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Saturday's
Lagniappe
Is Russia Really That
Authoritarian?
By
Anna Arutunyan
Russia,
according to the Western news media, is increasingly slipping
toward totalitarianism. The man allegedly pulling all the strings
is Russian President Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB operative and apparatchik
extraordinaire. This misconception of Putin as a powerful dictator
whose control over his citizens must be countered through punitive
measures is deeply ingrained. The myth is embraced by journalists
and politicians alike.
According
to Le Point, “Putin is endlessly displaying his might.”
His government, according to The Guardian's Marc Rice-Oxley,
is more “brazen and confident” than it ever was
in the 1990s. Max Boot reiterated the repetitive claim in another
syndicated column: “Having taken power in a nascent democracy
six years ago, Putin has been reestablishing authoritarian control.”
And to “secure” that “control,” The
Independent editorialized, Putin “knew where to turn for
help”—none other than the siloviki (power elite)
of the former KGB. He is, in the words of Senators Lindsey Graham
and Joseph Biden, “a one-man dictatorship” who “continues
to consolidate power” in Russia.
While all
myths, including this one, have origins in reality, Putin's
perceived might can lead policymakers to dangerous oversimplifications.
But how do these perceptions arise, what is the real state of
Putin's administration, and how harmful can this myth of total
control really be for policy-makers in Washington and Europe?
Origins
of the Myth
Journalists covering Russia can hardly be blamed for interviewing
the sources closest at hand—usually those with a good
command of English, contacts with the West, and a deep distrust
of the current Kremlin crew. While perhaps well meaning, such
editorial policy, particularly in the case of American media,
succumbs to the tendency to dumb down what it cannot grasp.
As such, the news media often censures concepts that fail to
fit into the familiar dichotomy of dictatorship vs. democracy.
Of course, this simplification applies practically to any country
outside the West's scope. But given its size and energy potential,
Russia is a particularly fertile breeding ground for grandiose
theories and myths regarding power grabs and malign leaders.
The fault
lies not only with simplifying journalists. The myth derives
as well from the self-serving perspective of Russia's failed
reformers. “Russia's liberal opposition has a vested interest
in feeding this myth,” says Boris Kagarlitsky, a prominent
expert (and former dissident) with the Institute for Globalization
Studies. “First, it helps them get help from abroad. Second,
it helps explain away the failures of the liberal opposition
itself. Instead of saying, ‘We didn't offer anything that
the people could support and that is why we failed,' they end
up saying that a fascist regime kept them from getting there
and that everything is so terrible they couldn't have done anything
in the first place.”
Fed these
perspectives, the West still perceives Russia's political playing
field mainly as a struggle between pro-Kremlin forces and a
Western-leaning, liberal, pro-market opposition. Meanwhile in
Russia itself, the liberal opposition is marginalized. Its representation
in the media, where it still has access to the printed page,
exaggerates its influence among the population.
Who
Rules Russia?
Instead of a one-man dictatorship, experts close to the Kremlin
administration, as well as pro-Kremlin ideologues, describe
a struggling, fractured corporation that at best is trying to
become transparent and at worst is acting directly against the
national interest. That the Kremlin's “propaganda machine”
is willing to take such a grim view of things should be a signal
that Putin's power, and Russia's government, is far less strong
and stable than Western observers care to admit.
Stanislav
Belkovsky of the National Strategy Institute is perhaps the
chief proponent of this corporate view of the Kremlin. What
is ascribed to Putin's KGB past and his siloviki-saturated government,
Belkovsky argues, is actually the legacy of the putatively liberal
tenure of Yeltsin. “In the beginning of the 1990s, when
the seemingly immortal KGB fell apart, many agents became in
demand outside of the system … because of their value
as a qualified … work force,” Belkovsky writes.
“As the post-Soviet security structures continued to fall
into disarray, the specialists that had survived physically
began to leave Lubyanka to take up civilian posts—not
just in the government, but in purely commercial structures
as well.”
As for the
allegations regarding Putin's anti-liberal track record, Belkovsky
describes how under the current administration “privatization
has gone further than [former vice-premier Anatoly] Chubais
could have ever imagined during the early 1990s.” The
Yukos affair, in which the Russian government threw entrepreneur
and Yukos oil company head Mikhail Khodorkovsky in jail, was
less a tightening of political control, Belkovsky argues, than
the result of various bureaucratic clans vying for a piece of
the energy pie.
Is Putin,
then, a powerful CEO taking charge of his company or a weak
corporate leader held hostage by an increasingly powerful bureaucracy
of institutional players? “The bureaucracy is spreading,”
Kagarlitsky told me. “It is very involved in business.
And in the West this is understood as lack of business freedom
in Russia—as though all business is controlled by bureaucracy.
In reality it's the other way around—the more the bureaucracy
is involved in business, the more each bureaucrat becomes a
hostage of the business interests he's involved in.” In
the end, it is hard to say whether Putin controls Gazprom and
Lukoil, or whether Gazprom and Lukoil control Putin.
