences for the national
psyche, Russia - in being what cannot be included in the Union
- is now formally defined as what is not Europe, in the new, hardening
sense of the term. The injustice of this is obvious. Inconvenient
though it may be for the ideologues of enlargement to acknowledge,
Russia's contribution to European culture has historically been
greater than that of all the new member-states of the EU combined.
In the years to come, it would be surprising if the relationship
between Brussels and Moscow did not rub.
Few peoples have had to undergo the variety
of successive shocks - liberation, depression, expropriation,
attrition, demotion - that Russians have endured in the last decade
and a half. Even if these, historically considered, are so far
only a brief aftermath of the much vaster turbulences of the 20th
century, it is no surprise that the masses are 'profoundly tired
and resistant to any public mobilising'. What they will eventually
make of the new experiences remains to be seen. For the moment,
the people are silent: Pushkin's closing line applies - 'narod
bezmolvstvuet.'
Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.
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