In recent years much ink has been spilled analyzing the personality, motives, and political agenda of Vladimir Putin. He came to power in 1999, during a traumatic period in Russia’s post-Soviet political history. The year before, economic crisis had forced the federal government to default on its debts and devalue the ruble. The first Chechen war had ended in defeat and did not bring peace to the north Caucasus. The administration of Russia’s first post-Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin was mired in corruption, nepotism, and incompetence, and the President’s health was failing, partly as a result of his struggles with alcoholism. Putin was sold as a clean pair of hands who could start things afresh.
Today Putin is often portrayed in the West as the source of our political problems with the Russian Federation, leading a corrupt anti-Western regime guilty of serious human rights abuses. But memory can be a treacherous thing. Boris Yeltsin’s Russia also saw gross human rights abuses in Chechnya, vast corruption, claims of election rigging, and murdered reporters. In one memorable case at the end of the Kosovo War, Russian soldiers engaged in a tense stand-off with NATO forces over Pristina airport. Nonetheless, it is Vladimir Putin who, with his strident nationalism, his crony capitalism and his appeals to conservative religious values, has come to symbolize renewed Western distrust of the Kremlin while Yeltsin is remembered as a happy drunken democrat. But it was Yeltsin, not Putin, who used military force to crush his parliamentary enemies in Moscow in 1993.
It is a fallacy to believe were Putin to fall tomorrow our relations with Russia would return to a normal footing. Normality implies stability from Russia’s political scene that has been missing since the late 1980s. During the political free-fall of the 1990s there were even questions about whether Russia would survive as unified state. Democratic government never had a chance to take root in a country where the basic economic and legal conditions for its sustainability were missing. Putin was a product of the Russian post-Soviet elite’s search for security and stability for the future. He was Yeltsin’s third prime minister in 1999. He survived politically where many others did not because he was a former head of the FSB, and had served on the Russian Security Council. Only an heir whose ties to the ‘structures of force’ promised long term political continuity made Yeltsin feel able to relinquish his grip on power as his health failed. He wanted a reliable successor to shield him from prosecution, not a democrat.
Putin has upheld his side of the bargain. He was a mature man when the Soviet Union collapsed, but he has only held high rank in the Russian political system since its end. He certainly owes his political career to the fall of the USSR, and for all the Soviet-era nostalgia he strategically deploys, Putin has not tried to resurrect it. Instead he has slowly built up his own office into a more personalized authoritarian regime. Indeed Russia’s government was merely downgraded from a hybrid regime to an authoritarian one on the Economist’s 2010 Democracy Index, following Putin’s decision to resume his presidency. Putin has tacitly struck a bargain with the Russian electorate that has so far held. He could gradually restrict Russian political freedoms if he also raised Russians’ living standards simultaneously. Over time this doctrine has gained a name – ‘Putinism.’
Fareed Zakaria has defined the critical elements of Putinism as ‘…nationalism, religion, social conservatism, state capitalism and government domination of the media.’ He believes that these values are defined by Putin as being in tension with, or hostile to, typical Western values such as individual rights, tolerance, cosmopolitanism and internationalism. The regime does not rule through brute force and thus relies on a political platform that is paternalistic and profitable to enough sections of Russian society that it can hold onto power at election time. To tilt the odds in its favor, corruption is tolerated, judicial independence is restricted and inconvenient activists, businessmen or journalists have a habit of mysteriously dying or winding up in prison on corruption charges.
It is a political model which has attracted the attention of other leaders of emerging market countries from Eastern Europe to Asia. But it depends heavily on the continued ability of the state to both hand out economic goodies to the oligarchic elite and raise ordinary living standards. While the state dominates the energy sector, and as long as oil and gas prices are high, this is a viable political strategy. While the unreformed energy sector remains the major engine of the Russian economy her major institutions and companies will remain locked into a murky web of corruption together that is an invitation to authoritarianism. The open question now energy prices have fallen is, will this trigger a diversification away from the opaque rentier economy that makes Putin’s strongman style of paternalistic rule attractive to the Russian electorate?
Putin’s People
The core of Putin’s political base in the elite remains the security services. In 2007 the Economist cited famous research by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, that roughly a quarter of Russia’s senior federal-level bureaucrats had a security services background. Two years later a Cato Institute survey found that 77% of Russian politicians in the top 1016 government posts had a security-forces background. ‘Siloviki’ or ‘power guys’ still hold a disproportionate influence in modern Russian political culture. This is a legacy of the collapse of non-coercive power centers in Russia in the 1990s and the failure to build credible democratic institutions following the dissolution of the supervisory Communist party structures.