Viktor Militarev,
a colleague of Belkovsky at the National Strategy Institute,
also argues that Putin's possibilities are limited. Although
conceding an increase in authoritarian tendencies during Putin's
administration, Militarev points out that “a majority
of the population would be willing to forgive Putin this ‘managed
democracy' if those very authoritarian tendencies were directed
at raising the standard of living.” As for Putin's alleged
consolidation of vertical power, Militarev adds, “That
is all Western nonsense. Putin can't even fire [Mikhail] Zurabov,”
the current minister of health and social development, despite
a series of corruption scandals and demands for his sacking
by the ruling party in the parliament.
If this
is true, then Putin's control over his ministers is considerably
limited. He can't issue directives for his ministers to follow
in part because his ministers don't control their people either.
The chain of command, in other words, is broken. This failure
to assert vertical hierarchies of authority can be seen in the
new practice of appointing regional governors rather than electing
them. In this view, the new governors face the same problem
at the regional level that Putin faces at the top. As Kagarlitsky
puts it, “Either the new governor has to fire everyone
and appoint his own people, or he must come to terms with the
fact that he only controls what's going on in his office, while
real life is in the corridors, and he has no control over that.”
The Stalinist system of one-man rule and even the Leninist concept
of partiinost—following the party's directive—simply
do not apply. Instead, several bureaucracies of power based
in personal clans contend for power. And whatever authority
Putin once commanded to forge coalitions has been significantly
diminished by his announcement that he will step down in 2008.
The
Near Abroad
Another perception in the West is that Putin's Kremlin is taking
a more muscular stance toward the post-Soviet territories, known
in Russia as the “near abroad.” The current government
has reinforced this perception that it is attempting to reestablish
influence in former Soviet republics—particularly the
more Western-leaning ones like Georgia and Ukraine—with
aggressive rhetoric of its own. Russia's approach to its neighbors
has proven more worrisome to Europe and Washington than the
president's harsh policies at home.
But some
analysts in Russia are questioning this stance as well. According
to political analyst Alexander Khramchikhin, who writes for
Russky Zhournal, which is run by the pro-Kremlin think tank
Foundation for Effective Politics, Russia's foreign policy clout
declined not during the Yeltsin era but under Gorbachev and
his foreign minister Eduard Shevarnadze. Yeltsin, not Putin,
reestablished Russia as a prominent player in the world arena.
Khramchikhin cites such “achievements” as Russia's
membership in the Group of Eight and the use of Russia's Black
Sea fleet to quell unrest in Georgia in fall 1993. “It
was then that Russian peacekeepers appeared in the Commonwealth
of Independent States (CIS), and showed themselves to be the
only effective peacekeepers in the world,” writes Khramchikhin.
“Russian soldiers were prepared to kill and be killed,
and that is exactly how they were able to quickly stop the bloodshed
in Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan.”
Whatever
the validity of Khramchikhin's assessment of Yeltsin's operations
in the near abroad—as well as Russia's minor standoff
with NATO troops over Kosovo—such activism does contrast
sharply with Putin's administration, which has made concessions
to withdraw bases from Georgia and other CIS countries. “It
was Putin who made Washington the source of legitimacy for post-Soviet
regimes,” concurs Belkovsky. “Even under Yeltsin
the source of that legitimacy was Moscow: not a single leader
in the former USSR could feel safe if he had deliberately turned
his back to the Kremlin. Now … the position of the Kremlin
doesn't really interest anyone.”
As for the
recent “gas wars” that are widely viewed as Russia
exercising its energy muscle, analyst Mikhail Delyagin, who
actually laments Russia's loss of control in the post-Soviet
sphere, writes in Yezhednevny Zhurnal: “The principle
approach of Russia's bureaucracy toward the CIS is absolutely
correct: if you are truly independent then pay for your gas
like independent countries and not like satellites.” According
to the Western argument, Russia is “bullying” its
neighbors by threatening to raise the price of the gas it sells
to the near abroad. But this argument gets it backwards. By
the time the “gas wars” are over and the agreements
are signed, Ukraine and Belarus walk away without the subsidized
energy benefits that they enjoyed as satellites. In the economic
sense, Moscow loses leverage. By weaning Ukraine and Belarus
from Russia's gas and gradually forcing these “sovereign
states” to pay for their energy resources like any other
country, Moscow is undermining the cohesion of the CIS and giving
a clear signal to its former “satellites” that they
are on their own. Without the concessions of cheap gas, there
is little that Moscow can demand in return.
It is certainly
open to debate which policy—Yeltsin's or Putin's—was
the wiser. But given its professed fears of expanding Russian
influence, the West appears to be responding not so much to
the Kremlin's muscular policy as to its muscular rhetoric. That
rhetoric, in turn, may actually reflect a loss of control rather
than a surge of power.
The
Dangers of Misinterpretation
Russia is neither the first nor the last country to be direly
misunderstood in the West. In this case what makes Russia unique
is its size and its energy potential, and also the fact that
Putin's government still faces west, whatever it mumbles to
domestic television audiences. A destabilized Russia following
the 2008 elections means a destabilized world oil producer,
which has major implications for the global economy.
The dangers
of misinterpretations are two-fold. First, a weak argument often
generates an equally weak counter-argument. With the abundance
of negative spin in the Western media, some non-conformists
are apt to wax apologetic about a president who allegedly is
no more authoritarian than his American counterpart, and to
accuse the United States of judging Russia according to double
standards. Instead of assessing Russia on its own terms, such
apologists turn Russia's government into a mere argument in
the slew of accusations against the Bush administration. Neil
Clark, of The Guardian, writes, for instance: “Even though
Putin has acquiesced in the expansion of American influence
in the former Soviet republic, the limited steps the Russian
president has taken to defend his country's interests have proved
too much for Washington's empire builders.” According
to this argument, the first thing to consider when joining the
“current wave of Putin-bashing” is whose cause these
“Russophobes” are serving. When dialogue comes down
to either criticizing Putin for being a dictator or defending
him for being a dictator, there is little room left for a sober
assessment of where Russia as a whole is heading.
Second,
when Western op-ed columnists call for a tougher stance toward
the Russian leadership in advance of summits and state visits,
and when newspapers like The Guardian publish editorials with
titles like “The Rise and Rise of Putin Power,”
the signal to Western policymakers is clear: there is much to
fear from a strong Russia with a control-freak president. In
the end, this overestimation of the might of Putin and the Kremlin
in dictating the fate of 140 million people obscures the very
real dangers of a weak, dilapidated Russia. Amid talk of a nation
turning into a police state, the recent ethnic clashes in Kondopoga,
rampant crime and corruption, and a demoralized army that is
in the news only on the occasion of brutal hazing incidents—all
suggest that the police have a great deal less control over
the state than either Western pundits or Russian law enforcement
officials themselves would like to believe.
Most importantly,
however, policymakers and Western businesses are themselves
unwittingly buying into a deterministic, top-down management
system for Russia—and hence perpetuating it. The rights
abuses decried by watchdog groups and the media do exist, and
Vladimir Putin, as president, inevitably takes the blame. The
problem arises, however, when this belief in the dictatorial
nature of Putin's government translates into the belief that
if he wanted to, the Russian president could make all the “murky
murders,” journalist arrests, and big business muscling
disappear. The bleak reality is that pressuring Putin will not
alleviate problems that have other causes besides Putin himself.
Russia may
indeed be using strong rhetoric. But a sound foreign policy
needs to mind its inherent weaknesses. A government that, in
the words of Viktor Militarev, is suffering a “crisis
of corporate management,” could use better medicine than
constant reminders about a “democratic course.”
If such
a crisis is indeed eminent, how can Washington help correct
it? Ironically, by understanding that the best it can do is
doing nothing at all. Russia expert Stephen Cohen wrote in The
Nation this summer, “Do no harm! Do nothing to undermine
[Russia's] fragile stability, nothing to dissuade the Kremlin
from giving first priority to repairing the nation's crumbling
infrastructures.” In his view, it is Washington's own
muscular stance in Russia's “backyard” that has
generated protectionist rhetoric in Moscow. By continuing to
meddle, the West may just be provoking the kind of suspicious,
isolationist attitude that it is decrying.
Whatever
Putin's shortcomings and the weakness of his administration,
regime change is by far not the best option for further stability
and domestic growth in Russia. Putin's government has made progress,
however small, in rebuilding Russia's infrastructure in his
seven-year tenure. It is hard to imagine how a more liberal
and pro-Western successor, whose top priority will be a total
overhaul of the government apparatus, could successfully continue
this process. It is even harder to imagine how such an overhaul
could ameliorate the immediate problems of corruption and lack
of accountability. In this sense, foreign-sponsored NGOs aimed
at strengthening various supposedly liberal opposition forces
are at best a waste of time and resources, and at worst a potential
catalyst for instability. Programs aimed at stimulating Russia's
internal development would do better by de-emphasizing political
opposition and stimulating small business and grass-roots organization.
Finally,
the West is understandably worried by the perceived isolationist
tendencies of Russia. But once again, the current gas wars reveal
the complexity of Russia's energy-driven integration. The recent
price hike in gas supplies to Belarus—and Europe's reaction—point
to a paradoxical, two-fold problem. On the one hand, already
dependent on Russian energy, the West is dealing with a seemingly
integrated world power, a major player that the West depends
upon. But on the other hand, Russia's relations with Belarus,
and their impact, show just how incomplete the transfer from
a Soviet power to a loose confederation really was. We can view
Russia as a bully using its energy muscle to discipline a former
satellite. Or we can look at the conflict as a last attempt
to draw badly needed boundaries of sovereignty and thus establish
Russia's identity by redefining relations with its former holdings.
In the latter case, whatever side is right, self-interested
meddling by outside powers will only perpetuate Russia's longstanding,
oftentimes tragic, paradox: its constant struggle to be a major
player in the world arena at the expense of domestic development
and national identity.
Anna
Arutunyan
is a freelance writer and an editor at the Moscow News and a
Foreign Policy In Focus ( FPIF ) contributor. Petroleumworld
do not necessarily share these views.