Without a legal framework of laws and a functioning administrative system, the property of the state was seized and divided up illegitimately between entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. The only way to resolve disputes over assets was coercively, and the influence of the different security services grew accordingly under Yeltsin. The siloviki are a heterogeneous group drawn from many different branches of the Russian police, military, and intelligence services. We should not make the mistake of ascribing them the power of a unified bloc. But they are more likely to be religious, to be comfortable with a large role for the state in the economy, and to favor a nationalistic foreign policy – all key tenants of Putinism. Under Putin many have gone into business and politics and flourished. Having become the arbiters of capitalism within Russia, the siloviki have shown no rush to build a culture of the rule of law that would cut down on the need for their services and diminish their power and opportunities for self-enrichment.
Their influence was reduced in Russian politics between 2008 and 2012 during the technocratic-minded administration of President Medvedev, but it was never eliminated. It must be recalled that the August 2008 Georgian-Russian war took place during Medvedev’s administration, although it was Vladimir Putin who sparked the crisis when he signed a decree authorizing official relations between Russian governmental bodies and secessionist Abkhazia and South Ossetia in April 2008. Siloviki influence has returned with the re-assumption of the presidency by Putin, though the long-term economic implications of the Ukraine crisis may undermine them in 2015.
The only other grouping of any significance in the second Putin administration remains the technocrats around Prime Minister Medvedev. It is important not to see them as a democratic opposition-within, but they are less bellicose and more interested in diversifying Russia’s economy. Putin may come to rely on their services more as the global fall in oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine combine to push Russia back into recession. Russian public opinion tolerated or encouraged foreign adventures after the humiliating collapse of Soviet power during the early 1990s, but it remains much more concerned about living standards. Two thirds of Russia’s exports come from oil and gas sales, and they fund the expensive reconstruction of its military, fuel its long-term growth, and subsidize the lifestyle of its new middle class. The economic expertise of the technocrats may be called upon more in the future to manage Russia’s present economic crisis.
Putinism in Practice
Putin is not a dictator-for-life in the twentieth-century mould. He has shown this by obeying the letter, if not the spirit, of the Russian constitution and swapping roles with his protégé Dmitry Medvedev when it forbade a president to stand for more than two consecutive terms. Putin continues to dominate the Kremlin today, but one day he will have to step down. Unlike Yeltsin’s chaotic search for an heir who would shield him from future prosecution after he left office, Putin’s genius since has been to recognize that the post-Soviet Russian political system needed some long-term vision to ensure its continuity by regulating political transitions between authoritarian leaders. Russia had lacked this since the collapse of the collectivist dictatorship of the Politburo, and Putin has tried hard to evolve and systematize a ruling culture that will respect his political legacy and avoid factional infighting.
Putinsim makes sense once you realize that it is an ideology developed to outlast Putin’s departure from the Russian political scene. Its fierce nationalism reduces the legitimacy of pro-democracy dissidents at home. But it also helps weld the disparate post-Soviet elite into a homogenous whole by presenting them with a common Western enemy. A conservative political style which emphasizes tradition and strong respect for precedent creates the kind of unwritten conventions and norms that are hard for future leaders to break. Corruption is allowed, but is left to hang over the heads of all future potential leaders within the ruling circles. Putin’s ultimate aim is to create a system of managed autocracy, where each leader in turn nominates the heir who will succeed him as he steps down. This collective autocratic system has its flaws but has endured for decades in countries as varied as Mexico, Egypt and Malaysia.
Putinism applied the brakes to Russia’s dizzying sociopolitical failure in the late 1990s. But instead of using the space granted to reform Russia’s political economy, Putin developed his doctrine into an informal mechanism to regulate competition between different Russian power centers. Revolt can sweep away a party or leader, but the presence of the Siloviki throughout Russian business and politics guarantees the presence of a murky, deep state dominated by reactionary militaristic and nationalistic worldviews. Russia’s unreformed economy remains energy-dominated, and thus a type of capitalism tied to the state. Its biggest companies will therefore continue to need close ties to bureaucrats to prosper and corruption and an extractive, rentier mindset will continue to characterize the post-Soviet business elite. The strength of such a system is that it is so widespread it can survive the fall of any individual leader, even one who created it.
Conclusion
If a palace coup sweeps away Putin, expect the next Russian leader to offer more of the same as they consolidate their power base. The Yeltsin years allowed for political pluralism of a Darwinian kind, but at the same time the chaos created a demand for a political leader who could competently run the country. Putin completed Russia’s transition to capitalism which Yeltsin had begun, but it was a mercantile brand of state capitalism, heavily linked to the security services, which emerged at the end of the reform process. In today’s Russia the ‘structures of force’, the business elite and the bureaucracy are all intertwined together in a dysfunctional political economy. Two successful transitions of political power to designated heirs have created the precedent that the Russian people merely ratify the choice of the previous leader. Putinism and the deep state it has consolidated will continue to guide the choices of Russia’s political elite for decades. Just as Nasserism still guides Egypt’s military regimes and the post-war Liberal Democratic Party still runs Japan – Putinism will live on well after Putin.
